Walking Alongside History 

Conservatives often misunderstand themselves. William F. Buckley’s Publisher’s Statement, which describes National Review’s mission, is often remembered as a description of the conservative movement as a whole, a movement that all too often conceptualizes itself as “…standing athwart history, yelling Stop…” This framing is counterproductive and contradictory. Generally speaking, conservatives are quite fond of the movement of history, up to a point. American conservatism has internalized a great deal of Enlightenment rationalism and free-market thinking, both of which were corrosive to the traditional social structures that came before. Conservatism must instead understand itself as that which holds the tension between historical development and tradition, a tension that both the left- and right-wing reactionaries would each collapse in their favored direction. Conservatism is the force that safeguards inherited tradition while providing institutional form to organic historical development.  

Conservatism’s flawed self-conception is why both reactionary movements and the left are able to so effectively challenge mainstream conservatism. If we really are trying to freeze history, we must admit that 1776 is a rather arbitrary point at which to do so. Why embrace what Edmund Burke, founder of modern conservatism, termed the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” in which chivalry died and the “glory of Europe is extinguished forever”? If we can undo history, why marry ourselves to the alienation and social dissolution already beginning at that time? The “standing athwart history” conception makes holding to Enlightenment liberalism, religious pluralism, and the free market into arbitrary preferences, mere inheritances from our founding. 

Between Scylla and Charybdis 

Both the left and the reactionary right stand in contrast to mainstream conservatism, which, as its name suggests, is fundamentally skeptical of rapid social upheaval while still seeing something of value in the organic, accumulated development of history. Conservatism is, in its bones, anti-utopian, whether the utopia is seen in front of us or behind us. 

Properly understood, American conservatism is a sort of via media between reaction, which seeks to overthrow modernity, and the left, which seeks to literalize it against all particularities. Literalization is the attempt to fully embody, in every sphere of social life, abstract principles like equality, rights, and autonomy that underlie modernity. 

Although drawing bright categorical lines is impossible, we can regard as reactionaries those who seek to reassert past configurations of society by unwinding modernity. Integralists, seeking to roll back the Enlightenment’s separation of church of state, are the prime example. Reaction is no longer a niche internet phenomenon. Prominent voices call for the curtailment of Enlightenment freedoms. Identitarian movements that aim to essentialize race or ethnicity in the body politic show that reaction does not even need the veneer of religion.  

The American founding achieved the freest, most energetic society that has existed, yet the reactionary freely discards modern liberty and chooses other aims for society: order, sacredness, homogeneity, etc. The left, in contrast, asserts aggressively the abstractions modernity generates against inherited social forms. We need not conflate every modern liberal with a Jacobin. Still, while all political movements moralize their goals, liberalism’s narrative of historical progress tends toward an absolutization and intensification of its claims. “Progressive” implies a definite direction and few reasons not to get there as fast as we can. Contemporary identity politics displays this moral universalization and intensification quite well. David Brooks noted this at least eight years ago, arguing in a column that “wokeness” lacks any moderating instinct, that “[i]t’s always good to see injustice in maximalist terms.” He states that pointing out any nuance or mitigation in the supposed injustice “is to be naïve, childish, a co-opted part of the status quo.” 

We need not be determinists or even believers in “progress” to accept that there is genuine “development” across history. Speaking broadly, we can see a dramatic sharpening of subjectivity, with truth and meaning increasingly experienced as something that originates within the individual rather than the outside. From this intensification of subjectivity flows our deepest, largely unconscious assumptions that inform our notions of personhood, God, the just society, and our relations with others.  

Washington, Not Robespierre 

With this view of history, we can contrast the American Revolution with the French Revolution to understand how conservatism relates to this development. American conservatism sees itself in fundamental continuity with the American Revolution, despite this quite literally being a revolution against established authority. This is more than a matter of simply agreeing with the political outcome of the American Revolution. Rather, it is an alignment with the manner in which our nation was founded.  

The conservative is neither reactionary nor Robespierre, but Washington and Hamilton. He affirms modernity’s tension without succumbing to its pressures. The goal is not, or should not be, to freeze the world in 1788; though the Constitution is a uniquely influential document in human history, and one could scarcely ask for wiser men to outline a government. Rather, the beauty of the American Revolution is that it stands in the line of English political change and conservative revolution. In the same way that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ushered in constitutional monarchy with little disruption to society as it existed, the American Revolution reconciled existing institutions with the changing notions of man then being enunciated in the Enlightenment. In effect, it found productive, institutional expression for the truth of the age while letting it remain abstract at the social level.  

This allowed the American Revolution to “conserve” all the accumulated particularities that it could. This channeling of abstraction, which protects culture and society, is how conservatism must understand its role as guardian of tradition. Religion, existing social structure, the economic order: all were “conserved” while the underlying logic of the system was revolutionized.  

And yet, a failure to properly distinguish where this embodied logic demands the overcoming of particularities is, to take the obvious example, how slavery survived the American Revolution. Slavery is simply irreconcilable with the notion of personhood operative in our nation’s founding at any level of abstraction. Putting aside questions of what was politically feasible at the time, abolition was called for. We avoid conserving that which legitimately ought to be abolished by understanding the goal as mediation, not conservation for the sake of conservation.  

The French Revolution shows what happens when embodiment is taken too far. Nearly coterminous with the American Revolution and swimming in the same Enlightenment waters, the French Revolution carried out a systematic destruction of society as it existed. Both revolutions were motivated by fundamentally the same Enlightenment liberalism and rationalism, but the French insisted on the embodiment of these truths in all aspects of society, particularly in the early phase of the Revolution. This was seen in everything from the annihilation of the old order and murder of the king to the radical egalitarianism of the sans-culottes, to the “de-Christianization” of the country, and the expectation that all participate in sharing the Revolution with the world through the Levée en masse. We see metaphysical ideas acted out at every turn. Beyond the human cost, this is a fundamental violence enacted against all that had come before, an assault on the traditions that grounded the life of the community.  

“Equality” was the goal of both revolutions, but it was equality as a political value versus equality as an enforced social reality in all facets of life. In this way, the American Revolution can, in the words of Russell Kirk, truly be called a “conservative reaction, in the English political tradition” without contradiction in terms. It did not seek to unwind the fundamental movement of history as a reactionary does, but institutionalized and reconciled this movement with the inherited truths and traditions of all that came before. Both countries became modern democratic states, yet French society endured tremendously more institutional damage and human suffering to get there. 

The Living Via Media 

Consider economic policy to see this distinction unfold today. The left broadly aims to instantiate equality through policy (welfare and progressive taxation) into a concrete economic reality rather than leaving it as an abstract political or moral value. The conservative is skeptical of efforts to engineer equality into such a literal good (consider the common conservative belief that welfare policy displaced religious charity work and the nuclear family). Rather, the conservative wants modernity’s notions to find embodiment on a level above immediate, on-the-ground reality. This is often found at the institutional level, where, for instance, equality finds embodiment in equal political rights, legal standing, and voting. This gives historical development genuine reality while avoiding the social upheaval that literalization brings.   

This framework also helps us understand recent actions that cut against the right’s usual market orthodoxy. Efforts to ban institutional investors from buying houses and expand tax credits for childcare show that the abstractions of the free market are not absolute for the conservative and will not be allowed to actualize themselves at the expense of institutions like the family and local community. When conservatism conceptualizes itself as something more than the ultimately ineffectual brakes on the left, it gains a mechanism by which to discern what it must conserve.   

Conservatism must hold to its narrow way, its via media, if it is to be an effective force for channeling and institutionalizing this historical development. History informs us that there are no easy solutions. The American Revolution was a decades-long experiment in constructing a government, an experiment immediately thrown into the next crisis by the time it found resolution of its first questions. The conservative makes room for the organic development of these questions in society as a whole (which he knows is far more than the government) while preventing a totalizing literalization that swallows everything that came before. 

It is telling that Buckley’s original quote about National Review’s mission is so widely misremembered as having been spoken about conservatives themselves, rather than the magazine. From George W. Bush speaking in tribute to Buckley in 2005, to close associates of Buckley himself such as Michael Lind, the quotation is reliably jumbled and personalized, arguably oversimplifying Buckley’s own views. Contra this misremembering, a conservative is one who walks alongside history, not yelling “Stop!” but rather “Don’t step there!” He knows he is precisely where he should be when the reactionary accuses him of simply guarding the retreating column’s rear during liberalism’s long march, and the liberal accuses him of arresting progress. In this way he consciously mediates historical development and tradition. Tradition itself is, after all, institutionalized development. With one hand he shelters what came before and provides meaning and stability to man; with the other he embraces history, humble enough not to push it toward utopia but strong enough to guide its path forward. 

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