From Gratitude to Grievance: An Essay on the Past and Future of American Conservatism

One of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s final books was a slender tome called Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country (1990). Buckley, of course, was the founder of National Review in 1955 and the longtime host of PBS’s Firing Line whose brand of erudite intellectual pugilism gathered American conservatism into a movement by 1980 that launched a Reagan Revolution and has shaped American politics ever since. Buckley was his own sort of firebrand whose caustic wit did not much mask a genuine zeal for fiery political debate. His media descendants on Fox may lack his vocabulary, his love for Latin, and his dry humor. But their devotion to the partisan cause has deep roots in Buckley’s example.

Gratitude was an unusual sort of book for Buckley, its somewhat gentler-than-usual tone suggested by the lower-case letters in which the title is printed on the dust jacket. Buckley intended the book as a call for compulsory national service, which was remarkable enough coming from an often libertarian conservative of the mid-century. But what seems more remarkable from a distance of nearly three decades is the soft, sometimes elegiac tone that Buckley takes in a book that, mostly, is a meditation on our debts owed to those who came before us and to one another as a community. We all owe what Buckley calls a “debt to civilization” that is “impossible to define,” and so, really, impossible ever to repay fully. Our gratitude is not measured according to any expectation we ever could give back all that we have received. Instead, simply trying to repay it is how we acknowledge our indebtedness. Gratefully acknowledging our debt cultivates in us an attitude that we owe something to those who came before us, and to one another.

What Buckley describes in Gratitude is the purest form of conservatism one can imagine, if for no reason other than because it so succinctly evokes the writings and ideas of Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the originator of modern conservatism. Buckley’s subtitle (“Reflections on What we Owe to Our Country”) echoes Burke’s best-known work, the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791). Burke is remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution, which won for Burke a reputation as a defender of aristocracy. That does somewhat misstate Burke’s importance, however. Burke was an ardent defender of the peoples of Ireland and India when British colonial ambitions disturbed their ancient societies, and he reluctantly supported the American Revolution because King George had sought to deprive British colonists of their ancient, hard-won rights as British subjects. Conservatism did not begin in a reflexive defense of the old because it was old. Instead, for Burke, what mattered was to acknowledge a debt we owe and never can pay that is held in a relationship among “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

In more recent years, conservatism has taken on a different color. When political figures who are called conservative make assertions about a “real America” that needs to be reclaimed, or offer promises to “Take our country back,” they are not offering expressions of gratitude for how the United States has grown into the political community that it is today. Rather, they are rejecting the development of American social and political life and expressing a grievance that it has grown or developed at all.

There is something in American conservatism that has made this shift from gratitude to grievance possible and, if we are honest, someone like William F. Buckley, Jr. is not blameless. Conservatism, in fact, has had a strange and troubled history in American politics where it lives more like a guest who has overstayed his welcome than, itself, as an organic development from the questions in the American political tradition. Conservatism is a European political phenomenon, not an American one. Its adaptation to American politics has necessitated some distortions, and those distortions have had consequences. Here, for these few pages, we will examine the past and the present of American conservatism to understand its strange journey from gratitude to grievance.

“The Chains of a Definition”

If Edmund Burke had one abiding intellectual trait it was his romanticism, which we might understand as a disposition against the kind of scientific precision about everything that we take so much for granted today. Intellectually, Burke preferred what is sensed or felt over “The geometricians, and the chemists, [who] bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are the support of the moral world.” It was, more than anything, the rationalist aspirations of the French revolutionaries that curdled Burke’s sympathies, the certainty that nature could be contained by the measurements of human reason. Burke believed the natural world overwhelms us, encompasses us. And so, also, does history.

It is a shame that Burke is remembered so well today for his Reflections that we have lost our appreciation for him as a philosopher. As a young man, Burke wrote a remarkable treatise about aesthetics so influential that Immanuel Kant made efforts to rebut it. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Burke attempted to define what, at the outset, he asserted was indefinable. Burke understood there to be a relationship between our aesthetic sensibilities, our moral aptitudes, and our social life. We seek in the world only the beauty and the truth that we can appreciate. Whether we are discussing art, music, politics, or moral philosophy, it is not so different. Thinking in plainly classical terms, Burke argued for the intimate closeness of truth and beauty. They are the goods that we seek, and so understanding how we come to understand those good things is more than worth our time.

Taste, Burke wrote in his introductory essay for the Enquiry, is “too volatile to endure even the chains of a definition.” There we find an insight not just into Burke’s theory of aesthetics but into the working of Burke’s own mind and, so, the nature of the political vision he elaborated across a lifetime that inspired the conservatism of subsequent centuries. Indeed, for as interesting as the essay on taste and the Enquiry are for Burke’s treatment of aesthetics, it is the two paragraphs on the subject of defining things that really seem worth close attention today.

“A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined,” Burke wrote, and, “when we define, we seem in danger of circumscribing nature within the bounds of our own notions.” Burke intends to spend the remainder of the Enquiry establishing a way we can understand what beauty and sublimity are, and how we can discuss these subjective concepts with any certainty that we are talking about the same things. Yet, before he does that he wishes his reader to know that something other than a definition is necessary. Burke wants to arrive at a set of understandings, a constellation of indicators that suggest a meaning instead of capturing one. Burke’s discussion lives in imagination, not under a microscope.

This disposition is important to understanding conservatism. Conservatism was born in intellectual humility, a wariness to unravel the “great chain of causes, which links one to another, even to the throne of God himself,” for “when we go but one step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth.” The conservative mind is one disposed to acknowledge the receipt of a historical inheritance, as Burke says in the Reflections, “with pious awe and trembling solicitude,” or, as we might say, with gratitude. Conservatism is not mere nostalgia, the preservation of the old because it is old. Tradition is a living thing, organic in its nature and, as Burke wrote in the Reflections, “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Yet, the conservative is conscious that she or he has been born into history, has received a tradition, and should disturb what has been given only for the most serious reasons. When serious reasons exist, change must come. Without serious reason, it is supremely ungrateful to reject what history has given.

Yet, this same disposition of humility also creates a problem that bedevils conservatism even today. Conservatism did not exist before Burke confronted a French revolution that sought to overturn the whole feudal European past. Conservatism did not need to exist until a liberalizing challenge rose that sought to overturn the order of European aristocracy, which had existed to that point for centuries without any effort required to preserve it. Burke sought to preserve those elements of that aristocratic past which still were beneficial, or seemed beneficial at that time. The humble gratitude for the political order he understood to have been received through history fostered a reluctance to name or to define too much precisely what he was conserving. Indeed, Burke never used the word conservatism and conservatism, itself, has resisted an easy definition since Burke’s time precisely because it is a reactive (or, “reactionary”) phenomenon that arises only in response to some disruptive or liberalizing event. Conservatism is not an ideological position. Rather, conservatism is a method of thinking and a disposition about tradition. For that reason, conservatism cannot be distilled into propositions as easily as liberalism, or Marxism, or fascism, or capitalism. Conservatism itself resists the chains of a definition.

For these reasons, conservatism has suffered for a long time from being a sort of a useful vehicle for a variety of ideological agendas. Conservatism’s political and intellectual virtues, its humility and gratefulness for what is given, have invited unwitting and unsavory appropriations of conservatism to legitimate a variety of other agendas. Nowhere has that been more frequently the case than in the United States.

Conservatism in America

In 1983, conservative commentator George F. Will apologized to readers when he set about to “commit political philosophy” in a book called Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. It was an interesting moment for an interesting book. As the first Reagan Administration neared its end and Reagan cruised toward an easy re-election, Will began to undermine some of the foundations of what came in American politics to be called the Conservative Movement, the one that elected Reagan to bring about a Reagan Revolution. Reading Statecraft as Soulcraft in retrospect today, it is no surprise that Will has abjured the Republican Party and now identifies more as a libertarian than a conservative.

Will made a stark case in 1983 that, on view of the length of the Western political tradition when we gaze at it through a Burkean lens, “Government is good, and the estate of government is grand.” Will was right. Very little in Western political theory teaches us that government is an evil to be avoided, and such was surely not the opinion of Edmund Burke. Yet, such a claim came as a startling rebuke to Reagan’s First Inaugural Address where he declaimed, memorably, that, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.” With his book, Will seemed to be attempting to reclaim a place for something more conservative in American conservatism. Again, in retrospect from where we are today, this seems to have been a futile exercise. In a sense, American conservatism was doomed from the start. Perhaps this is because conservatism was not a part of American politics from the start. Conservatism came much, much later.

If we reflect back on the origins of conservatism in Burke’s ideas and writings, it quickly begins to seem strange to think about conservatism in an American political context at all. Conservatism came about as a way to defend the old aristocratic order during the Revolution in France. The United States has no feudal or aristocratic tradition at all, and American political history reached 1948 before the word ‘conservative’ was applied in any serious sort of way to the American political debate. (It was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 who first called the Democratic Party “the liberal party.” As in Europe, in America conservatism came second, reactively.) Since even before the Constitution, American politics always was about the questions of national power versus state power. From the constitutional debates to the Bank of the United States to the Civil War to the Progressive Era, all of the questions broke over the continental divide between those who preferred national regulation and those who trusted the states to regulate themselves. It only was once the United States began to embark upon the American Century, involving itself first in a European war and then in a long, global struggle with communism (itself, an effort to remedy the lingering vestiges of feudalism), that Americans imported a European argument about liberalization and conserving a past. Liberal and conservative entered our political lexicon in the middle part of the twentieth century.

After Richard Weaver began to talk about an American conservatism in his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences, soon Russell Kirk would publish The Conservative Mind(1953). The seminal event, however, came in 1955 when William F. Buckley, Jr. began to publish National Review. Buckley’s magazine drew together the disparate elements that came together first to support Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964. Goldwater went down to a historic defeat, but the foundation had been set for Buckley and others to build a coalition out of pro-growth economic conservatives, defense hawks, and libertarians. The last piece was fitted into the puzzle with the rise of Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This was the potent stew that came together to elect Reagan, reject George H.W. Bush, offer a Contract with America, impeach Bill Clinton, invade Iraq, champion Sarah Palin, and march in Tea Party rallies. To the degree that most Republicans have been co-opted by Donald Trump, this also was the coalition that elected Donald Trump. But was it really, in a Burkean sense, conservative?

The argument that this coalition was conservative was much easier to sustain when global communism was the enemy. Communism provided a rationale. Evangelicals were battling godlessness (they were joined by Catholics). Libertarians were battling statism. Defense hawks had an arms race to focus on. And, pro-growth economic conservatives set out to defeat capitalism’s rival ideology. One way or another, each of these strands in the coalition could claim to be protecting something traditional in American or Western life, and for a long time that was good enough. In the dangerous environment of the nuclear-haunted Cold War, perhaps the tension between American liberals, opposed to communism but accommodating and peace-seeking, and American conservatives, hawkish and giving the communist adversary no quarter in a long struggle, was stabilizing in a way. Perhaps this arrangement of American politics gave the decades of the Cold War a degree of predictability so that things never really got out of hand. Yet, even if that was true, there is nothing especially Burkean about libertarianism that draws so much inspiration from John Locke’s contractualism and an anthropology that Burke did not share. Burke certainly was a believer in commerce, but no more did Burke believe in sacrificing more important moral goods to commerce than he believed in the bare assertion of national power. Burke demonstrated amply both in his Indian and Irish causes that there are moral constraints both on the use of national power and on the pursuit of wealth. And, though Burke certainly opposed atheism, he also spoke with approval and admiration for Muslims and Hindus. Burke believed in a role for religion in politics, but his own latitudinarian dispositions would have looked askance at the sorts of claims made by one nation to be a shining city on a hill favored by their god over others. Burke understood other histories, traditions, and religious faiths to be right for the people who had received those pasts as much as Britain’s was right for Britain.

Of course, it was not entirely ridiculous to argue that those positions held by American conservatives during and after the Cold War were, in some sense relating to Burke, conservative. Many very learned people made those arguments, and they were not completely wrong. But certainly they were not completely right and they could not be completely right because the most essential concerns of Burke’s conservatism had nothing to do with American history or politics. Conservatism is not an American phenomenon. But conservatism is undefined and, in an important way, undefinable. This means, at once, that we cannot say firmly that all of this is not conservatism. On the other hand, it is clear that conservatism invites a very broad and strange range of perspectives to claim its legitimacy.

A Political Aesthetic

Around the time conservatism was emerging in American political life, Richard Hofstadter wrote an interesting set of essays gathered under the title The Paranoid Style in American Politics in 1964. Hofstadter’s book never was popular among conservatives for rather obvious reasons, and Hofstadter himself acknowledged that his description of conservatives as “paranoid” in the title and throughout the books is pejorative. In one sense, we would want to notice that Hofstadter joined the partisan fray with his book, in which case his contribution to our understanding of the political divisions in the postwar era is limited by his own partisan blinkers. In another sense, however, Hofstadter has given us at least one insight that becomes essential at this point if we wish to understand what American conservatism became, why that happened, and what it means for where American politics is now.

Hofstadter’s title referred to a Paranoid Style which he means in the same sense that we would refer to “the baroque or the mannerist style,” and, “above all, a way of seeing the world and expressing oneself.” To name what Hofstadter does not name so explicitly, Hofstadter’s book concerns an aesthetic sensibility about politics and life. As much as Burke’s aesthetics corresponded to a political vision, Hofstadter suggested that there is an aesthetic in American culture that finds political expression, too. Hofstadter styles this aesthetic as “paranoid,” which he does not intend in the technical, clinical sense of a psychiatric condition. Rather, Hofstadter wrote, he referred to “the feeling of persecution…systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.” Something in the American consciousness disposes some of us to this, and it recurs like a motif in our politics. Hofstadter was aware that paranoia is not only an American style, there are expressions around the globe, but (at Hofstadter’s writing) it was the “preferred style” of minority movements in the United States. Nazism and Stalinism had made use of the paranoid style, too. Yet in the U.S., at least until 1964, the style had been in use only on the fringes even if, on those fringes, it enjoyed a particular preferability.

Hofstadter traced expressions of this aesthetic through American history from Nativist conspiracies in the mid-nineteenth century down to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-under-every-bed pandering in the 1950’s. More than by implication, Hofstadter suggests that the real home of the paranoid style was on the “right wing” of the Republican Party which, at that time, overall was the more moderate party of Nelson Rockefeller and Dwight Eisenhower. Yet, Hofstadter was alert to a possibility that the paranoid style could be ascendant in the party that nominated Barry Goldwater, where William F. Buckley, Jr. had been battling the John Birch Society for a decade, and where latent suspicions of federal power that had lived in rural America since the federal period might coalesce into a political force on the American right.

Whatever else may be said of Hofstadter’s work — and the book is quite imperfect — he appears to have predicted correctly both the rise of the paranoid style and how well it would supplement the conservative movement, binding together those pro-growth business conservatives, defense hawks, libertarians, and evangelical Protestants in the midst of the Cold War. The paranoid style helped those disparate views of the world become coherent together because the expectation of a Cold War enemy outsider conspiring to harm Americans. The influence of this paranoid style on American conservatism has been subtle. Yet, once we begin looking for it, the paranoid is style becomes harder not to notice.

What is most important to understand about the paranoid style is how the conspiracies it suspects have the flavor of infiltration and subversion. The Cold War-era horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) expressed the idea about as clearly as it can be expressed. An alien force corrupts from within, secretly and out of view, until the subversion was complete and it was too late to reverse. The allegory to McCarthy-era fears about fellow-travelers and fifth columnists is obvious enough, but the same sort of fear can be tracked from the anti-immigrant rhetoric of 1840’s-era Know-Nothings to more contemporary worries about caravans, MS-13, and “bad dudes” crossing the southern border. Perhaps nowhere is this paranoid style more noticeable or more virulent in its effects than among conservatives, themselves. Over the last three decades, Republican primary elections have become exercises in which candidate is “the most conservative,” or “the true conservative,” or “the authentic conservative.” This race for purity has driven the party farther and farther to its own fringe, which comes as little surprise when we consider the prevalence of the RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) phenomenon among conservatives who, again, are concerned that some Republicans are not real Republicans and the party might fall prey to some taint of impurity or subversion.

Again, any serious examination of conservatism tells us quickly that there is nothing very conservative about any of this at all. Gratitude for what has been given through history and a commitment to preserve what works in public life while changing what must be changed has no need for a paranoid style. American conservatism did not absorb this aesthetic from some inner sympathy or because of any alignment of ideas. This happened because of a confluence of events that began when conservatism was introduced to American politics in the postwar period and was possible both because conservatism is not native to the American political tradition and because, being anti-ideological, conservatism itself lacks enough definitive content to assert against its misappropriation.

With a past like the one we have described here, the present and future cannot be promising.

“On Both Sides”

The situation is not so much better for liberalism in American politics, but it is better. Americans did not think of themselves as liberal for most of our history any more than they thought of themselves as conservatives. In that sense, liberalism also is a newcomer that sits a bit uncomfortably in our politics as it strains against a feudal past Americans do not have. Still, liberalism is a body of ideas emphasizing individual liberty and equality against the feudalism, and which owes its origin to the English philosopher John Locke who influenced Thomas Jefferson so much. Liberalism possesses enough shape of its own and has enough of a relationship to the beginnings of American political history that it fares better than conservatism has fared.

Still, liberalism has found itself locked in a polarizing struggle with conservatism for the last several decades that has become much too familiar to us. Like most long arguments we know from our own experiences, any original conflict or overarching differences eventually give way to the habit of disagreeing and the nurturing of a grudge. That has been especially easy for conservatism, for reasons we have discussed, but American liberalism is not innocent of a role in shaping our polarized politics. Both, lacking a deep anchor in American political history and without an external threat in communism any longer helping to make their place in American politics coherent, now have only polarization as the fuel to keep them going. A spirit of opposition to one another now defines both of them.

It would be hard not to lay greater blame on American conservatism for the polarization, though. The spirit of division and disagreement is natural to the ever-suspicious paranoid style. But the greatest problem with conservatism also is its most important virtue: conservatism is anti-ideological. The modern age has been the age of ideologies, systems of ideas intended to explain human reality from soup to nuts in order to tell us how to live within that reality. We have seen Marxism, Nazism, Stalinism, Jacobinism, Maoism, socialism, communism, fascism, and, yes, liberalism. There have been others, too. Conservatism is not an -ism in this sense. Conservatism’s central inspiration, we saw with Burke, is a receptive gratitude for the givenness of what we receive from the past. Where ideologies attempt to assert a meaning over what is given, conservatism is grateful to receive what is given, try to understand it, try to improve it and, for this reason, conservatism is suspicious of all ideologies that seem to prefer something else over what is given. Conservatism is challenging for this reason. It is contrary to everything about the age in which we live, one in which systems provide answers to questions and we who are living today are the masters of those systems.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in 2013 that the conservatism of Burke is “difficult, intricate, and true” while what passes for conservatism today in politics is “simple, persuasive, and false.” It is difficult to imagine a better distillation of the problem because Scruton has captured quite precisely why this false conservatism has been so successful. In an ideological age, women and men expect a set of ideological answers to problems no matter where their ideological sympathies lie. When conservatism, being anti-ideological, has failed to offer the expected ideological answers to political problems, people with an expectation of an ideological reply to liberalism have rushed in to supply those answers. Thus, conservatism has become a vessel for practically anything that opposes the other side.

Conservatism is anti-immigrant and pro-family, it is pro-gun, pro-military, pro-death penalty, and pro-life. Conservatives are anti-entitlement, anti-Obamacare, pro-veteran, pro-Social Security and pro-Medicare. Conservatives believe in small government and maintaining America’s superpower status. Of course, all of these issue positions can be identified with the various elements of the coalition that came together as a conservative movement: pro-growth economic conservatives, libertarians, and religious conservatives. The contradictions among them track with the contradictions that always were inherent in the coalition. And, despite the contradictions, what holds them together is a spirit of opposition to the other side of the political argument, what George Washington called “the spirit of revenge” in his Farewell Address where he also warned that, “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

The expectation of this ideological combat can be found on both sides of the American political divide. It simply is the case that one of them claims to draw inspiration from ideas that are antithetical to ideology entirely. Far from being characterized by a grateful spirit of receptiveness to what the past has given us, conservatism now is a set of dogmas united by ideological and cultural grievances.

Make America Great Again

A sense of entitlement lurks behind the chants of “Make America Great Again.” Those who would make America great again feel an entitlement to American greatness, which is why they want to recover what is rightly theirs. Their perception that the greatness to which they are entitled has been lost has nurtured in them a deep sense of grievance that has become the sole, signifying mark of American conservatism in the age of the Trump presidency. The willingness of Americans who call themselves conservatives to absorb “Make America Great Again” as a summary of their political hopes marks the final step along the road from gratitude to grievance and it is the surest sign that gratitude does not motivate American conservatives today in the least.

Surveying the history of conservatism in American politics here, it has been important to remind ourselves along the way that gratitude is the distinguishing characteristic of a conservative. The reminder has been important because of how scarce gratitude is among conservatives in the United States today. It hardly is the case that conservatism has fared better in other parts of the world during the last several decades, the defenselessness of anti-ideology before ideological expectations and the tendency of conservatism to become a vessel for grievances not being a uniquely American phenomenon. Yet, it is the case that there has been a particular virulence in American politics for reasons that are unique to our politics here. Whether due to American economic and military hegemony now older than the living memory of almost every American, or due to a sense of American exceptionalism that reaches back to our Puritan heritage (“a shining city on a hill”), or due to the persistence of the frontier experience in American memory that nurtures a sense of rugged individualism and the paranoid expectation that someone, somewhere is plotting against my freedoms, this particular style has exerted a gravitational pull on American conservatives from gratitude toward grievance. It cannot be wrong to wonder at the end of this history whether conservatism in American politics even is possible.

What would an American conservative look like in the early twenty-first century? Of course, the description would begin with gratitude. A conservative would receive the whole tradition of American political development gratefully, would seek to preserve those elements that work well and to improve those elements of the tradition that do not work well. The tradition incorporates the whole history of Western political ideas all the way back to ancient Greece, of course. But the tradition lays particular emphasis on what is American in the Western tradition. It includes the history of our initial constitutional founding, but it does not stop there. The American tradition includes the egalitarianism of Andrew Jackson’s era that removed property qualification as barriers to the right to vote, and it includes the constitutional changes that followed the Civil War that took some questions out of the hands of state governments and, once again, increased the American commitment to equality. The American tradition includes the Progressive reforms of 1890–1920 that restructured the American economy and responded to the changes of industrialization and it includes America’s growing commitment to a global vision for human rights that began with Woodrow Wilson and characterized its Cold War and post-Cold War foreign policy. A conservative, at this point in our history, would recognize that the civil rights movement and the women’s movement have made vital contributions to American life, and so has the coming of legal protections and social acceptance for LGBT people because our tradition most fundamentally is about recognizing the equality and value of each person. For those same reasons, a conservative would support Obamacare’s commitment to increasing access to healthcare (recalling its market-based approach was a conservative proposal in the 1990’s) and a conservative would welcome immigrants to the United States, as they did for a very long time.

If it even is necessary to point it out, a conservative today is fairly identical with those who oppose Donald Trump and conservatism is unrecognizable in the positions and claims of the Republican Party. For all intents and purposes, the Democratic Party has become the conservative party in American politics. That last statement demands two important qualifications: no party’s program really can be a home for anti-ideology since ideology and anti-ideology are mutually exclusive, and there is plenty in the Democratic platform that never could be called properly conservative. Still, if the question is about which party in American politics demonstrates a greater gratitude and receptiveness toward the past, in 2019 there is no question about it.

In Gratitude, Buckley wrote that, “The conviction of some conservatives that the state can’t have a genuine, non-predatory interest in the cultivation of virtue strikes me as an anarchical accretion in modern conservative thought.” This is a comically typical Buckley sentence, a quite simple thought that needs some translation into spoken English. Here, Buckley merely acknowledges that modern conservatives have taken on ideas that are not conservative, and his eye especially is on the modern notion that individuals are self-creating, self-sustaining, and do not owe a debt to one another. The resistance Buckley expected among conservatives to the idea of national service charts a journey from gratitude to grievance, and at this point in an examination of American conservatism that should surprise us very little. The deformation of its conservatism has been the signal feature of American conservatism.

What does that augur for the future of American conservatism? There always will be those who wax nostalgic about the past, who idealize a history they hope to re-create in the present. This is not conservative. The integralist instinct to dissolve differences between church and state is as old as Constantine, but the conservative knows that a church with political power quickly is overcome by politics and ceases to function as a church. The protection of property and wealth is as old as history, but being old is not so sufficient for conservatism as practical efficacy (and, his own quarrels with Lord Shelburne persuaded Burke that wealth is not the same as aristocracy). Individualism certainly has a future in American politics. That is not conservative, but it is American.

In the end, perhaps the most conservative hope we can have for conservatism in America is that American conservatives will recognize that conservatism is not their creed and they will abandon the word to embrace their own tradition. There is a properly American political argument, one as old as the republic and which broke open between rural and urban spaces over state and federal power in the days of Jefferson and Hamilton as much as it survives today in the wake of an election where Donald Trump defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton. Of course there is a place for conservatism and a conservative perspective in American politics: receptive gratitude for the inheritance we have received from the past never is out of order. Still, the reassertion of that older American argument’s primacy, untinged by a European argument about feudalism, would be a development for which any conservative in the United States should be grateful.