American conservatives have a funny relationship with their American patriotism, and really with the whole of American nationality itself. The central feast on the American calendar is July 4th, an observance that celebrates the separation of the United States from the British crown, an act not altogether conservative if your conservatism consists primarily in, well, conserving things. One can, and people do, argue that the American revolution conserved the self-governance of the states by their existing social elites, but this would seem to move the goal posts rather too much. While one can portray the American Revolution as more conservative than its counterparts in France and later Russia, this would be grading on a curve, for as much as we conserved, as much or more we threw off in many ways, both subtle and overt. The entail, titles of nobility, and religious establishment all died before the Civil War. America before the Revolution looked quite different from America after it. The American Revolution was just that: a revolution, and for American conservatives to wrestle with the event and its consequences is a tricky puzzle.
The fundamentally revolutionary nature of the American experience makes pinpointing what we can all American conservatism can be quite difficult to define. What the conservative here seeks to conserve is itself a non-conservative enterprise: the tearing down of the old and the raising up of the new. To ask, with whatever degree of snark one desires, “what has conservatism conserved?” in the American case asks the wrong question. Far better would it be to ask “what was it that conservatives were supposed to conserve?” By what standard ought we judge it?
One thing we lack, in the first instance, is a coherent social class with distinct social privileges, customs, and a tradition of governing, an aristocracy worthy of the name. This nation has had its sundry local cliques and mini-castes of the privileged, whether in money or in name, but they have usually been highly localized, or extremely unstable. The Boston Brahmins and the Knicerbocker set in New York, if they ever did, do not today have a particularly tight grip on culture or on politics. They have common social institutions, but scarcely anybody mentions their names publicly. Even the South, with its own much vaunted aristocracy, never produced a solid aristocracy with true staying power outside of a few places. Today, their names live on, but like their non-southern counterparts, outside of a few exclusive social circles who care about such things, nobody pays much attention to what they do. In Virginia, being a Randolph, or a Tazewell, an Armistead, or a Baldwin once meant something to many people, but today it means little unless you spend most of your time in Richmond and Charlottesville, and even then only around a certain sort of person.
We find in this country people with wealth and privilege to spare, but nearly always among those who have earned them in bourgeois endeavors, the kinds of endeavors not ordinarily the province of those who obsess about a family name. Wealth erosion among our richest and most privileged is quite rapid, leaving little space for a genuinely stable, coherent upper class capable of stabilizing much of anything if they can’t stabilize even themselves. With no true aristocracy or genuine upper crust with privileges to conserve, the American Tory looks elsewhere to conserve his understanding of the world.
His inclination then often turns to religion, but even here our American Tory will have difficulty walking away with little more than disappointment to show for it. The Virginia church ceased to be that state’s established religion by the end of the 18th century, and the old standing order of New England lost its grip on the religious and intellectual life of the northeast in the century following. Even if one looks to the churches generally as sources of stability and places where conservatives might hold on to influence, our latter day Tory comes away almost empty-handed. The major mainline Protestant denominations place themselves well in line, for better or for worse, with the mainstream of American culture. It was at one point possible to consider oneself a conservative within these bodies, but as the church in America continues to divide on American culture war issues, that becomes harder and harder. Religious conservatives do have their own denominations, but they tend to be small, lack cultural influence, or both. It is perhaps for this reason that so many American conservatives have turned to Roman Catholicism, a tradition that spent so long looking at American life from the outside in that it had to build its own parallel institutions. In any case, with respect to the mainstream of American life, religious institutions have either made their peace with boilerplate American liberalism, or have been safely put at the margins where they lack influence.
One can exhaust many an hour looking for institutions of clout and influence that conservatives enjoy preeminence in and find very few. In higher education, conservatives are quite rare in positions where they can actually do things. The existence of institutions like Hillsdale, Grove City, and Claremont speaks to the extent to which the mainstream institutions have concluded they can safely ignore the political and cultural right. A conservative alternative to Harvard or Yale would be nice, but the institutional clout one builds through centuries of sustained existence does not appear overnight. Far better to control an existing institution than to create a new one. Finance and the corporate world, though they have aligned themselves politically with the right on certain issues, cannot be said to be conservative in any meaningful way beyond the ways conservatives usually align with corporate interests on property rights. The entire liturgical season of Pride Month and its associated merchandising are a case in point. Popular culture, too, tends to come from predominantly left-leaning institutions, and even the military, if you know anything about the makeup of its officer corps these days, cannot be counted among safely right-wing institutions.
In context after context, conservatives, understood in the classical sense of those who value stability and tradition, find themselves as strangers in a strange land. I suspect this partly explains the alienation many people on the American right have been feeling and expressing lately. The fabric of American life simply lacks the kinds of institutions capable of sustaining a coherent conservatism within the culture that will defend the same values and interests over long periods of time. It may go some way in explaining why conservatives wed themselves to abstract constitutional principles far more than do their counterparts on the left: at some point it really is all that is left. When you have no fixity in a monarch, an aristocracy, or any institution at all really, you turn to one of the few remaining places you can find it. If fixity and steadfastness cannot be found in the concrete, we will find them in the abstract. Lacking castles on the land, we defend the ones in the sky instead. By extension, this would help explain conservatives obsession with the courts: because the courts are so powerful, and because they have power over the most fixed part of our public life, controlling who gets on the bench takes on a vital importance. That’s the funny thing about our courts. They often work as engines of progress, but in their drive to sustain their own institutional norms, they are quite conservative.
One of the problems with being a conservative is that looking backwards comes far more naturally than looking forward. Hence, the question of how to move forward seems almost unnatural. If conservatism in this country is bad at conserving things, it is because the tide of our national life trends against it. We are a nation conceived on the assumption that the things most commonly conserved outside the US are not worth keeping. In a sense, our entire political culture runs on a small-p progressive operating system. The challenge for the American conservative is to find something concrete that he both wants to and can feasibly conserve. Preserving things is hard when it’s not even entirely clear what you were supposed to be holding onto in the first place, and the frequent turn to knee-jerk right wing cultural revanchism reflects this problem. All of this involves very deep, complex questions about what is worth preserving, which itself explains the reactionary turn the on part of the right: if the whole experiment is flawed, go back to what came before (or at least what you think came before). But there is no going back. Even when you try, what you come up with is a thing unto itself, having characteristics of the old that have had to accommodate themselves to the realities of the new. If you have no castles worth defending, sometimes you have to build one. And figuring out what that will be will take a lot of work, a lot of coalition building, and as always, quite a lot of prayer.