Despair dressed as Strength
Updated: 6 days ago
On the tempations of power over principle.
There is a peculiar temptation that comes with believing the world has gone wrong. It comes late at night, usually, with the screen lit and news scrolling past. It says that because the stakes are high, rules no longer matter. That principle is luxury. That restraint is a kind of weakness the other side has already shed. That winning is everything.
It is an old temptation. It is older than our Republic and older than the word conservative. History is crowded with men who surrendered principles in the name of saving them, and many of them believed, to the end, that they were right.
Conservatives must resist this temptation.
Conservatism, at its root, is not opposition to the Left. Opposition is a posture, and a posture is not philosophy. Conservatism is a way of seeing. It is a view of human nature, of what government can and cannot do, of the slow wisdom stored in habits and institutions that no single generation designed.
It begins with humility. Burke understood this better than anyone (save maybe Chesterton). Writing in 1790, while Paris was being remade by men certain they could build a just society from first principles, he called society “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.”
The dead have a vote. So do the unborn. The living are only stewards.
This is not sentiment. It is a claim about knowledge. The men who came before us were neither fools nor saints. They learned things by living through them, by failing, by burying their mistakes. Their achievements deserve gratitude. Their failures deserve scrutiny. Their wisdom deserves something better than fashionable contempt.
Hayek made the same point in another language. No planner, however brilliant, can know what millions of people know. Knowledge is scattered. It lives in the farmer’s sense of the weather, the shopkeeper’s feel for his customers, the mother’s knowledge of her child. A free society works because it lets that knowledge be used by the people who hold it. Concentrate power, and you do not concentrate wisdom. You lose it. Hayek called the belief in centralization “a fatal conceit.”
Burke saw the conceit in the revolutionaries of Paris. Hayek saw it in the planners of the twentieth century. It is worth asking where it grows today.
Something has changed.
There are voices on the Right willing to abandon the inheritance they claim to defend. They have grown impatient with constitutional restraint. Impatient with persuasion. Impatient with the slow, difficult business of governing free people who do not agree.
They do not always say this plainly. They speak of a common good, of national renewal, of a nation that has lost its way. Some of what they say is true. The family is weaker than it was. Communities have thinned. Many Americans feel the institutions meant to serve them have turned on them. This feeling didn’t come from nowhere.
But look closely at our impatience. It is not only a hunger for power. It is a flight from work.
This is a country of three hundred and forty million people who do not agree about God, or marriage, or how a child should be raised, or what a good life looks like. That is not a malfunction. It is a condition. No election will end it, and no ruler can decree it away. The question is not whether Americans will disagree. The question is how they will live beside one another while they do.
Freedom in such a country is hard. It means making your case to a neighbor who thinks you are wrong, and then making it again. It means losing votes you were sure you would win. It means building a school when you cannot rewrite the curriculum, raising your children well when you cannot raise everyone’s, and keeping your church full when you cannot make the law preach for you. It means accepting that persuasion is slow, that it often fails, and that it is still the only method that leaves both sides free.
Eliot wrote that there is no such thing as a Lost Cause “because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Nothing is settled for good. Every generation has to make the case again.
Compulsion seduces the slothful to skip all of this. It offers the result without the argument and the harvest without the planting. The Accuser in Job believed virtue was always bought or compelled. Compulsion rests upon this plinth. A movement that wants to rule a divided people without the trouble of convincing them is not defending a tradition. It is exhausted, or worse.
The remedy they pine for is power. Not the power to govern, which every movement seeks, but the power to compel. They imagine that a righteous ruler, backed by a loyal state, might accomplish what free citizens have failed to do for themselves.
This is not conservatism. It is despair dressed as strength.
Madison put it in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” He did not think men were angels. He did not think his allies were angels. He built a government that assumed the worst of everyone who would hold it, including himself.
The Constitution was written with this knowledge. Its restraints were not designed for calm times, when everyone agreed. They were designed for our times. When passions run high. When enemies are dangerous. When the temptation to set principle aside feels less like temptation and more like duty.
A restraint that holds only in good weather is not a restraint. It is a decoration.
Yet, these new voices twitter away. The argument goes like this: The rules only bind those who obey them. The Left, so the argument runs, has used courts, agencies, universities, and corporations to impose its views without winning elections. It has bent norms whenever bending served. To keep playing by the old rules is not principle. It is surrender with good manners.
This debate is now. St. Paul in the First Century confronted and condemned it.
This argument is not stupid. Parts of its account of the last fifty years are hard to dismiss, and the people who make it are responding to real losses.
Yet, if the rules have been broken, the remedy is to restore them, not to break them faster. A man whose house has been robbed does not become safer by robbing his neighbor. He becomes a thief, and the street becomes more dangerous for everyone, including his own children.
Power taken by one side is inherited by the other. Every tool a conservative government forges, it hands to the next government. The administrative state that some on the Right now hope to seize and turn was built by the Left for the same purpose. Seizing it does not dismantle it. It only proves that the tool works, and that whoever holds it may do as he likes.
There is no permanent majority. There is only the precedent you leave.
Frank Meyer spent his career arguing with his own allies. A former Communist who had seen what a "righteous" state does, he joined the conservative movement in the 1950s and insisted on something many of his fellow conservatives disliked. Virtue matters, he said. The traditionalists were right about this. But virtue cannot be forced. A good act done under compulsion is not a virtuous act. It is compliance. A state that "makes men good" has, in the same motion, made them unfree, and incapable, in many ways, to be virtuous in any sacred sense.
His critics said this left the moral order defenseless. Meyer answered the moral order was never the state’s to defend. It belonged to churches, families, schools, and the conscience of each person. The state’s job was narrower: To keep peace so other associations could do their work.
This is where the three thinkers meet, despite their quarrels. Burke gives us reverence for what we have inherited. Hayek gives us humility about what any ruler can know. Meyer gives us the insistence that the good life must be chosen, not imposed. Each one alone is incomplete. Together, they describe a conservatism that defends tradition without worshipping power, and values virtue without negating it with compulsion.
To fight rightly is not to fight timidly.
There is nothing timid about defending free speech against censorship. Nothing timid about defending religious liberty against coercion, or constitutional government against those who would bend it to ambition. These fights are hard. They lose often. They require courage of a quieter kind.
Nor does conviction mean surrendering the future. Conservatives must build. Schools. Businesses. Families. Parishes. Art. Burke wrote of the “little platoons” we belong to in society, the first link in the chain of our affections. Those platoons do not raise themselves. A civilization cannot survive on denunciation alone. It must make something worth keeping.
That work is slow. It does not trend. It does not win the evening’s argument. It is also the only work that lasts.
The means matter.
A movement that defends liberty by embracing tyranny has already lost. A movement that condemns dishonesty while excusing it among its own has given up its moral authority. A movement that demands virtue from its enemies but not from its champions has stopped believing in virtue.
There will always be men promising deliverance. Men who say extraordinary times require extraordinary obedience. Men who offer the comforting idea that freedom can be saved by placing it, temporarily, in their hands.
The word temporarily is always there. It is always a lie.
The bargain never changes. Only the salesman.
We are not called to surrender our principles to save our country. We are called to save our country by keeping faith with them.
The fight is worth having. But only if what survives the fight is worth defending.
If you know what time it is, you know it is time to be hardened. Not weak, soft, and lazy. It is not the time for those skating to a temporary fix because they are too anemic for sustained engagement and losses, and easily fatigued by process.
Paine wrote of the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, who serve only while serving is easy. The constitutional conservative is forged in the deep snows of a valley and it is their time.
