Classical Conservatism is Dying and Here’s Why
It is safe to say that the traditional conservative tradition is on life support. It is the dying old man that no one comes to visit, whose words lie trapped in his throat, no audience around that wishes to hear them. The quiet conservative wisdom of the past, encapsulated in presidents such as Coolidge and Eisenhower does not command nearly as much respect as it once did. In recent decades, conservatism became marked by executive excesses and took on an increasingly revolutionary and upending flair.
Conservatism is not like other political traditions. It has no literary creed, no rousing manifesto to its name. Socialism, after all, has Marx’s Das Kapital — a sort of foundational text associated with it from which ideological tenants are pulled. Conservatism as a political tradition, in contrast, did not set out to erect a comprehensive philosophy of the world. It concerned itself not with, say, a theory of agents, classes, and various ‘material processes’ that its Marxist counterpart did.
Conservatism has principles, surely but not necessarily goals. This distinction is important. Principles are things that can be adhered to; goals are things that must be striven to, and thus, muscled into place. Principles are meant to acknowledge something universal; goals require mechanical means and a certain artificiality to be achieved.
