As a second term of Republican president Donald Trump looms, vigorous debate about the nature and future of American conservatism is sure to continue. Some recent installments in this perennial discussion include the following:
At Public Discourse, R.J. Snell contends that conservatism is “not a worldview or an epistemic acknowledgment of a list of propositions—how thin, how vague, how bloodless—but an inherited and inhabited set of practices, virtues, stories, and forms of life.”
In a similar vein, at Law & Liberty Brian Lee Crowley writes, “Conservatism is not a deduction from first principles; whatever principles it has are deductions from human experience as tested and shaped by time.”
One important thread on the American right is the “fusion” of libertarianism and traditional conservatism. In a Law & Liberty podcast hosted by James Patterson, a stable of diverse thinkers “consider fusionism’s origins in mid-century America, its culmination in the 1980s, and its current status.”
At the Critic, Sebastian Milbank warns against a narrow understanding of conservatism that arises from idolizing an individual thinker (he focuses on Roger Scruton). “Healthy political movements are contested and ever-evolving, but conservatism today is too often reduced to a sentiment rather than a worldview capable of grappling with the vast challenges of the modern world.”
A recent book by Stephen Presser anthologizes another thread in the tapestry of conservative thought: paleoconservatism. Jerry Salyer offers an appreciative review at Catholic World Report. “By definition, a conservative values stability and order, and sees war as at best a very last resort,” he writes. “Paleos are also suspicious of the Enlightenment’s idealization of democracy and equality, and often accuse neoconservatives of regarding America as a religion rather than a country.” Meanwhile, in a likewise appreciative but more critical engagement of the same book in the Independent Review, Shawn Ritenour suggests that “paleoconservative critics of libertarian affection for free markets overstate their case when they assert that libertarians emphasize the importance of the individual to the exclusion of normal social relationships.”