Why Are Conservatism and Modern Liberalism at War? 

Modern Western democracies exist in a state of moral civil war between modern liberalism and conservatism. Neither side can win, because each has become a distorted reflection of the other. Liberalism and conservatism, once complementary poles in a shared moral universe, now mirror and magnify each other’s vices. Liberals accuse conservatives of bigotry and repression; conservatives accuse liberals of relativism and tyranny. Each is right about the other’s pathology and blind to how its own moral logic breeds the same vice in reverse.  

The crisis is not merely political, but metaphysical. Both have detached partial goods—freedom and order—from participation in the transcendent good that grounds them. Separated from that whole, each becomes a privation of what it sought originally to serve: liberalism’s will to freedom turns coercive, while conservatism’s will to order becomes rebellious. 

Liberalism’s Hidden Paternalism 

As Locke argued at the beginning of his First Treatise of Government, liberalism began as a revolt against paternalism—the church dictating belief, the patriarch directing conscience, the state enforcing virtue. The new liberal vision of government promised freedom through neutrality: the state would protect choice, not prescribe ends. Yet, as Tocqueville foresaw in the second volume of Democracy in America (Part IV, chapter 6), liberal people wish to be free and yet seek to be led. What began as liberation becomes tutelage.  

Today’s liberal order commands obedience in the name of safety and compassion: “You must affirm,” it could be said, “or someone may be harmed.” Bureaucracies of inclusion, such as the U.S. Department of Education, form a moral apparatus policing the conscience through ersatz virtues like conformity mistaken for justice, sentimental compassion without prudence, tolerance without ordering to truth, and authenticity as self-expression divorced from metaphysical reality. Autonomy becomes a managed performance; the old confessor’s booth reappears as the diversity seminar. 

Behind this moral paternalism lies a metaphysical substitution: without a natural telos, the state assumes the work of providence. Administration replaces purpose. We explain pain and injustice by saying, “the system will fix it,” rather than asking deeper moral or spiritual questions—trusting that history will bend toward justice through managerial reason. But compassion, detached from transcendence, becomes coercive sentimentality, commanding obedience to autonomy as a supreme good in and of itself. 

Conservatism’s Rebellion Against Its Own Principles 

Conservatism, meanwhile, betrays itself by rebelling against the very order it claims to defend. The classical conservative hero was the disciplined statesman (Cicero, Burke, Montesquieu); the modern one is the defiant populist (Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán), the rule-breaker who “tells it like it is.” Authenticity replaces prudence; passion supplants reason. Conservatism’s patient fortitude turns into outrage; its moral realism into selective relativism.  

When law restrains enemies, it is justice; when it restrains allies, it is “lawfare.” And the movement now sustains itself through a martyr complex—an identity of grievance mirroring the left’s own politics of victimhood. Thus the party of order defines itself by rebellion and the party of authority by resentment.

Girard’s Diagnosis: Mimetic Rivalry and the Scapegoat 

René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry clarifies this dynamic. In this theory, rivals imitate each other’s desires and methods until they become indistinguishable, each defining himself by the other’s negation. Liberalism enforces conformity in the name of diversity; conservatism celebrates transgression in the name of order (see, for instance, Girard’s work Battling to the End). Each side’s reaction justifies the other’s fear, producing a spiral of reciprocal imitation.  

The scapegoat mechanism follows: every community purges heretics to preserve identity—the liberal cancels the “bigot,” the conservative the “RINO” (Republican in Name Only). Such expulsions yield only temporary unity, for the real disorder is not carried away by the scapegoat. It remains within the community.  

For example, think of Democratic party leaders driving Rep. Dan Lipinski or Gov. Robert Casey to the political margins because their pro-life positions conflicted with the party’s definition of abortion as a woman’s right. Or picture President Trump bullying Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress or campaigning against Thomas Massie for launching unwanted discharge petitions, which does nothing to eliminate the issues Greene and Massie raised. In these cases, as in many others, scapegoating simply intimidates others out of speaking openly about or resolving the issues that continue to simmer under the surface. 

The Metaphysics of Privation 

Beneath these surface conflicts lies the metaphysics of privation. Evil, Aquinas teaches in the Summa, does not have real being, but is the negative being of the absence or distortion of good. Similarly, the vices of our politics are corruptions of genuine virtues: sentimentality is compassion unmoored from prudence, for instance. Underlying both of these political vices is a distorted conception of freedom severed from truth; order becomes domination when detached from love. 

True freedom, for Aquinas, is not the capacity to choose indifferently, but the perfection of movement toward the good. A will unguided by truth is blind power. True order, conversely, is participation in divine wisdom, not the possession of the good by one faction. When conservatism absolutizes order as its property, it repeats the liberal error in reverse: it replaces reason with collective will. Both thus collapse politics into force rather than prudence. 

Liberal Objections and Their Blind Spots 

Liberals may object that such analysis imposes a single metaphysics on a pluralistic society. Yet pluralism itself is a metaphysical claim: the assertion that no shared good can exist presupposes voluntarism—the supremacy of will over reason. Liberal regimes do not abstain from metaphysics; they enforce one of their own, defining dignity as autonomous self-creation. Real pluralism requires a shared participation in truth, not its denial. To silence metaphysics is not neutrality, but covert dogma. 

The second liberal objection—that rejecting neutrality invites theocracy—confuses restraint with denial. The cure for bad metaphysics is not no metaphysics, but good metaphysics: the acknowledgment of a transcendent truth that limits all power. In Aquinas’s account, the natural law binds rulers as well as subjects; it grounds rights in human nature, not in the state.  

Still another liberal critique holds that the premodern harmony to which Thomists appeal never existed. Granted, medieval Christendom experienced plenty of violence and injustice. The claim is not for historical nostalgia, but a return to philosophical realism: that classical metaphysics grasped enduring truths about being and goodness that modernity ignores at its peril. Material progress does not guarantee moral or metaphysical advancement; a society can be materially prosperous and yet morally impoverished. 

The pragmatic objection—“your cure is politically impossible”—confuses feasibility with truth. Politics cannot heal what philosophy denies. Renewal begins not by majority vote but by witness: small communities recovering the grammar of participation in the good. To reject that task as impractical is to accept permanent and enduring pathology. 

Conservative Objections  

Conservative objections mirror the liberal ones. The first claims asymmetry: liberalism holds power, while conservatism merely defends itself. Yet moral analysis does not follow power differences. Vice remains vice whether practiced by rulers or resisters. A tradition that defines itself by opposition abandons the form of its own tradition; to replace reason with will, even in defense, is to join the voluntarism it opposes. When conservatives speak of “defeating” rather than converting, they accept politics as war, not as a rational movement toward the common good. The cry that “error has no rights” collapses a subtle truth—falsehood has no claim to truth—into a denial of persons’ dignity.  

Aquinas teaches that even an erroneous conscience binds; therefore, the healing of an erroneous conscience through persuasion, not coercion, is the way of truth. The will to victory may win institutions yet lose the soul, perpetuating the very civil war it seeks to end. 

A second conservative critique—accusing this analysis of “liberal rationalism”—mistakes reason for ideology. Rational argument is not a liberal invention but the universal vocation of the human intellect: to participate in the eternal law precisely by knowing and judging what is true and good. To reason is not to adopt a partisan method but to exercise the intellect’s natural capacity to seek order. To dismiss reason as ideological is therefore to abandon participation in the natural law itself and to concede the field to relativism—the very metaphysical disorder conservatism once sought to resist. 

The so-called realist retort—politics is war, not dialogue—confuses the material with the formal aspect of the political. Power and conflict belong to politics materially, but its formal end is the common good, ordered by reason. Reduce politics to will, and it ceases to be political at all.  

Finally, the pragmatic conservative demands policy. Yet policy without metaphysics is blind. No reform will endure unless it proceeds from a right understanding of the person and the common good. Education ordered toward virtue, law ordered toward reason, economy ordered toward human flourishing—these follow only from renewed first principles. Culture and politics flow from metaphysics; without conversion of mind, every policy remains provisional. 

Recovering the Grammar of Participation 

The way forward, then, is neither compromise nor conquest but metaphysical correction: a recovery of being as participation—where existence, intelligibility, and goodness are received from a source beyond the will, not produced by sheer power or majoritarian decision-making.  

Freedom must be seen again as participation in truth, not indeterminate choice; order as participation in love, not control. The common good is not collective autonomy or uniformity, but a shared appreciation of the greatest goods—human flourishing, moral order, truth in charity, and eternal life. Such an order harmonizes difference without dissolving it, because charity, as the form of the virtues, does not erase the distinct operations and objects of the other virtues but perfects them by ordering them all to a single ultimate end—love of God—thereby unifying moral life through final causality rather than through uniformity. 

To restore sanity to politics we must first recover contemplation—the capacity to see being as an intelligible gift rather than material for our own selfish manipulation. Such contemplation is not passive observation but a moral and intellectual reorientation of the person toward reality as it is, and it is therefore already the beginning of conversion. Only from this contemplative conversion can liberalism’s compassion be purified into mercy and conservatism’s fidelity be ordered toward justice.  

Girard’s insight finds its fulfillment here: rivalry ends not through victory but through conversion—a turning of desire away from mimetic competition and toward the good as good. The Gospel unmasks the scapegoat mechanism by revealing the innocence of the victim; Thomism extends that same logic to ontology itself, showing that being is nonrivalrous because the good is self-diffusive. To participate in the good is therefore not to seize or dominate, but to receive and to share.  

Peace as the Tranquility of Order 

Peace, Aquinas writes, is “the tranquility of order.” It is not the cessation of struggle but the harmony of rightly ordered loves. Our civilization will not regain peace until it recovers that analogical vision: freedom illumined by truth, order animated by charity, politics re-anchored in metaphysics. The liberal and conservative traditions can again serve this higher peace if they renounce the logic of power for the logic of participation. Otherwise, they will remain prisoners of the mirror, condemning in each other what they refuse to heal in themselves. 

To end the mirror wars we must turn toward the light they reflect—the transcendent good in which freedom and order, truth and love find their unity. Only there can the mimetic rivalry of modern politics give way to reciprocity, and the grammar of being restore what ideology has undone. 

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