The notion that what is old is no longer relevant is one of the many lies the left tells conservatives and that too many conservatives swallow.
When a newly elected Justin Trudeau had what some in media called his mic drop moment in 2015, telling reporters “Because it’s 2015” as justification for his decision to have a gender-balanced cabinet, that was Liberal cool at its most quintessentially vapid. “Because it’s 2015” was no real answer, and we knew that no real answer would be forthcoming. It was an appeal to progress and equality without argument. Equality of outcome trumped every other value, while merit, proportion, and experience were steamrolled over with a hollow platitude.
Pretending that the old must be surrendered to make way for the new is the classic leftist move. During the 1960s in China, the Communist Party explicitly called for the destruction of the Four Olds: the old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas that delayed the coming of a better, new society. How sadly familiar that idea is today in the West. Attacking the old is useful to the left because it cuts people off from their histories, their ancestors, and their cultural ways, leaving them uncertain, ignorant, weak, and demoralized.
One of the bedrocks of conservatism is that the most profound questions of human life have already been dealt with by serious minds before us: The old is our most precious resource, not baggage to be discarded or retrograde prejudice to be apologized for. It was Edmund Burke who said that the conservative understands society as a relationship, not only between the living but between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. Expressing contempt for the people and ways that went before us—specifically the European, Christian peoples who built our country—is one of the most egregiously wrong of liberal-left postures today.
If there is one thing that isn’t cool, it’s a conservatism that adopts the values of the left, becoming progressive conservative or some other pale imitation. Conservatism is precisely about conserving what is good in nature, in human nature, in the family, in society, in law, and in customs.
The conservative is different from the liberal and different from the libertarian in not accepting that either equality or unfettered freedom are the greatest goods in society. The conservative accepts that inequality is natural and inevitable in a society with basic freedoms under law. Conservatism accepts that some social conduct is more worth valuing than others; that reproductive heterosexual marriage, for example, should be socially and morally privileged over all other human relationships.
Conservatism can never inhere in divisive identity politics. As soon as you have a debate between a conservative and a liberal over who is more feminist, or who more is more committed to a newly burnished group right, the conservative has lost because it is no longer conservatism that is being promoted.
Much of conservatism is driven by men, and the essence of conservatism appeals predominantly to men, though women, of course, play a central role, not least because women are attracted to conservative men and because conservatism benefits women by supporting family life, civil order, decency, sexual restraint, and male engagement. Polls today show that young women are increasingly liberal, young men increasingly not.
Conservatives neglect young men at their peril. Men are the ones who build civilization; men are driven to produce, to provide and protect, to amass resources, to create competence hierarchies—in contrast to women who seek the protection of powerful men, consensus with their fellow women, and security by harnessing the resources of the state.
Conservatism is the only remaining philosophy that puts the good of families at the centre of its value system. Left liberalism increasingly speaks of women—women’s desires and women’s needs—as if women are the primary autonomous unit of society, while men exist primarily to produce what women need for their independence and freedom. The good of children is barely considered at all or is paid lip service to only, as when conservatives sometimes join with liberals in affirming that the primary role of fathers is to pay child support so their children can be raised almost solely by the mothers who divorced the fathers.
Women cannot build and lead a successful conservatism; only men can do this, with women by their side. Conservatives should do far more for young men and should resist the lethal temptation to side with left-liberals in anti-male provisions that accept that men should be disadvantaged in order for women to lead.
Most especially in the social realm, conservatives should work to dismantle the conditions that disadvantage men in the workplace and the home: we’ve had 40 years of affirmative action hiring that discriminates against men, particularly white men, in the workplace; and we’ve 30 years of sexual harassment legislation in workplaces and schools that assumes men to be predators and women victims and is willing to abandon such legal bedrocks as equality before the law and the presumption of innocence to (allegedly) protect women. It is shocking that conservatives have sometimes cheered these on.
Most importantly, conservatives must dismantle the conditions that make marriage a financial and emotional hazard for men in which fathers’ most basic civil rights and parental duties have been outrageously trampled. If conservatives did nothing other than lobby to get lawyers, courts, psychiatrists, and social workers out of most families’ lives, they would be doing something of true value.
As conservatives, we must be willing to say what we are willing to conserve. If we are merely trying to put the brakes on some aspect or other of woke policies, whether it be the trans agenda or climate hysteria, we are not doing very much. Conservatism summons many virtues such as endurance, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, hope, and moral courage that are hardly mentioned today in other political and social traditions. It should be celebrated for these and for the eternal verities it was originally built around. If one is not interested in conserving what has come before, one should not claim to speak for conservatism.
