An Epitaph for Principled Conservatism

The death of American conservatism matters to everyone, not just the GOP.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

For what shall it profit a political movement, if it shall gain efficiency and lose its own soul?

We may now be watching the death of principled conservatism in America.

While progressives and some kinds of libertarians are (understandably) focusing on the damage Trump is doing to institutions and norms that undergird American democracy, they should also be concerned about the fracturing of the conservative movement itself.

I consider myself politically homeless, but I’ve worked with libertarians, progressives, and conservatives of varying sorts on everything from education to policy.

This political pluralism has been incredibly invaluable to my own development as a scholar and, now, as a public writer.

I consider myself as something of an ambassador for differing political views. I’ve seen the best of each of these traditions (as well as the worst) and feel reasonably competent at offering good faith explanations for why people of different political viewpoints believe what they do.

And it’s in that role as ambassador for political pluralism that I’m most deeply concerned about what’s happening to American conservatism right now.

Why Conservatism Matters

I’ve studied under Straussian conservatives, Catholic conservatives, Burkean, and Kirkian conservatives. In graduate school, I was steeped in appreciation for the genius of the Western political tradition and American political thought and I still occasionally teach in a wonderful program on American political thought for K-12 teachers. In high school and college, I was deeply influenced by writers like C.S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, and G.K. Chesterton.

Despite not agreeing with a range of conservative priorities, I kept coming back to conservative thought in my personal and professional thinking about human life.

And it’s not just that conservative thought has a lot of beautiful and powerful writers; the message itself is important for balancing the extremes of both libertarian and progressive thought (not to mention fascism and authoritarianism, by definition extremes).

But Trump’s MAGA movement is undermining not only the moral foundation of that message; it’s destroying outright the parts of that message that can and will resonate with non-conservatives like me in the future.

The loss of a principled conservatism from our national dialogue would be a loss not just for conservatives, but for everyone. Because whether non-conservatives realize it, conservative principles have much to teach us about the dangers of utopian planning and government power, the necessity of a shared human experience, the reality of a stable human nature, the importance of the local for understanding politics, and the power of the good, the true, and the beautiful in human life.

Or at least they did.

So before American conservatism is completely dead, I’d like to take some time to highlight what I have personally found valuable in principled conservative thought, what I think it contributes to our political dialogue and why losing these ideas would be a deep loss for us all.

[As a caveat, I’m primarily talking about the American experience. European conservative thought is a somewhat different animal and not one I’m competent to comment on. I’m also ignoring a range of other harmful conservative movements. My goal here is to mourn the death of a particular kind of conservative thought that has been enormously influential on me as a person and that I think will be a loss to our nation once it’s gone for good.]

A Defense of Truth in a Relativistic Age

Perhaps the simplest summary of the best of American conservatism is an appreciation for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

This phrase comes from Plato and is perhaps the root of conservative defenses of Western political thought. Without turning this into a long lecture, this phrase was later developed by Aristotle and then by medieval scholastics as a way to root personal and political thought in the existence of values that transcend fallible and transient human desires.

These principles were considered antidotes or at least weapons against claims of brute power or tendencies toward hedonistic gluttony and lust. These principles reminded humans to look upward - whether to God or Platonic forms or just the eternity of the cosmos. Looking upward had the effect of moderating our worst animal impulses and also instilling a dose of healthy humility about what humans and their fallible systems are capable of.

Now belief in Truth with a capital “T” is being eroded by both sides in obvious and subtle ways.

On the progressive side, claims to truth have long been eroded by the progressive traditions of relativism and historicism, rooted originally in Hegelian thought. More recently this relativism has taken the form of an individualistic identitarianism that claims that we can never judge - or sometimes even understand - another person’s “lived experience.”

Conservative political thought - in its best form - reminds us that there exists a shared human experience, a shared landscape that we all traverse together despite the varied paths we take, a set of moral and political truths about human social life that we ignore at our peril.

Conservative political thought has, for a long time, defended the Truth of a stable human nature and has used the existence of that flawed human nature to justify institutional guardrails, whether limited government to manage the autocratic part of our nature or marriage to channel our lust.

In contrast, we know that MAGA feeds off of misinformation and disinformation. Truth has been reduced to the name of a social media platform that enriches the President while spreading deception.

While no side can take the high road on caring about Truth these days, it’s a clear violation of conservative principles to both act as though the truth does not exist and to work assiduously to undermine it at the same time.

Love of One’s Own

Another powerful piece of conservative thought that is sometimes misunderstood by non-conservatives and often abused by conservatives themselves is the belief that love of humanity must start with love of one’s own.

This argument goes back to Aristotle, but was picked up by thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment and by Edmund Burke, who used the term “prejudice” to summarize the often difficult to defend reasons that we love our family and our home and our community.

I sometimes joke with students that I love my kids despite the fact that there are lots of kids out there more talented and more hardworking than mine.

But that’s the conservative point.

By investing in the love of people and things that you can’t rationally defend other than that they are yours, you concentrate your time and attention on the areas of life where your care can have the most impact.

Conservatism provides us with a principled defense of a love of one’s own, whether that’s the local, the family, the church, or anything else we love (mostly but not entirely) because it’s ours.

This principle supports bottom-up improvement, focuses our care and attention on things we can actually impact, and helps avoid the human tendency toward the tragedy of the commons.

Like truth, love of one’s own gets mangled into a mirror of itself under MAGA.

First, love of one’s own was, until recently, understood to be moderated by mercy toward strangers. Jesus’s call in the Bible to care for strangers has been completely forgotten in the cruelty of shipping non-violent migrants without coats on Christmas Eve or handcuffing them on deportation flights.

Second, the conservative call to love one’s country is not - and this is crucial - that you love your kids or country no matter what. As Burke pointed out, “to love our country it ought to be lovely.” We shouldn’t defend our country or our children when they’re doing horrible things. And calling public servants who have risked their lives for our country “traitors” and pulling their security details simply because they disagree with you is not patriotism. It’s authoritarian bullshit. It’s not love of one’s own; it’s love of oneself. Conservatives used to call that selfishness.

In fact thoughtful criticism of our country is one way that we love what is ours. The Civil Rights movement was a deeply conservative movement in a lot of ways. It was an embrace and radical practice of the American ideals of free speech, free assembly and equality before the law at the risk of serious bodily injury and (too often) death. It was an act of love to our country to make it a better place for our children and grandchildren - a fight to make our country worthy of its own principles and in turn worthy of being loved.

But when love of one’s own gets twisted into authoritarian cruelty, nativism and scapegoating of desperate people looking for a better life, harmful trade wars, and alignment with dictators who share none of our values or ideals we’re not talking about conservatism anymore.

Conservative Defenses of Limited Government

American conservatives (until recently) shared in common with libertarians a healthy skepticism about government power. American conservatives, tracing their lineage to the American founding, used to be the defenders of limited government, federalism, separation of powers, and a strong Congress to counter the power of the executive.

These reminders were particularly important as a range of initiatives, often (but not always) motivated by progressive beliefs about equality, increasingly emboldened the government, multiplied federal programs, siphoned power and resources away from local and state communities, and led to bloat, mismanagement, sometimes corruption, but always wasted opportunities to make people’s lives better.

My progressive friends often fall into the “we need a law!” response to pits in the landscape. A principled conservative response would ask them to think about whether civil society or markets or some other solution might have fewer costs, fewer unintended consequences, and fewer downstream implications for the stranglehold that government bureaucracy now places on so many American lives.

But that skepticism of government, particularly the federal government and the executive is no longer apparent. In fact, MAGA is actively removing the institutional guardrails that conservatives used to believe were essential to channeling and managing human nature. We’re seeing an unraveling of the entire conservative project in the name of a single man’s self-interest.

It’s an incredible example of long-term self-annihilation for short-term gain.

It would take me all day to highlight the ways MAGA violates the foundational beliefs about limited government that used to characterize American conservative thought, so I’ll just say that any conservative who tries to claim that unrestrained executive power combined with total chaos and unpredictability is the way to solve the problems in our federal government should go re-read Jefferson, Madison, Lord Acton or even G.K. Chesterton for some perspective. Or any history of the 20th century.

Conservative Defenses of Norms and Tradition

Another benefit of conservative political thought is the insistence on reminding people that political institutions and norms take a long time to build but a short time to tear down. This reminder is particularly important for the “move fast and break things” wings of the progressive and libertarian movements.

Principled conservatives from Aristotle (insofar as we can call him conservative) to Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk were anti-revolutionary not because they did not see the need for change but because change itself can be deeply dangerous.

Conservatives used to know that when you’ve burned everything down there’s no guarantee that what you build will be any better. And in fact, most of the time - given that fallible human nature they used to believe in - it will be much worse.

Kirk’s third, fourth, and fifth principles of conservatism all stress the importance of moving slowly: respecting norms and traditions because many exist due to hard-won wisdom that we’ve long forgotten and because predictability is what allows us to live together in peace.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Trump’s approach to governmental “reform” has much more in common with the French revolutionaries that Burke decried than it does with any principled conservative approach to reform.

Does the federal government need reformation? Of course.

Is the way to do that tearing down norms of limited government and separation of powers, politicizing government agencies, appointing myopic loyalists and undermining the institutional integrity of long-standing institutions like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (as starters)?

It’s one way of doing things, for sure. But there’s nothing conservative about it.

Conservative Defenses of Virtue and Character

Another thing conservatives used to do well was offer a a defense of the virtues against a society that pushes back against and even works (often unintentionally) to erode individual responsibility.

The conservative virtues that help build character and make individual responsibility possible take a number of forms depending on the kind of conservative you’re talking to. They might be the ancient virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice or the Christian virtues of faith, justice, prudence, hope, temperance, fortitude, and charity. (One might notice that “prudence” shows up on both lists).

Other forms these virtues can take include the primary Christian virtue of mercy. Or the Christian commandment to love thy neighbor.

And of course conservatives don’t “own” these virtues. Many progressives and libertarians advocate for Christian virtues or practice Stoic habits.

But one thing conservative thought did well was extol the importance of these virtues even as more and more people insisted that it’s the government’s job to solve people’s problems.

Progressives increasingly emphasize the importance of structural causes of injustice and for good reason. My own recent work does this too. Structural explanations are incredibly important for understanding how to make the world a better place.

But the push for structural explanations and structural solutions to human problems sometimes overlooks the importance of individual human agency. I can throw ladders into pits all day long, but at some point the person at the bottom has to start climbing.

And conservatives have been right about the effects of the decline of the traditional American family, an area that progressives have fought against the science and (largely) lost. (I wrote a whole book on this if you happen to be interested). The “success sequence” of finishing high school, working full-time, and marrying before having children (in that order) is one of the primary predictors of economic mobility in the United States. Virtues like temperance, fortitude, humility, and justice makes that sequence much more likely. Of course, we also know that structural factors are deeply important in that sequence two. Both individual character and external structures matter to human flourishing and both are essential to finding solutions.

But what does MAGA offer us of virtue and character? What does choosing to ally ourselves with an imperialistic dictator over a struggling democratically elected leader say about our values? How does acceptance and even embrace of grift, of infidelity and sexual misconduct, of violence against police officers (when white people do it), of unabashed nepotism, and of self-enrichment at the expense of the American people relate to any of the virtues above? In what way does MAGA relate to conservative calls to make the world a better place by starting with our individual habits and character?

What would C.S. Lewis or Edmund Burke or Aristotle or Jesus say about any of this? It would make me (grimly) laugh if it didn’t make me so sad.

The Importance of Bearing Witness as Cities Upon a Hill

Conservative political thought succeeded when it offered a principled and compelling alternative to other political viewpoints. And a huge part of what made that vision compelling was the witnesses who lived out conservative values.

While I never found the entire conservative project compelling for lots of complex reasons (thus my political homelessness), I was nevertheless deeply influenced by the conservatives I knew who bore witness to their faith, to their values, and to their commitments every day.

It’s also the case (which progressives and libertarians are loathe to admit) that conservative principles are correlated with happiness and well-being, at least at the individual level. Conservatives consistently have better mental health and higher levels of happiness than liberals and while there are a number of explanations for why this is the case, it’s one way in which principled conservatives bore witness to their values of caring for their family and community, looking upward to something higher than themselves, and exemplifying the virtues that support individual responsibility, resilience, and grit.

This last conservative ideal, that of bearing witness to your values out in the world, is perhaps the greatest loss that American conservatism is suffering.

While conservative claims to virtue often rang hollow when those same conservative politicians were caught in sex-scandals or grift, at least everyone could identify it as a departure from a value system. It was an example of hypocrisy: a (human, all too human) failure to live up to their values.

But now up is down, truth is lies, and there are no principled conservative values left to defend other than a hollow call for “efficiency,” a call that fails to mask the cruelty and chaos that it uses to destroy the norms and institutions that protected us from unrestrained executive power.

When I look at the conservative faculty who guided me in my early years, what binds them together is that they were not only principled people, they were deeply good people too. Almost entirely white males (perhaps unsurprisingly in academia) they expressed deep concern for my growth as an intellectual and academic and spent considerable time they did not have to take to make me a better academic and intellectual, even when we didn’t agree.

My conservative friends were (and many still are) deeply principled people who – usually – lived out their values as much as their limited humanity would allow.

And conservatives used to be able to claim (even if they didn’t always follow through in practice) that American exceptionalism meant putting our ideals first and looking up to the good, the true, and the beautiful as models for how to stay humble and govern carefully.

The American Dream is still a deeply conservative vision: individuals of character and virtue like my German Lutheran ancestors in the early 1900s who, through grit and hard work, made their own lives better and made our nation better along the way.

But the Christian idea that our actions and behavior “bear witness” to the existence of God, who is love and mercy incarnate, is now laughably hollow.

The early America, a City Upon a Hill that other people look up to, admire, and emulate despite its deep flaws, is now an America that Europeans and our other allies look at with deep distress and increasing fear.

Undermining Your Own Foundation

Precisely because I found conservative values worth preserving alongside other key political values, I required students in my American politics classes to read conservative thinkers alongside progressive and libertarian ones.

After reading Russell Kirk in one of my political science classes, a cheerful student thanked me and chirped “before reading this, I didn’t think conservatives had any principles at all!”

I laughed at the time, but it seems that student may have been right after all.

Once American conservatism sold its soul to the MAGA movement - a movement without principles, without any of the recognizable conservative virtues, without appreciation for place or tradition or even one’s own - it lost any moral standing it may have had to offer any alternative to progressive or libertarian overreach.

It destroyed not just its own moral commitments, but it destroyed any hope that radical moderates like myself might have had for convincing progressives and libertarians and independents that it’s worth carving out a space for conservative thought in academia and in our national dialogue.

It’s hard for me to argue now that the principles that conservatives champion are worth taking seriously, worth incorporating into our policy debates, and worth preserving when the ascendant “conservative” movement in America has no principles at all.

What I loved about conservatism was not just the nostalgic love of the past, though that was part of it.

Conservatives, or at least the ones I knew, cared about rule of law and mercy for the vulnerable.

They cared about checks and balances because they feared despotism.

They embraced limited government and federalism because they believed that the people who should make decisions for individuals should be those individuals themselves or a level of government that was actually answerable to them.

They understood the tradeoffs of markets and embraced them for their economic power while also recognizing the need to protect people from unbridled market processes.

They understood the dangers of sudden and widespread change because they understood the complexity of the human social order.

They realized, unlike many progressives, that sudden shocks to any system will create deep human suffering.

They defended truth, goodness, and beauty against attempts to politicize science and education and if they over-corrected at times I was often hesitant to chastise them because I understood the passion of their beliefs and viewed them as under-dogs.

By aligning itself with internet trolls, Silicon bros, and the worst of right-wing cancel culture, American conservatism has undermined the very moral foundation that made its arguments worth engaging with.

And it’s looking increasingly unlikely that a principled conservatism will re-emerge as a viable and relevant option for young people, given what that generation will associate with conservatism: everything American conservatism - at its best - used to fight against.

My sadness these days is not just because of the damage that’s being done to institutions and norms and people’s lives, though there’s plenty of that.

It’s also a kind of bewildered disappointment that some of my conservative friends and mentors - people who bore such powerful witness to their principles in a way that influenced a young then-progressive-atheist to take those principles seriously - support a movement, even half-heartedly, that is tearing away the foundation of conservative thought itself.

I feel like I’m watching an entire tradition burn.

And whether we know it or not, we’ll all be worse off when principled conservatism is gone.

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