Symposium: Conservatism’s Law of Return

This article is in response to “The Duties of a Free Citizen” and is part of the symposium on What Is Wrong with Conservatism and How Do We Make It Right?

I really like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was, after all, too big to fail. In that sense, maybe I’m a Hamiltonian. But don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Dr. Gutzman’s article. The Constitution, Jesus, and non-interventionism are all all right in my book.

But the question, for me anyway, is whether a conservative can ever really resist some form of stasis, as he suggests. As he says, “perhaps the needed economic course correction is so radical as to leap from Burke’s ‘reform’ to his ‘change,’ and leaves his ‘conservative’ category altogether.”

What seems clear to me is that Burke’s conservative category needn’t be Dr. Gutzman’s. Of course, it is made explicit that, for him, conservatism is not necessarily a program, but still I wonder if any genuinely conservative stance can consider itself “conservative” if it is interested in enacting hitherto unseen ideas.

If you’ll forgive the atrocious pun in my title for a second, I think it’s an issue worth exploring. Conservatism can certainly be interested in the Burkean idea of reform. Stasis cannot define any conservatism not only because that would mean modern conservatism could stand for nothing more than corporate robbery and social security (two sides of the same coin, perhaps) but also because there is no virtue in holding to stasis when already caught up in a wayward trajectory. Conservatism requires motion when the current direction, the “status quo,” is misguided.

The problem is that this motion can only be radical in its attempt to return to the root of something. It’s an etymological conservatism of sorts. The radical conservatism of figures such as Phillip Blond is a good example of this idea. Conservatism must be a return to ideas of the past, even if radical from our contemporary point of view. I fear that anything transcending Burke’s category of reform risks missing this essential element.

Perhaps I have knit-picked something from an otherwise phenomenal article, but I think that if we’re going to debate the nature of conservatism, it needs to start with understanding in what sense conservatism can be radical. For as C.S. Lewis put it “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” or perhaps, the most conservative.