Conservatism without a Movement? 

The following is based on a presentation given at the Russell Kirk Center’s “Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in June 2025.  

In his 1993 essay “Popular Conservatism,” Russell Kirk placed hope in the natural conservative instinct that he identified in most Americans—an unlearned and unrefined sort of conservative tendency, able to identify well enough some of the social ills around them, skeptical of fanciful narratives spun by cable-TV pundits, also skeptical of the promises and projects conceived by politicians, and desirous of the freedom to educate their children, worship God, and contribute to their community. Indeed, he saw, at the outset of the Clinton presidency, both political parties at least paying some lip service to this popular conservatism of the average American. 

The big question, he noted, was how this basic instinct would be educated and directed in the years to come.  

Conservatism is not going to become unpopular in America; so the question before us is not whether it will be supplanted by a new liberalism, but rather if a high degree of intelligence and imagination may be infused, these next few years, into the popular conservative yearning. Some of us, having labored in that vineyard for four decades, pray that the harvest may be sweeter than the grapes of wrath. 

Those sentences, viewed now from thirty years on, have a rather melancholy ring to them. For in that time, the conservative instinct in America has been educated more by the social media influencer than the serious thinker. Which is to say that it has not been educated all; conservatives’ instincts have not been elevated and refined, but rather, ideologized and degraded. 

There has always been a distinction between what the description of this conference calls the “intellectual conservative tradition” and partisan, “movement” conservatism. On one hand, there is a conservative tradition of thought about how the human being relates to his social and political surroundings. On the other, there is an organized political movement promoting an agenda understood to be, in some way, shape, or form, an outgrowth of that understanding. Both often go by the name “conservatism.” 

The relationship between these is naturally strained, given that the conservative intellectual tradition has generally held that conservatism does not directly correspond to any particular political program. As Kirk famously put it in the introduction to his “Ten Conservative Principles,” “there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.” 

A conservative political “movement,” then, must always walk a very fine line. A group of partisans may share a conservative temperament and seek to influence policy and government outcomes generally guided by their conservative prudence. But it would have to guard carefully against ideologizing itself—turning its policy aims into ends in themselves and thus losing the entire thread of intellectual conservatism. 

Both Kirk and Roger Scruton recognized the tension between the deeper intellectual conservatism and the partisan advocacy that has used the name “conservatism.” Neither shied away from a degree of advocacy, but both recognized that the key to the conservative understanding of the world is that certain social and cultural realties are outside of the control of politics and are far more essential to a healthy social order. And thus, neither hesitated to criticize his side of the political aisle when it threatened those deeper values.  

On this matter Kirk favorably cited T. S. Eliot, who argued that there must be a distinction between those who detach themselves in pursuit of truth and those devoted to political advocacy, even as there ought to be linkages and continuity that allow conservative ideas to have an effect in the world. He warns equally against the political theorist becoming a “doctrinaire [who] dominates the man of action” and against “a tradition in which political philosophy is formulated or re-codified to suit the requirements and justify the conduct of a ruling clique.” 

In America, at least since the Reagan presidency, the incessant struggle to control the levers of the central leviathan state, and particularly the executive branch, has dominated the imagination of “movement” conservatives, with the result being the latter of the two dangers Eliot warned of: the tail has wagged the dog. “Conservative” has come to mean whatever the Republican Party standard-bearers say it is, defined and redefined based on the political objectives of the moment and the men. 

This has taken many iterations, from the neoconservative crusaders for liberal democracy, to libertarian-inflected conservatives, to today’s populist “National Conservatives.” All have ideologized some aspect of the prudential, conservative approach to politics. And all, accordingly, have sold a bill of goods to America’s “popular conservatives” by promising that there is a clear political or policy solution to the evident dangers they perceive to their traditional way of life.  

And not least of all, this brand of conservatism has systematically captured the minds and attention of young people who have an instinctive conservative impulse, directing them away from cultural endeavors and toward the inanities of talk radio, then cable news, and now social media influencers and podcasters. It has turned them toward what Kirk called “the politics of passionate unreason.”  

Not only has movement conservatism distracted its adherents from cultural and social goods, it has distorted those very goods by viewing “culture” only through a political lens. Claes Ryn noted this tendency in 1996 and it continues to ring true today: “In recent years,” he observed,  

individuals known as conservatives have taken a greater interest in the state of “the culture.” In part this development may be a sign of an awakening to the importance of thought and imagination. At the same time, it confirms and gives new impetus to the ideologization of American conservatism in that interest in “the culture” is often heavily slanted by the old fascination with political power. Issues of cultural decline are discussed as if the key to reversing the trend lay in the hands of the politicians and their intellectual allies.  

Much of the present conservative interest in “the culture” is due to a growing awareness of the political impact and propaganda potential of the mind and the imagination. It has also become politically opportune to bemoan cultural sleaze. 

Many right-leaning activists today also loudly declare that “culture counts,” but engage with “the culture” explicitly on the same terms as Marxist radicals who saw culture as a contrived and controllable phenomenon that serves the interest of this or that political or economic group. Accordingly, they seem not to have imbibed much of the traditional conservative understanding of culture, recognizing the limits of political action and the limits of one’s own moralistic pretentions.  

There are probably many culprits for why movement conservatism became untethered from the politics of prudence. But one of them, I would argue, is that the imperative to win national power and especially the presidency systematically cuts against a politics that, in the words of Scruton, starts at home.  

Scruton argued that a healthy politics is one that grows out of the habits and ways of life of a settled political community. It is an outgrowth of a pre-political social commitment to one another and the patterns that allow a people to share life in a particular place. This commitment to a shared home generates skepticism of an “enterprising” politics that would aim to remake society wholesale or always distract it with collective projects. Rather, it allows for the possibility of what Michael Oakeshott called a “civil association”—aiming at the maintenance of social order, the administration of justice, and the flourishing of nongovernmental authorities that pursue human goods that politics cannot provide. 

As I have argued elsewhere, in America, this sort of politics rooted in a commitment to a shared home has never been possible directly at the national level. New Yorkers, Hoosiers, Michiganders, and Californians simply do not share a place in any meaningful sense. Commitment to America as a whole must come one of two ways—as a “community of communities” in which one’s sympathy for the nation comes channeled through a commitment to locality; or through ideological abstraction.  

Contemporary politics, in what is now a continent-sized presidential-plebiscitary democracy with mass, instantaneous communication, incentivizes the latter—ideological abstraction. It demands a politics conducted in language and symbols that cut across and marginalize locality and place. The same political memes (used in the traditional sense and in the internet sense of that word) must be able to appeal to people who precisely do not share a place or a way of life that emerges from it.  

The issues to be discussed, the passions to be aroused, and the money to be donated all must therefore point far away from home. The citizen of a small midwestern town must be made to care far more about what is happening in California, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, or Budapest than what is in his backyard. And when political contestation does occur at home, it will therefore be undertaken in the language and mindset of national, ideological partisans, rather than carried out by deliberation among neighbors.  

Insofar as movement conservatism has followed the incentives of this mass politics, incessantly focused on winning national elections, it has taken the “popular conservative” instinct that Kirk identified and redirected it in the direction of personal grievance and collective projects. In doing so, it has cultivated among a generation of conservatives the same kind of moral servility that Kenneth Minogue so astutely diagnosed in the modern liberal, who has channeled all of his moral instincts into political causes and away from responsibility and personal virtue. 

For conservatives in the manner of Kirk and Scruton (or, for that matter, in the manner of Oakeshott and Minogue), there is little hope that “our kind” will helm the ship of movement conservatism any time soon. Rather than struggle against that reality, it may be time to consider embracing the freedom that comes with it, declaring as much independence as possible from whatever happens to be going by the name “conservative” in Washington, DC. In universities, classical schools, institutions devoted to learning and research, or in philanthropic activity, it may be a time for retrenchment, articulating truths that are a challenge to and indictment of all influential currents of today’s mass politics, just as intellectual conservatism was when it developed in the 1950s.  

Such conservatives are not powerless, but their work at this moment will probably consist in sowing seeds the harvest of which no adult today may ever reap. Such an approach would manifest itself in several ways. 

First, conservatives could direct more attention to their homes—to “the place where we are.” Philanthropic dollars could be dedicated more to middle America, building strong towns and communities rather than being funneled inevitably to DC politicians or the mass projects emanating from coastal elite hubs.  

Second, and relatedly, they ought to emphasize the reality that the highest endeavors of human beings and the greatest ambitions of the human soul do not depend on big-picture political outcomes, fighting against that servile attitude that holds that the only good we can do in life is to give ourself over to a Cause. As Scruton observed: “The choice lies before us, as it has lain before every human being in history, to live well or badly, to be virtuous or vicious, to love or to hate. And this is an individual choice, which depends on cultural conditions only obliquely, and which no other person can make in our stead.” 

Third, organizations ostensibly devoted to educating for liberty, order, and responsibility must decide whether they seek to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world or gain temporary influence. Do conservative universities distinguish themselves by high standards and intellectual independence or by being partisan canvassers and DC influence-peddlers? Do we invite to our campuses great writers and thinkers and artists? Or popular “influencers” who check the “intellectual diversity” box by being provocative rather than profound? 

Fourth, when it does come to politics, we ought to take our cue from another great traditional conservative, Robert Nisbet, and prize as among the most important political goals the preservation or recovery of the functional autonomy of sources of social authority outside the state, recognizing that with autonomy from politics comes a duty to devote an institution to its distinctive tasks and activities. We must fight for the autonomy and the duties of our churches to minister to souls rather than preach quasi-political moralism. The autonomy and duties of private schools to put our children into conversation with the great tradition of humane letters. The autonomy and duty of universities to pursue higher learning not aimed at influence, but at truth—cultivating what Scruton once called “The Virtue of Irrelevance.” 

Involved in this last point, we ought to cultivate a relentlessly skeptical attitude toward central political plans, to steel the minds of young conservatives against the seductive notion that, as long as we are in charge, as long as the program tells us what we want to hear, all the teachings about constitutionalism, personal virtue, limits, freedom, and human fallibility don’t count any more.  

For some time, of course, movement conservatism preached about these things, but for decades now, it has failed crucial tests: to decline to expand the power of the state; to devolve serious authority to localities; and to promote the freedom of civil society, even if it meant giving up an opportunity to exert temporary influence, to rile up supporters, and win more votes. 

To the partisan activist, of course, this advice would be seen as suicidal—though I am not advocating that conservatives decline to vote for worthy candidates or stop opining on or studying contemporary politics, only that they renounce their unflinching loyalty to “the movement.” If some meaningful detachment does not occur between that partisan movement and the intellectual and cultural conservative tradition, however, the latter’s rich understanding of the human condition and its limits may, even among purportedly “conservative” institutions, be lost. With it would go hope for the elevation of the natural conservative impulse that Kirk so hoped for thirty years ago.  

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