The important thing to understand about American conservatism is it's always about preferring the liberalism of a generation or two ago to the liberalism of today; there's no real connection to traditional right-wing thought to speak of. https://twitter.com/mattklewis/status/1343633857476780032

A lot of this is caused by American political history: Conservatism as I understand it emerged in Europe as a rejection of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Meanwhile, the American Framers were Enlightenment figures and the heroes of a sister revolutionary movement.

Our third president spent the French Revolution in Paris urging on what was probably the most historically significant political tragedy in human history, for God's sake.

Since I'm bored while grading, here are some canonical European-conservative ideas, as far as I'm concerned:

1. Societies (and social institutions) are too complicated to be created or seriously modified through human volition. They organically evolve over time.

2. Absolute equality in a society is not possible and probably isn't even desirable. (Some people really are better suited to exercise judgement and power than others.) Inequality may be better controlled and regulated by law than by the free market and popular politics.

3. Temporal power is, in some important sense, subordinate to the spiritual. Human beings have an established telos, the product of some form of natural and/or divine law. Earthly power should be directed toward helping humans along their proper spiritual/ethical journey.

4. The state is not some neutral free-for-all for providing the means to achieve the aims of individual humans, whatever those might be. Each society's way of sorting out 1-3 above places substantive constraints on acceptable debate and policy, whatever individuals may wish.

5. Societies are particular, not universal. Each has its own unique way of handling institutional design, acceptable inequalities/inequalities, and the acceptable goals of human life within the polity. Attempts at view-from-nowhere standards of evaluation of societies are foolish

I could keep going, but a really important point is that, while a lot of this was elucidated as *conservative* as part of an intellectual backlash against the Enlightenment and Revolution, all of it draws on the intellectual resources of a pre-Enlightenment tradition...

...And that tradition's central figures are, probably (I'm getting a bit over my skis in the history of ideas discussing a medieval theologian here) Aristotle and Aquinas.

While conservatism was, in a sense, new in the early 19th century, it oriented itself, as all intellectual movements must, against some parts of the past by drawing on ideological resources themselves provided by the past, in this case the far more distant past.

There's a sort of never ending swap meet or rummage sale for intellectual resources--a bit of Aristotle here, some Machiavelli there--and one of the things which tends to methodologically separate political philosophers from political theorists, I think....

...Is that the 'best' theorists work from the presupposition that one cannot understand ideas apart from their history, while the 'best' philosophers ignore the history and focus on some sort of 'which idea do we think are best based on our own standards of "good" game.'

So Rawls could, for example, just copy-paste some ideas straight out of Kant into his own work, without questioning what it was about Kant's historical circumstances or his own which made it feel 'right' to do so. I don't think a great political theorist would ever do that.

(I'm obviously biased here: my PhD training is from a theory program and not a philosophy program. But I never read a Quine or a Davidson or a Wittgenstein or a Rawls because they were good at intellectual history.)

Oh no this took off