What Does “Conservatism” Even Mean Anymore?
Understanding the battle of the True Conservatives.
Last Call: We’ve got a handful of tickets left for the Dallas live show next week. If you’re in the area on Thursday, September 5, come hang out with Sarah, Tim, Bill, Sonny—and the great Adam Kinzinger! The last few tickets are here.
1. Conservatives
Yesterday on our giant-sized Next Level, Sarah and Tim talked a bunch about Kamala Harris and the conservative movement. The show is here and it’s a top-five episode. Don’t miss it.
TL;DR: People should say what they really think.1
I want to keep excavating the topic, though, because a lot of times there’s some confusion about what “conservatism” even is.
In general, when people talk about “conservatism” they mean one of four things:
A conservative temperament.
Conservative political theory.
Conservative policy preferences.
The conservative movement.
Obviously there is some overlap. But it’s most useful to understand them as separate phenomena which, though they share some genetic material, are distinct from one another in 2024 America.
Let’s talk about them.
1. A conservative temperament. This is where I live. It usually starts from a place of humility, gratitude, and pessimism: A person with a conservative temperament or disposition will tend to believe that however imperfect a situation might be, we ought to be grateful for it because it can (and probably will) get worse.
The conservative worldview sees tail risk everywhere and views most progress as (at best) beset by unpleasant and unforeseen consequences.
A real-world example: I have written many times about the distortions and ill effects created by the Electoral College. At the same time, I am wary that any attempt at reform it would create different distortions and ill effects. And these might well be worse.
The liberal worldview believes that progress is possible—maybe even inevitable. The conservative worldview believes that we’re always a step away from a cartoon anvil falling on our heads.
Understood in this way, “conservative” and “liberal” temperaments exist (mostly) separate from traditional political views. My bff Sarah Longwell, for example, is liberal through and through because she sunnily believes that better is always possible and that all we have to do is roll up our sleeves and get to work.
2. Conservative political theory. You could trace this back to the Greeks, but for our purposes it makes more sense to start around the Enlightenment. Often, the great minds of conservative political theory were recoiling from contemporaneous upheavals: Edmund Burke was reacting to the French Revolution. Michael Oakeshott was repelled by Nazism and Marxism.
Is conservative political theory operable today? That’s a complicated question.
For instance, conservative political theory has a lot to say about subsidiarity and the size of government: It believes that small government is best.
But in practice, there is no movement or constituency in modern America for “small government.” Absolutely none.
Meaning that people who cling to conservative political theory on small government have basically opted out of the real world. They’re the equivalent of a Frenchman arguing that the Merovingian dynasty was better than the Fifth Republic. Maybe this is true! But it’s also immaterial, because the Merovingians are a dead letter.
The other thing that’s odd about conservative political theory is that, historically, it has grown during societal convulsions, when challenges arose to the established order.
Are there any “convulsions” at the moment? I suppose some would say that “wokeness” or immigration or DEI have represented a societal convulsion.
But I would argue that both of these progressive challenges fit firmly within established dynamics of reform and counter-reform.
Instead, I’d argue that the only true challenge to the established order comes from the movement that seeks to move us away from liberal democracy into what it calls illiberal democracy.
One of the great confusions of our time stems from the fact that conservative political theory has traditionally rejected radical change, but the people pursuing radical change today mostly emerged from conservative political theory.
3. Conservative policy preferences. This is the most plebeian form of conservatism because it’s almost entirely based on recent associations.
For 75 years (give or take), the Republican party has been the conservative party in America. So people conflate Republican policy preferences with conservative policy preferences.
Many Trump-skeptical conservatives claim that the policy preferences of the Reagan era are the “true conservative” policies. But I’m not sure why that should be.
Here’s a list of Reagan-era policy preferences:
Activist foreign policy built on robust alliances.
In favor of large-scale immigration.
Constitutional originalism and judicial restraint.
Committed to free trade as an engine of economic growth.
Today, those preferences are rejected (to varying degrees) by the “conservative” party and embraced (again, to varying degrees) by the “liberal” party.
The rump of Trump-skeptical conservatives mostly grew up in the Reagan era and they continue to insist that the policies from that time are the True Conservative policies, while the policies of the current Republican party are not.
But this is like arguing that the “real” AC/DC lineup was with Bon Scott and that the band fronted by Brian Johnson isn’t actually AC/DC.
I am sorry, but the “real” AC/DC is the band that is selling albums and tickets, right now, today.
4. The conservative movement. There exists in the world a number of people who professionalized “conservatism” and turned it into a small industry.
Matt Schlapp. Hugh Hewitt. Brent Bozell.
Another common conflation is to equate professional operators with “conservatism.” For instance: If Rush Limbaugh was touting some person or thing, then that person or thing was conservative by definition.
The ne plus ultra here is Donald Trump, who has come to personify “conservatism” to the point that whatever he espouses at any given moment becomes the party line in the conservative movement—and hence the official stance of mainstream conservatives.
2. Rules
I’m skeptical of all four of these types of conservatism.