Don’t Give Up On Conservatism

This is a strange time for conservatives to despair of conservatism. We just won a generational legal victory by overturning Roe v. Wade, and abortion facilities are closing in state after state. Republicans are poised for electoral triumph in the midterms, and the Supreme Court justices who delivered Dobbs are likely to continue rolling back judicial liberalism’s legal abuses.

And yet some on the right are convinced that we are losing, indeed, that we have already lost and therefore need new strategies and labels. For example, Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson recently argued in these pages that “conservatives should stop calling themselves conservatives … because the conservative project has largely failed, and it is time for a new approach.”

This dour assessment seems based less on various defeats on discrete policy issues than on the sense that conservatives, especially conservative Christians, now live in what has been called the negative world. The institutions and power centers of our culture are determined to suppress, even eradicate, orthodox Christian beliefs on marriage, family, sexuality, and the human person. Consequently, we are fighting just to preserve refuges in which we may still live peaceably according to our beliefs, and not be compelled to repeat lies and participate in evil.

We find ourselves besieged in a hostile culture. And though the political coalition we are part of may triumph at the polls for a day, against the powers arrayed against us there is no victory through politics as usual. Consequently, Davidson argues that the failures of the conservative project have become debilitating for conservatism as a practical approach to politics because there is little left to conserve. He writes that:

Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing. Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.

Davidson argues that it is therefore necessary for conservatives to start thinking of themselves as “radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.” He wants conservativism to transform into something that can raze the wicked and corrupt institutions that dominate our society. Only after we clear the ground and rebuild a healthy culture will conservatism again make sense. And achieving this goal will require wielding government power more vigorously than conservatives have usually been comfortable with.

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