If you read the first two entries, you’ll know that Edmund Burke spent a book attacking the idea that you can build a political order on an abstract proposition about human beings in general. If you know our history, you’ll know the United States was founded on an abstract proposition about human beings in general.
All men are created equal. That sentence is as universal, as deductive and as indifferent to local circumstance as anything in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Burke took apart line by line. It makes a claim about all men, everywhere, in every condition. It is exactly the kind of sentence he said you could not govern from, and it is the founding sentence of the country whose conservatives quote him more than anybody else on earth (who also live in the longest-running constitutional republic in human history).
That seems like a bit of a problem, and it has a second half that makes it worse. Burke’s method needs something old and working to point at. The cathedral you repair because you want the cathedral. America had no cathedral. No crown, no hereditary peerage, no established national church after the 1830s, and no unwritten constitution accumulated over centuries, because ours was written in a single summer by men in a room who then signed it.
So when an American says he wants to conserve the American tradition, the honest question is what he thinks the tradition is, because the thing at the bottom of it is a revolution justified by precisely the abstraction Burke said would wreck a country.
This is the third of four articles. The first was Burke, and the argument was that conservatism at the root is a claim about knowledge. The second was Peel, and the argument was that running a party on that philosophy produces the problem Disraeli named in 1844 when he asked what exactly you intend to conserve. This article asks that question of a country that has to answer it without any of the materials it’s supposed to need.
The country with no ancient régime
In 1955, a Harvard political scientist named Louis Hartz published The Liberal Tradition in America, and it’s still a useful treatise about why American politics feels the way it does. The thesis is narrower and stranger than the version in circulation, so let’s take a look.
Hartz doesn’t claim American conservatives are in a bind. He claims America never had the social material for a real right or a real left, because it skipped feudalism. No feudal order means no landed aristocracy to overthrow, which means no revolutionary tradition in the European sense, which means no reactionary tradition either, because reaction is a response to revolution. There was no one except the King to claw back power from, and we did that together in the beginning. His phrase for it is the absence of feudalism and the presence of the liberal idea.
What follows is a country where liberalism wins by default, before anybody argues for it, and then becomes invisible. Nobody defends it because nobody attacks it. It stops being a position and becomes the air or water.
America represents the liberal mechanism of Europe functioning without the European social antagonisms.
There’s a part of his theory that goes against everything you’d predict. Hartz argues this produces a society that is profoundly anti-individualist. A country founded on individual rights, with no inherited ranks, ought to produce the most individualistic people alive. Hartz says it produces conformists, because when everyone shares the same unexamined assumptions, deviation looks less like disagreement and more like a defect.
Now a correction, which is going to be a theme here.
There’s a sentence attributed to Hartz everywhere. America is conservative, but the principles conserved are liberal, and some indeed are radical. It comes with ellipses, it’s cited to page fifty, and it is the most convenient summary of this entire problem that anyone has produced.
I had it checked, and the sentence belongs to Gunnar Myrdal, from An American Dilemma in 1944, on page seven of the first volume. Myrdal puts the second half in quotation marks with a footnote, which means he’s quoting somebody else. So the cleanest statement of the American conservative problem is a quotation inside a quotation, by a Swedish economist writing about race in America, attributed for seventy years to the wrong author. I’ll use the idea because the idea is right, but that’s why we say it (not because we’re quoting Hartz).
The rebuttals to Hartz are worth noting. From the 1960s, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock rebuilt the founding around classical republicanism instead of Lockean liberalism. If the Revolution was fought in the language of virtue and corruption and the fear of standing armies, Hartz’s premise fails at the root.
And Rogers Smith, in 1993, made the rebuttal you have to carry through the rest of this. Hartz sees a liberalism that does not know race and therefore cannot see what is sitting in plain view. American politics, Smith argues, expresses the interaction of multiple traditions: liberalism, republicanism, and what he calls ascriptive forms of Americanism, meaning hierarchies assigned at birth. You don’t need feudalism to get hierarchy. You need a different mechanism for it, and one always exists.
So where does my opening claim stand? On institutions, it’s simply correct, and nobody disputes it. Where it loses me is in overstating the absence. America had established churches in several states by the 1830s, a landed gentry in the Tidewater and the Hudson Valley with entail and primogeniture until Jefferson’s statutes killed them, and a slaveholding social order across half the country that functioned in every structural sense as an ancien régime: hereditary status, fixed ranks, an organic theory of society, and a governing class that defended all of it in writing. Hartz conceded the South was his great exception, which is a curious thing since the South is quite a bit more conservative than the North (and remains so).
The aristocracy question
Were there conservatives at the founding? There were men who thought like conservatives about human nature, and the best of them is John Adams.
Adams’s central claim is empirical and not sentimental, and he hammers it for about fifteen hundred pages in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, from 1787. As an aside, that long ass title is a good example of how Adams could bloviate, so bear with me (and him). The claim is that aristocracy arises everywhere, in every society, whether or not anybody plans it, so the only real question is whether you channel it or pretend it isn’t happening. Wherever commerce flourishes, and the arts are cultivated, he writes, an aristocracy rises up in a course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families, who unite against both the people and the first magistrate.
That’s a description of a mechanism, not a defense of a class.
And now the famous phrase, which nearly everyone quotes wrong by stopping too early:
The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.
The quotation usually ends at “the able,” which makes it sound like a man listing the natural rulers of society. The whole sentence is a warning about what those three groups do to a legislature, and his remedy is to put them in a chamber by themselves where everyone can see them, because the alternative is that they operate invisibly inside the popular branch.
Russell Kirk put Adams at the head of the American conservative tradition in 1953, and inside the movement it has been settled ever since. Here is the sentence that complicates it, from the preface of the same book, where Adams writes that the United States has exhibited perhaps the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature, and hopes that men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy and superstition.
Simple principles of nature. Sufficiently enlightened. That is a sentence of the Enlightenment, and Burke would have found it alarming. Adams’s defense of balanced government is mechanical and Polybian, built out of reading a great deal of history as data, with almost nothing in it of prescription or inherited prejudice or veneration.
Richard Samuelson drew the distinction better than I can, in an essay that names Kirk directly. Burke denounced the French revolutionaries primarily for making war on their traditions. Adams denounced them for making war on human nature.
That difference runs all the way down. One man is defending an inheritance. The other is defending a fact about the species, and you can hold the second with no inheritance at all, which is extremely convenient for a country that didn’t have one.
The best document in all of this is a letter. In October 1813, Jefferson wrote to Adams about natural aristocracy, and one sentence gets quoted in every discussion of the subject: for I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men, the grounds of this being virtue and talents.
Here is what gets left out. That sentence doesn’t open the letter. It sits mid-paragraph, and the paragraph is about selective human breeding. Jefferson has been reading Theognis, and he spends several sentences on whether you could improve the human race the way you improve livestock, by selecting the best male for a harem of well-chosen females. He concludes that the equal rights of men would rise up against this privileged Solomon, and that we’ll therefore have to content ourselves with the accidental aristoi produced by the fortuitous concourse of breeders.
And then, with no transition at all: for I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men.
It’s a concession to Adams, arrived at by exhaustion, in the middle of the strangest paragraph either man ever sent the other. What follows is serious. Jefferson distinguishes the natural aristocracy of virtue and talents from an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, calls the first the most precious gift of nature for the government of society and the second a mischievous ingredient, and then states the disagreement with real fairness. Adams would put the pseudo-aristoi in a separate chamber where they can be hindered from doing mischief. Jefferson thinks that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief is arming them for it.
Adams replied on the 15th of November, and his reply is far less quoted and much better. He agrees, then says that agreeing in words is not the same as agreeing in sense, and takes the word talents apart:
Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and Motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy, are Talents, as well as Genius and Science and learning. Any one of these Talents, that in fact commands or influences true Votes in Society, gives to the Man who possesses it, the Character of an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word.
Then the demonstration, which is the most practical thing in the correspondence:
Pick up, the first 100 men you meet, and make a Republick. Every Man will have an equal Vote. But when deliberations and discussions are opened it will be found that 25, by their Talents, Virtues being equal, will be able to carry 50 Votes. Every one of these 25, is an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word.
That’s the whole argument in one image. Aristocracy isn’t a legal category you can abolish. It’s what happens in any room where people have to decide something, and the only question is whether you can see it. He then knocks down Jefferson’s distinction entirely: birth and wealth are conferred on some men as imperiously by nature as genius, strength or beauty.
And the closing paragraph, which is the one to sit with:
I dislike and detest hereditary honours, Offices Emoluments established by Law. So do you. I am for ex[c]luding legal hereditary distinctions from the U.S. as long as possible. So are you. I only say that Mankind have not yet discovered any remedy against irresistable Corruption in Elections to Offices of great Power and Profit, but making them hereditary.
Read that carefully, because it isn’t what it looks like. Adams says twice in four sentences that he detests hereditary office. What he’s saying is that nobody has found anything better at stopping corruption in elections to powerful and profitable offices, and that he doesn’t expect anyone to. That’s a conservative sentence in the deepest sense, written by a man who helped draft the Declaration and served a term as an elected president.
One figure to close this out, who’s here as much for how he reached us as for what he said. John Randolph of Roanoke is the closest thing the early republic produced to a European reactionary, and the line used to prove it is: I am an aristocrat; I love liberty, I hate equality. I had to verify that one. It isn’t in Hugh Garland’s 1850 biography, which is the standard nineteenth-century life and which was searched directly. The earliest printed appearance anybody could find is William Cabell Bruce’s biography of 1922, volume two, page 229, carrying a semicolon where you usually see a period. So it predates Kirk by three decades and he didn’t manufacture it. But there’s no source in Randolph’s own speeches, letters or the congressional record, and everybody quoting it now is quoting somebody who quoted somebody. Take that for what it’s worth.
The thing there was to conserve
Before 1861, the most systematic, most intellectually ambitious conservative thought produced in America was produced in the South, by slaveholders, in defense of slavery.
Before some jackass thinks I’m calling conservatism racist or pro-slavery, understand that conservatism can be applied to any belief you want to conserve. This is one narrow version, and modern conservatives obviously don’t agree; neither did our first conservative president, John Adams.
John C. Calhoun was a senator, a vice president under two presidents, a secretary of state and a secretary of war, and the short book published after his death in 1850, A Disquisition on Government, is the most rigorous political theory any American wrote in the nineteenth century.
He starts from a sociological premise and not a constitutional one. Any community divides into distinct interests, and whichever interest commands a numerical majority will use the machinery of government against the others, because that is what the machinery is for. So counting heads doesn’t give you government by the whole. It gives you government by the larger part over the smaller, and then calls the result the will of the people, even if it’s 51% of the people. In his words, the numerical majority is treated as the greater part as the whole, and the government of the greater part as the government of the whole.
His remedy, the concurrent majority, is a veto: each major interest gets a negative on the whole, and government acts only when all of them consent. It is this mutual negative among its various conflicting interests, he writes, which invests each with the power of protecting itself.
If you’re hearing echoes of the first essay, you should be. This is a Madisonian argument about faction pushed to its limit, and it’s recognizably in the family of everything in this series: distrust of raw majorities, structure preferred to sentiment, a claim that abstract equality dissolves the real distinctions holding a society together.
And here is what it was for. Calhoun developed the concurrent majority to protect a slaveholding minority region from a free-state majority. The theory is general in form and entirely specific in application, and both of those are true at once.
Lest anyone think the slavery part was incidental, here is Calhoun on liberty. The usual quotation starts “liberty is a reward to be earned.” His actual sentence starts differently and runs much further, and the continuation is the part that gets cut:
It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike; a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving; and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.
Nothing about that clause is incidental, and it’s the load-bearing claim.
The honest version goes like this. The arguments of antebellum Southern conservatism are the same arguments. That society is organic and not contractual. That hierarchy is natural and beneficial. That abstract equality is a destructive fiction. That rationalism dissolves the bonds which make freedom possible.
Strip slavery out of that body of thought and you don’t get a conservatism with an embarrassing attachment, you get substantially less conservatism, because the institution was what the theory was theorizing. Larry Tise pushes it further, arguing the proslavery case was a national conservative ideology with heavy New England clerical input, which if true means you can’t use the North as a clean alternative lineage. Corey Robin generalizes the whole thing: conservatism as such is reaction to emancipatory movements from below.
Here are four responses, starting with the best.
The first and best is that there is a Northern conservative tradition owing nothing to slavery. Adams, Fisher Ames, the Federalists, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, Orestes Brownson, the Whig constitutionalists. It is institutional, legal, and commercial instead of agrarian, which is exactly why Kirk undervalued it when he built his canon. That’s a defect in the canon, not in American conservatism. You simply cannot suggest the only thing being conserved was slavery, when these men were conserving the fruition of over 2,000 years of Western pursuit of human liberty.
The second is the genetic point. That an argument was deployed to defend an atrocity doesn’t establish that the argument is false, any more than the Terror refutes the rights of man. Burke’s critique of abstraction was aimed at Jacobins, not abolitionists, and Burke opposed the slave trade.
The third comes from Eugene Genovese, a Marxist historian sympathetic to the Southern critique of capitalism, who argued in the 1990s that the Southern critique of bourgeois individualism detaches from slavery and retains force. He made that case while being completely explicit that slavery was indefensible. Which is worth noting, because Genovese also made the strongest case against, that Calhoun’s theory defended a planter class under assault and can’t be separated from its socioeconomic moorings. Same man, both arguments, forty years apart.
And the fourth is the one I’m actually going to make.
What is conservatism
On the 27th of February, 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the Cooper Institute in New York, and it’s the speech that made him a plausible presidential candidate. Most of it is a documentary argument almost nobody reads.
The method he uses is the argument. Stephen Douglas had said that our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood the slavery question better than we do now. Lincoln takes that sentence and treats it as a proposition to be tested. He asks who the fathers are, answers that they’re the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution, and then goes through them. He refuses to summarize, and takes them one at a time, tracking how each voted whenever federal authority over slavery in federal territory came before a body he sat in, starting with the Northwest Ordinance. He names the votes. He names the men who were present and silent. He’s careful about the ones whose position he can’t establish, and says so instead of counting them.
It’s the least rhetorical thing imaginable: a man doing arithmetic in public for the better part of an hour, in front of an audience that had come to see whether a western lawyer could handle himself. And it works, because at the end he can say that Douglas’s own fathers, by Douglas’s own definition, understood the question to permit exactly what Douglas said they forbade.
Then he turns to the South directly, and makes what I think is the cleverest move in American political rhetoric:
You say you are conservative, eminently conservative, while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live”; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.
He accepted the definition whole, and he did not argue that conservatism is bad or outdated or a cover for privilege. He took the word at its strongest and most sympathetic, adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried, and demonstrated that on the central question of the century his side held the old policy and the other side was the innovator. The phrase in quotation marks is Lincoln quoting Douglas back at him, and it recurs through the address as a refrain.
So the position, stated as strongly as I can put it, is this. If conservatism in America means adherence to the old and tried, then on the defining question of the nineteenth century the conservative was the antislavery Republican, and the radical innovator was the slaveholder demanding a brand-new federal right to carry his property anywhere in the territories. The expansion of slavery was the innovation. The restriction was the inheritance. Lincoln proved it with the record and then named it with the word.
Which brings up a fight most people have never heard of. When Kirk built the American conservative canon in 1953, he put Calhoun in it and praised him warmly, calling him one of the two most eminent American political writers alongside Adams, and crediting him with demonstrating that conservatism can project as well as complain.
Harry Jaffa spent decades trying to get him out. Jaffa was a student of Leo Strauss, wrote an important book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and is generally credited with drafting the most famous sentence in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech, so he was not a bystander. His position was that the Declaration’s equality principle is constitutive of America, that the whole project is unintelligible without it, and that conservatism had to purge its neo-Confederate tendencies. He treated Calhoun as the fountainhead of what had to go, and he didn’t stop at Calhoun. He described Kirk and Richard Weaver and Willmoore Kendall, the three central traditionalists of the postwar movement, as the nihilistic successors of John C. Calhoun. We formed a government based on the idea that human beings are equal, and behaving otherwise is not conserving what makes America unique in human history.
The Remnant
Now skip forward about seventy years.
Between roughly 1910 and the mid-1950s, there was something historians call the Old Right, the direct ancestor of the movement that exists now, and almost nothing about it would be recognizable to a conservative today.
It was never an organized thing. No magazine of record, no canon, no theory of itself, no name its members used. What it had was a coalition: Republican business conservatives like Robert Taft, conservative Southern Democrats like Josiah Bailey and Al Smith, press barons like Hearst and McCormick, writers like Mencken and Garet Garrett, and the Hoover and Coolidge and Harding line behind it. Its institutional vehicle was the Conservative Coalition in Congress, an informal bloc of Republicans and Southern Democrats that formed around 1937 and stayed effective until about 1964. For twenty-seven years it was where domestic legislation went to die.
What the coalition believed in was this. Opposition to the New Deal, which it called domestic dictatorship (agree). Classical liberal economics. Congressional supremacy against executive prerogative. And above all of that, non-interventionism: against entry into the Second World War, against NATO, against Korea, with the America First Committee as its mass expression.
Two figures give you the texture.
In 1930 twelve Southern writers published a symposium called I’ll Take My Stand, whose unsigned statement of principles, by John Crowe Ransom, says the essays all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way. Their argument is that industrialism is not merely an economic arrangement but a total order that destroys the conditions of a humane life: craft, religion, settled place, leisure, the relation of a worker to the thing he makes. They were against progress as a category. It sold about two thousand copies by 1940.
The group came apart in the most revealing way possible. Robert Penn Warren, who contributed an essay defending segregation, moved toward support for civil rights and publicly repudiated his own contribution. Donald Davidson went the other direction and became an organized resister of desegregation in Tennessee. Same book, same twelve men, opposite destinations.
The second figure is Albert Jay Nock, whose influence ran far ahead of his readership. Our Enemy, the State, from 1935, draws a distinction that has run through American conservative and libertarian thought ever since. Government arises to protect rights. The State is a parasitic apparatus of expropriation. They differ in kind and origin, not in degree, and state power and social power are a zero-sum pair, so the State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power. Worth knowing: Nock thought the Constitution itself was the moment American government became a State, which puts him outside the constitutional veneration of everything that came after him.
His influential piece is a 1936 essay called “Isaiah’s Job,” and it’s the founding document of conservative intellectual self-understanding. The prophet isn’t sent to persuade the masses, because the masses can’t be persuaded. He’s sent to the Remnant: a scattered minority who can’t be identified in advance, organized, or counted. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. Two things you know and no more, Nock writes: that they exist, and that they will find you.
Hear what that move does. It gives a losing side a theory of why losing is the correct condition of the serious thinker, converting political defeat into vocational confirmation. When Buckley writes in 1955 that his new magazine stands athwart history yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, he’s writing Nock’s Remnant with a subscription list.
Why 1945 is a hard break
So why does everything start over after the war?
The Old Right had no institutions. No journal of record, no publishing house of its own until Henry Regnery founded his in 1947, no foundations, no student organization. It had newspapers owned by rich men and a bloc of votes in Congress, and when the men died it had no body to live in. It had no canon, because nobody had written the book saying here is the tradition and here are its authors. And it had no theory of itself. It knew what it was against; ask what it was for, and you got an answer about the Constitution, which was true, not a philosophy.
There’s a political version of all three, and it happened at a convention. Robert Taft was called Mr. Republican and was the Old Right’s one plausible president. He ran in 1940, 1948 and 1952, and in 1952 he got closest. He lost to Dwight Eisenhower, who had never held elective office, had been recruited because he could win, and represented everything Taft’s wing opposed on foreign policy. Taft was dead within a year. So the Old Right lost its last national figure and its best chance inside eighteen months, and what replaced it was a Republican Party that had accepted the New Deal settlement at home and the permanent alliance system abroad, even though Eisenhower would go on to warn about the dangers of the military industrial complex that supported the latter.
And the fourth reason is the one that actually broke it. The Old Right wanted the state small, and that included the war state. The movement built after 1945 kept almost all of the domestic position and inverted that one completely, adding an aggressive, internationalist, anti-communist foreign policy with the permanent military establishment it requires. The Old Right wanted a small state, including the war state. The postwar movement wanted a small state except the war state. Calling that an adjustment is too kind. It’s a different proposition with the same label on it, and Murray Rothbard wrote a book making exactly that accusation from the losing side.
One more date on the other end. The Conservative Coalition stopped being effective in 1964, the same year Goldwater was nominated and lost forty-four states. The old vehicle died in the same year the new one had its first national run and was destroyed. Everything that looks like conservative success afterward was built out of the wreckage of 1964, by people who had just been told by the electorate, in the most emphatic terms available, that nobody wanted this.
Which is the whole point. Everything in the next essay is a deliberate answer to the failure I’ve just described: the magazine, the canon, the student organization, the treaty between libertarians and traditionalists, the boundary policing that decided who was in and who was out. All of it built, on purpose, by a small number of people, between about 1944 and 1960, because the previous attempt collapsed without leaving anything behind.
Which makes American conservatism the most self-conscious political tradition in the English-speaking world. It knows it was constructed, because the men who constructed it said so while they were doing it, in print, in magazines you can still read. Compare that to Britain, where nobody built the Conservative Party; it accumulated, out of a Tory grouping older than the word, through a letter Peel wrote to get elected. When British conservatives look for their origins, they find a process. When American conservatives look for theirs, they find a decade, an address list, and about nine men.
And that brings us back to Disraeli’s question in the hardest possible form. If your tradition was assembled, deliberately, within living memory, by people choosing what to put in it, then what exactly are you conserving?
The assignment
America had nothing to conserve but a revolution; the revolution was justified by an abstraction, and the one genuine ancien régime on the continent was a slave society. Those three facts are the whole American conservative problem, and every serious American conservative since has been working on some version of them, whether or not he knew it.
Adams found an answer that needs no inheritance: human nature produces the same hierarchies everywhere, and the job is to see them clearly and build for them. That answer travels, and it works in a new country. It’s also colder and less consoling than Burke, which is why people who want the warmth keep reaching past Adams and getting tangled. Lincoln found the other answer: if conservatism is adherence to the old and tried, you can be the conservative in an argument against the people calling themselves conservative, and prove it with the record.
Three things to do with that this week.
Read the Cooper Union address for yourself. Not the famous paragraph, the whole thing, including the long documentary middle nobody reads. It takes forty minutes, and it will change how you argue, because you’ll watch a man win a fight by doing homework instead of by raising his voice. If you did Lincoln-Douglass debates in high school as I did, you’ll remember some of this.
Find out what your own tradition is made of. Pick the political tradition you consider yourself part of and try to name the decade it was assembled in and the people who assembled it. If you think it wasn’t assembled, that it runs continuously back to the founding, test that theory. Look for the institutions, the magazine, the canon, the organization. If you can’t find them before 1945, that tells you something, and it’s the same thing the first essay told you about Burke.
Then the one that costs something, which is Lincoln’s test. Take the position you hold most strongly and ask whether it’s the old and tried or the new and untried. Do it honestly, with the record in front of you instead of from memory. Sometimes the answer will be that the thing you want is the innovation and the thing you’re fighting is the inheritance.
When that happens, you have two honest options. Argue for the innovation on its merits, which is perfectly respectable and which Lincoln’s opponents could have done. Or change your position. What you can’t honestly do is keep the word conservative on a position you’ve just discovered is the new thing. That’s the move Lincoln caught the South making in 1860, and it’s still the most common move in American politics, and now you know what it looks like.
Next: a twenty-nine-year-old starts a magazine in 1955, a former communist supplies the religious seriousness, a former Trotskyist writes a treaty between people who do not agree, and one man spends fifteen years deciding who counts as a conservative. Then the whole settlement comes apart, in public, in the last ten years.