Tradition Is Not Nostalgia, and Five Other Myths About Conservatives

Every few years a columnist discovers a conservative, holds him up to the light like a man examining a fossil, and announces that he has found a creature who wants to go back to 1955. Black-and-white television. A hat for every occasion. Nobody ever having heard of a dishwasher.

It is a wonderful picture, and I would like to meet the conservative who matches it, because I have been looking for him for years and he is never in the room. The conservatives I know about, the ones who wrote the books and built the institutions, were busy building railroads of ideas, amending constitutions, ending the slave trade and fixing sewers. What they were not doing was sitting in a rocking chair wishing for the past.

So let us take the charges one at a time. The accusations come in six varieties, and each deserves its strongest statement before we answer it. The answer, in every case, is the same: tradition is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a feeling about a time you have lost. Tradition is a working inheritance, a set of tested habits and institutions that you hand on, improve and repair. One looks backward and sighs. The other looks forward and builds.

What conservatives are trying to conserve

Definitions first. A conservative, in the American sense, is someone who thinks that the institutions and habits that secure liberty, family, faith, property and self-government are worth defending, because they were hard to get and easy to lose. In America, what we conserve is not an old king or an old class. It is the Founding: the Declaration's claim that people hold rights from their Creator, and the Constitution's machinery for limiting power. That is a revolutionary inheritance. A conservative in this country defends a revolution that already succeeded.

Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman whom most conservatives treat as the founding father of the tradition, wrote in 1790 in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." Read that twice. The man who gave conservatism its modern shape said, in the same book that warned against revolution, that a country that cannot change cannot survive. See Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing and Seven Myths About Edmund Burke That His Fans and Critics Both Repeat.

Now the myths.

Myth one: conservatives worship the past

The strongest version. Conservatives talk constantly about old books, old founders, old customs. They quote men in powdered wigs. Obviously they believe things were better back then, and therefore the best policy is to reverse the clock.

The record. Respect for a source is not worship of an era. Notice who else quotes old books. The people making this charge cite Marx, who died in 1883, and John Stuart Mill, and Rousseau, and the authors of the Progressive Era. Nobody accuses a physicist of worshipping the past because he uses Newton.

The conservative argument is not that the old is good because it is old. It is that an institution that has survived many generations has been tested against many circumstances, and that the burden of proof belongs to the person proposing to tear it down. G. K. Chesterton made the point with a phrase that has become famous: tradition is the democracy of the dead, a vote extended to the people who are not around to cast it. See Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right. That is a claim about who gets a hearing, not a claim that the dead were always right.

Nor do serious conservatives pretend the past was kind to everyone. They are the first to say that slavery was a monstrous wrong, that women could not vote until 1920, that many Americans were shut out of the law's protection for most of our history. What they say is that the way to fix those failures was to hold the country to its own founding promise, which is exactly what Lincoln and Douglass argued. That is not worship. That is an audit.

Verdict: false. Conservatives respect the past as a witness, not as a master.

Myth two: conservatives oppose all change

The strongest version. The word itself says it. Conservative means conserve. They say no. They have said no to everything for two hundred years. William F. Buckley's famous line about standing athwart history and yelling stop proves the point.

The record. It is true that conservatives say no to a great deal, and often rightly. A sensible person says no to proposals that sound good and would break something he cannot see. But "no to most proposals" is not "no to all change," and a few cases make the point.

1. Burke himself was a reformer. He pressed for economical reform in 1780 to cut the corruption and waste of the Crown's patronage. He argued for conciliation with the American colonies in 1775, in a speech that remains a model of political prudence. He led the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, for abuse of power. The man was a reformer by habit.
2. Peel and Disraeli reformed Britain. Sir Robert Peel, a Conservative prime minister, repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, a tariff that kept bread dear, at the cost of splitting his own party. A Conservative government under Lord Derby, with Disraeli steering the bill through the Commons, passed the Reform Act of 1867, which roughly doubled the electorate. Neither wrecked the country. Both did something more conservative than wrecking: they changed it in time so that it would not be changed by force. See Peel and Disraeli Show How Conservatives Reform Without Wrecking.
3. American conservatives amended the Constitution. Article V exists because the Founders expected change. Conservatives have used it: the Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, limited a president to two elected terms, a restoration of Washington's example. The Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 and its aftermath are another matter, and conservatives have argued about them since. See The Sixteenth Amendment and the 1913 bargain that built the income tax.

Buckley's line is a joke about a mood, written for the first issue of National Review in 1955, and the same magazine spent decades proposing very concrete changes to tax policy, welfare, foreign policy and the courts. See Buckley Policed the Fringe, and the Right Grew Stronger for It.

Verdict: false. Conservatives oppose reckless change, not change. The test is whether a reform builds on what works or demolishes it to start over. A reform that grows out of existing institutions is the conservative kind.

Myth three: conservatives want to return to a golden age

The strongest version. Listen to the rhetoric about the good old days, a time when families were intact and neighbors knew each other. It is a fantasy about a past that never existed.

The record. Some conservative rhetoric does romanticize, and the honest conservative should say so and stop it. A mood of "everything was better then" is bad history and bad politics, and it is the opposite of the confident, forward-looking posture that wins arguments.

But the serious conservative writers never claimed a golden age. Michael Oakeshott, in his essay "On Being Conservative," described conservatism as a disposition: to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, to prefer present laughter to utopian bliss. A temperament, not a time machine. See Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program. Friedrich Hayek took the argument further in an essay called "Why I Am Not a Conservative," complaining that conservatives lack a destination of their own. See Hayek Wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and He Had a Point Worth Facing. These are not men dreaming of 1955.

And here is the plain fact. The most important conservative idea in America is not nostalgic at all. It is the claim in the Declaration that all men are created equal, which was not true in practice in 1776, and which the country has been working to make true ever since. A movement that holds up an unfulfilled promise as its measuring stick is not looking back for a golden age. It is looking at a standard we have not yet met.

Verdict: false for the thinkers, fair warning for the pundits. The golden age is a failure of imagination. The tradition is a standard to be met.

Myth four: Lincoln asked what conservatism is, and the answer was "nothing good"

This is the one nobody expects, so give me a minute. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union in New York. It was the speech that made him a national figure. In it he asked a question that people forget he asked: "What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?"

Then he answered it by turning the question on his opponents. The argument of that speech was that the Republican position on slavery in the territories, that Congress could and should restrict its spread, was the old, tried position of the Founders, and that those who wanted to extend slavery into new lands were the radicals. Lincoln went through the record of the Framers and the early Congresses and argued that a clear majority of the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution understood that the federal government could control slavery in the federal territories. By his account, the party of the Founders was his party, and the innovators were the ones who denied the Founders' judgment.

You can disagree with every sentence, but you cannot say Lincoln thought conservatism was a dirty word. He claimed it. He claimed it for the cause of limiting slavery, and he rested the claim on the plain meaning of the old tested law.

Verdict: the tradition has at least one great, honest defender in the person who preserved the Union. For more of Lincoln's early political thought, see Lincoln's Apple of Gold Fragment Explains the Declaration and Constitution.

Myth five: conservatives defended every injustice, from slavery to segregation

The strongest version. Look at history. Whenever there was a fight to extend rights, conservatives were on the wrong side. Slavery, suffrage, civil rights.

The record. This is the most serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a flinch. Here is the answer in three parts.

1. Defenders of slavery and segregation were not conservatives in the sense we mean. They defended a particular local order, and they did it by trampling the Founding's own principles. The man who wrote that all men are created equal and the men who built a legal caste system cannot both be called heirs to the same tradition. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, was founded to stop the spread of slavery. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified between 1865 and 1870, were passed by Republican-led Congresses.
2. One of the great abolitionist victories in Britain was won by a man who worked with the Tories. William Wilberforce, an independent member of Parliament and a devout evangelical, spent twenty years on the abolition of the slave trade, which Parliament ended in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act followed in 1833, passed just after his death. Burke had drafted a plan in 1780 and sent it to a government minister in 1792, his "Sketch of a Negro Code," a program of regulation meant to lead gradually toward the end of slavery. The conviction that every person bears the image of God, the conviction in Made in God's Image, the Idea Behind Every Claim to Human Dignity, carried a political movement.
3. Conservatives have also been wrong, and the honest ones say so. Some defended segregation in the twentieth century and some of the opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was argued in constitutional terms that the country, rightly, did not accept. A movement that cannot admit a mistake deserves to lose. See Colorblind Law Is Not a Code Word, It Is Harlan's Dissent Made Good for the conservative case for the standard that finally won: equal treatment under law.

Verdict: the charge is half right as to individuals and wrong as to the tradition. The principle at the center of American conservatism, equal natural rights, is the principle that ended slavery. The failure of individuals to live by it is a reason to hold to the principle, not to drop it.

Myth six: tradition is just prejudice with a nicer name

The strongest version. Burke himself defended "prejudice." Tradition is what you call a habit you do not want to examine. If a rule cannot justify itself in argument, why keep it?

The record. Burke did use the word, in the older sense: a settled judgment held without having to rebuild the proof every morning. Here is the point behind it. You cannot test everything yourself. You do not rederive the safety of the bridge before you cross it. You do not re-prove the value of honesty before you tell the truth. Most of what any person knows, he knows because he inherited it, and the sensible reaction is to respect what has worked while remaining ready to fix what has not.

The alternative, to reject everything you cannot personally justify on the spot, sounds brave and ends badly. The French Revolutionaries of 1789 proposed to rebuild society from reason alone, with a new calendar, new weights and measures and new rules, and within a few years the guillotine was working overtime. Burke saw it coming in 1790, before the Terror, which is one reason his book is still read. See Burke Versus Paine, the Argument That Defined Left and Right for Good.

And here is the partnership Burke described in the same Reflections. Society, he wrote, is a partnership "not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." That is the whole argument for tradition in a sentence. We are trustees, not owners. A trustee does not sell off the estate to fund his present enthusiasm, and he does not leave it unrepaired either. He keeps it up and hands it on in better condition.

Verdict: false. Tradition is not prejudice that refuses to explain itself. It is accumulated experience that has already been explained by surviving.

Where the best objection lands

A fair critic will push back here. He will say: you have defined conservatism so generously that it includes everybody you like. Lincoln, Burke, Wilberforce, all conservatives by your count. Is the label doing any work?

It is a fair question, and the answer is that the label does work in one respect. It tells you where to put the burden of proof. A conservative says, in effect: when you propose to change an institution, tell me what it was for, why it survived, and what will do its job after it is gone. That is not a refusal to change. It is a demand for an account. A reform that can give that account, such as ending the slave trade or repealing the Corn Laws, passes easily. A reform that cannot, such as reorganizing the family around a theory, deserves suspicion.

Notice what that test does. It protects the poor and the powerless more than anyone, since the people with the least cushion are the ones hurt worst when a clever experiment fails. The wealthy can survive a failed policy. The family on a tight budget cannot. When critics call caution a luxury, they have it backwards. Caution is what you buy for others when you are not willing to gamble with their lives.

The case in brief

1. Tradition is a working inheritance of tested habits and institutions, and nostalgia is a feeling. Conservatives defend the first and should resist the second.
2. Burke, the tradition's founder, wrote that a state without the means of some change lacks the means of its conservation, and reformed in practice: economical reform, conciliation with America, the Hastings impeachment.
3. Lincoln's Cooper Union address of February 27, 1860 asked what conservatism is and claimed the Founders' old, tried position against the new and untried.
4. The central American conservative idea, equal natural rights, ended slavery, and conservatives have not always lived up to it, which is a reason to hold to the principle and to say so.
5. The burden of proof sits with the person who wants to tear something down, because the people who suffer most from failed experiments are the ones with the least to spare.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph aloud with your family and write down the one promise in it you think the country has still not kept.