I am not a conservative theorist.  But in many ways, I could be.  I am a straight middle-aged white man married for almost twenty years with children, who is traditionally religious, reflexively patriotic and at times (not my best times) tempted to reactionary nationalism, and completely fascinated with history and multiple strands of traditional religious, philosophical, and political thought.  I respect meliorism, appreciate a broadly Burkean attitude to large-scale institutional or cultural change, and am suspicious of people who don't have what I judge to be an adequate awareness of the historical background to traditions of thought or whatever political situations in which we find ourselves.  In some deep ways, I am dispositionally conservative, and my "social location" and cultural affiliations would suggest that I would be on the right.  And yet I'm not.  Nor do I imagine a conservativism that would feel like a home for me.  Why is that?

I'm sure there are countervailing pressures on my life that work against the demographic and sociological realities that would push me toward the Russell Kirk society.  After all, I teach in the humanities at an American university.  And my religious affiliation is Episcopalian.  So I'm "cross-pressured," in the words of Charles Taylor, in interesting ways.  But I don't think that's the main factor here.

The main factor here is that conservative thought has collapsed in recent years.  This piece was published in the Washington post this week, and you'll see it has no cognitive point whatsoever--it's all about score-keeping in the shortest-term way possible.  A couple months ago, a piece by and about our cousins overseas suggested there are similar problems facing conservative intellectuals there.

This is fascinating.  This piece from 2018 in the Crooked Timber blog has an interesting account of why.  It has an interesting picture of thought: the intellectual world, especially where it relates to politics but elsewhere as well, is much less about innovation than it is about influence, about providing ideological frames for stuff you want to do.  It may adjust peoples' actions marginally, but it doesn't really provide maxims for them to instantiate, let alone generalize.  

What happened to conservative intellectuals is that they lost the capacity to influence.  They lost control of Trump and his allies.  They're left with "hackery or heresy," and very, very few--vanishingly few--of us humans have the courage and irascibility to be true heretics.  There are a few "woke Bill Kristols" but if Kristol or Frum is heresy, all I can say is that only a Trump, or a Stalin, would feel at all vindictive toward them.  And probably not even them: it's useful to have a fool near the court, as medieval rulers knew.

That's all a structural account of the collapse of the conservative movement.  The deeper problem they have is, they're just not very good thinkers.  They don't have much in the way of a positive vision of anything at all.  They're not strictly conservative, they're reactionary.  In this way, I think the mid-century liberals were right when they said (and got mocked for it later) that there's not much of a conservative tradition in the United States.  Reaction is not conservativism.  

"Liberalism" is typically the magic word for conservatives.  It's the safety word they use when they feel like they're getting critiqued too harshly.  "But look at liberalism!  See what we have to deal with!"  This is pathetic.  At one point someone in the conservative movement will notice serious liberal thinkers like Amanda Anderson and Cécile Laborde, and when they do, it will make them quiet.  Until then, they just sort of natter on, in a comfortable echo chamber of their own making.

Here's one way that I mean this: Religiously, they're reiterating natural law arguments (or Kuyperianism, which is what happens to natural law when it goes to Holland) without confronting the fascinating and deep challenges to natural law accounts, internal to the Christian account, for instance, from at least Augustine forward.  (Here's a hint to people who think Augustine was affirming of natural law.  Do a word search on the phrase "lex natur*" in Brepolis or your favorite databases, with modifications; does it appear in his works at all?  Vanishingly rarely.  Who, in Augustine's time, uses the phrase?  The Pelagians.)  This is telegraphic, but reassertion of "the old ways" in the face of--but without seriously engaging--new challenges is not helpful.

I could say similar things about how localism and agrarianism need to grapple with their origins in the reactionary white populisms of the nineteenth century.  Don't get me started on libertarianism.  And other movements as well.  

Most deeply, the problem seems to be that conservatives don't want to think about race as a fundamental fact of our history and our present.  Which means they don't seriously think about history.  We live with a complicated legacy, and you'd think it would be one that conservatives would want to confront.  I think the next great conservative revolution--the next great moment where conservativism becomes a vital intellectual force--will be after some conservatives have finally begun to grapple with the realities of race and racism and the conflation of whiteness with humanity.  Maybe there are some enterprising young thinkers out there now.  There certainly aren't many of age 30 or older.

On the other hand, here's a nice interview by Bill Kristol of my UVA colleague Jim Ceaser.  It's interesting to listen to, anyway.

A world where there were serious conservative thinkers grappling with the past would be a good world.  It is not the world we inhabit, unfortunately.  And the main fault for that lies with the "conservative" movement itself, not the "liberals" about whom they spend so much time complaining.