Rich in Grievance, Poor in Vision
Toward a Conservatism That Can Govern
The modern conservative movement is defined by a paradox: it is more energized than it has been in decades, and yet more adrift intellectually than at any point since the Cold War’s end. This crisis is not a simple matter of tactics or policy, not a debate over tax rates, foreign intervention, or border security. It is a crisis of identity. Conservatives have learned to hate a myriad of things in the modern age, but they have lost clarity because they have forgotten to articulate what they love.
What is conservatism? The question lies at the heart of the movement’s current turmoil. Until conservatives can answer it, they shall continue descending into what they have become: a movement rich in grievance and poor in vision, capable of resistance but incapable of rule. Conservatism is the stewardship of conditions that allow human flourishing across generations. The trouble is that conservatives keep reaching for definitions which turn them into reactionaries, failing to understand it makes governing impossible.
“What Are We Conserving?”
Conservatives sometimes attempt to define conservatism by asking a different question: “What are we conserving?” It seems like a reasonable step; conservatism implies conservation, which implies a subject or object on which to focus. It’s intuitive, which is why it keeps leading conservatives into incoherence because it hides a root philosophical error. Asking “What are we conserving?” traps the speaker and their audience in a philosophical framing which inadvertently produces answers that make conservatism incoherent, forcing enumeration where principle is needed, defense where vision is required, and nostalgic specificity where adaptive wisdom should govern.
The first problem is that it collapses principles into inventory. When forced to name objects of conservation, conservatives list historical arrangements: “traditional marriage,” “the nuclear family,” “Judeo-Christian values,” “the Constitution as written,” “small government.” But none of these are principles, they are instantiations of principles in particular times and contexts. For example, is “the isolated nuclear family” truly the object worthy of conservation? Or is it familial stability, the intergenerational transmission of virtue, and the dignified raising of children? The first is a specific mid-20th-century arrangement that relied on unique economic conditions; the second is a permanent requirement for human flourishing which has taken many institutional shapes over the centuries. This inventory-based approach creates a brittle form of conservatism where every historical change becomes an existential threat because forms are mistaken for foundations. As a result, conservatives end up defending artifacts (i.e. the form marriage took in 1950s America) rather than the architecture (the social conditions that make marriage as an institution durable and generative).
Secondly, the question traps conservatism into a form of political and cultural archaeology. “To conserve” in common usage means to keep something as it was, which makes the movement sound like a historical reenactment. But institutions are not artifacts; they are living structures that require maintenance, adaptation, and sometimes radical pruning to remain viable. As Burke put it, a society is not a museum piece but a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The conservative asks: “How do we keep this institution functioning for the next generation?” The antiquarian asks: “How do we keep it looking like it did?”
Finally, this question creates a rhetorical debt that compounds with time. Every object listed for conservatives must then be justified. Why this? Why now? What gives it authority? It hands progressives a grinding war of attrition wherein they need only discredit one item to weaken the whole list. For example, if “traditional marriage” is listed, the debate becomes whether that particular form of marriage has always existed (it hasn’t), whether it’s been universally beneficial (it hasn’t), or whether alternatives are viable (some are), and conservatism loses on empirical grounds even when it is philosophically correct about the underlying principle—that is, families are the engine of social trust in a broader culture.
Framed as Reactionaries
But the question’s problems run deeper than mere incoherence. Accept that framing and you inherit a deeper problem. “What are we conserving?” is one half of an asymmetric discourse in which conservatism must affirmatively justify every inherited arrangement while progressivism is never asked to justify the costs, risks, or permanence of what it dismantles.
Progressivism’s core question—“who does this inherited norm serve?”—is genuinely valuable. Abolition, suffrage, and civil rights were celebrated because they dissolved unjust limits that prevented flourishing. The problem is that progressivism cannot reliably distinguish between constraints that are arbitrary and constraints that are constitutive. Unable to make this distinction, it defaults to a procedural rule: inherited limits are presumptively suspect and change is presumptively justified.
The result is the asymmetry. Progressivism does not have to specify what it is building, only that the current arrangement is insufficient, unjust, or outdated. The burden falls on defenders of the status quo to prove that existing arrangements deserve to survive. Conservatives are under no obligation to accept this framing, and must not, if conservatism is to thrive. Yet conservatives impose this framing upon themselves when they ask: “what are we conserving?” Reactionary defense becomes the conservative identity. Conservatism becomes a movement of negation: anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-woke. They might win the moment, but they will lose the shape of the future because they’ve accepted that their role is to prevent rather than to build. A movement defined by what it opposes has no vision of what it supports, and a movement with no vision cannot govern because governing is the act of building towards a specified future.
From Objects to Conditions
Conservatism has been severed from its purpose, because conserving is not an end in itself. Political projects exist to sustain forms of life. Institutions, norms, and laws are conserved only to the extent that they serve human flourishing across time. Whether acknowledged or not, every political philosophy operates with some account of human flourishing, of the conditions under which human beings can develop, belong, contribute, and transmit life across generations. A conservatism that cannot articulate what kind of human life it seeks to sustain will inevitably collapse into nostalgia or grievance.
Conservatism seeks to sustain a form of human life in which people can develop their capacities, form deep bonds of obligations and belonging, contribute meaningfully to communities and institutions larger than themselves, transmit what they have learned to those who come after, and live with dignity across the entire arc of human existence from dependent childhood through productive adulthood to honored old age. Conservatism describes the conditions under which humans, as the kind of creatures we actually are, tend to flourish rather than languish, to build rather than destroy, to reproduce their ways of life rather than collapse into disorder and despair.
To know if this vision is realistic, let us observe what humans really are. Humans are not self-creating, not self-sufficient, not infinitely malleable. We are born radically dependent, mature slowly, require formation in virtue, seek belonging and purpose and meaning, and die. From these observable features of humankind, needs necessarily follow. Born dependent, we need stable caregiving over extended periods; slow to mature, we need sustained moral and cultural formation; seekers of belonging, we need communities capable of generating loyalty; limited to a finite life, we need mechanisms to transmit what we’ve learned.
These needs generate corresponding conditions. We require formation: stable families and communities capable of raising children, transmitting virtue, and shaping character over the long years that human maturation requires. Humans need continuity: mechanisms for preserving and passing on knowledge, skill, and wisdom across generations, because these are transmitted, not discovered anew except through painful experience. We also require order: social trust and ordered liberty, because cooperation, association, and exchange collapse without trust, and because freedom without order is chaos while order without freedom is tyranny. People need dignity: meaningful work and genuine belonging, because humans require contribution to feel worthy and membership to feel whole.
A survey of history provides ample evidence: across vastly different cultures, economies, and periods of time, societies that maintain these conditions tend to sustain themselves across generations, while societies that systematically undermine them tend to struggle or collapse. The nuclear family of 20th century America, the extended family networks of traditional societies, the clan structures of pre-modern cultures are all different forms, but they perform the same function: providing stable environments for child formation and intergenerational transmission. The specific institutional forms vary widely, but the underlying generative function remains remarkably consistent.
Furthermore, the conditions are interdependent. You cannot isolate one and maximize it without destabilizing others. Maximizing individual autonomy (freedom from all unchosen obligations) erodes the stability of the family (which depends on binding obligations). Eroding family stability weakens intergenerational transmission (which depends on stable families). Weakening intergenerational transmission destroys social trust (which depends on shared norms transmitted across time). Collapsing social trust makes ordered liberty impossible (because liberty without trust produces chaos). Conservatism resists utopian schemes not because change is bad, but because social systems are ecosystems, and ecosystems are destroyed by people who think they’re machines.
Once you see society as an ecosystem, the conservative task comes into focus. It cannot be about freezing institutions in amber. Instead, it must be an active maintenance of the generative capacity of the ecology those institutions serve: the ability of social systems to continue producing what humans need across time and changing circumstances. That calls for active cultivation: pruning what no longer generates what we need, reinforcing what remains productive, adapting forms to new circumstances while protecting the underlying generative function. Take the family: conserving it does not mean enforcing the gender roles of the 1950s, but ensuring that whatever familial forms emerge still generate what families exist to produce: stable child-rearing, intergenerational obligation, virtue formation, mutual support. The test becomes sharper than simply asking whether conditions currently exist.
The conservative question is: will these institutions still generate flourishing tomorrow? A system that works today but cannot adapt, cannot transmit its knowledge, cannot reproduce itself is not being conserved, it is being embalmed. The conservative task is maintaining institutions as living, generative structures. We are stewards of ecologies that must endure.
Conservatism is Stewardship
What is conservatism? Conservatism is stewardship: the maintenance of the moral and social architecture that produces the conditions for human flourishing across generations. Families, institutions, norms, and laws are living structures through which each generation forms the next. To conserve them is to keep them generative, applying enduring truths about the human person to new circumstances. Stewardship unifies past and present with a forward-gazing posture. The past provides wisdom (institutions that have endured reveal what works), the present provides agency (we are the stewards, not curators), and the future provides purpose (we conserve for those who come after). All three are in tension. Conservatism is not loyalty to the dead over the living or loyalty to the living over the unborn; it is holding all three in proper, ordered relation.
To conserve something across time means ensuring it remains functional in the future. A father conserving his farm for his children doesn’t freeze it in time; he maintains the soil, repairs the equipment, adapts to climate and market changes. He asks: “What will make my farm viable for my children?” not “How do I keep it exactly as my father left it?” The same logic applies to institutions: to conserve marriage, universities, civic culture requires asking what these need to become in order to remain viable. The conservative should ask: “what must we build now so that human flourishing remains possible for our grandchildren?”
What distinguishes conservative change from progressive change is what that change serves. Progressive change serves liberation from constraints deemed arbitrary or unjust: inherited status, traditional roles, biological limits, unchosen obligations. Conservative change serves the maintenance and adaptation of conditions necessary for flourishing: stable families, intergenerational continuity, social trust, ordered liberty. Both involve change, both have telos. What distinguishes them is destination: which account of human flourishing is true to what humans actually are and need?
Because it is grounded in a proper view of human nature, conservatism is falsifiable. If conservative policies erode the conditions for human flourishing, conservatism has failed by its own standards. The test is empirical: are families strengthened or weakened? Is social trust built or destroyed? Can communities transmit virtue across generations? These questions must cut against conservative sacred cows as readily as progressive ones. The 1990s-era War on Drugs, judged by conservative standards, demonstrably failed: mass incarceration disrupted families in entire communities, eroded trust in law enforcement, and produced cynicism about the rule of law. A properly conservative analysis would have recognized this and pursued family preservation rather than doubling down because the policy signaled toughness on crime.
Politics that ignore human nature do not liberate humans; they harm them, and conservatism is not exempt from this judgment. It must start with the human person as actually constituted, not as ideology or tribal loyalty might wish them to be.
The Steward’s Task
If conservatism is stewardship, then conservatives face a constant practical question: when does an institution require preservation, when does it require reform, and when must it be replaced entirely?
The first tools are cultural formation, institutional design, and incentives, with law serving as the backstop rather than the first instrument. But a steward also wields power, and sometimes wields it brutally. The farmer who culls the diseased animal to save the herd, the surgeon who amputates to preserve life, the parent who severs a child from destructive influence: these are proper exercises of stewardship. A conservatism that mistakes gentleness for principle will be devoured by those who mistake cruelty for strength. Power will be used. The question is whether it serves the generative function or merely the will of those who hold it.
Legitimate authority is layered: families and civil society do most of the formative work, localities reflect distinct moral ecologies, and national power is reserved for genuinely national goods. Coercion must be limited to protecting basic rights, preventing grave harms, and preserving the institutional preconditions of ordered liberty. A conservatism that tries to impose virtue directly by force becomes a parody of itself, while a conservatism that refuses to use law at all becomes defenseless.
These are the preconditions for any durable free society: child formation must happen, trust must exist, work must confer dignity, obligations must bind people to one another, and liberty must be ordered. Within those boundaries, different communities will embody these conditions differently, whether religious or secular, urban or rural, high-trust or high-autonomy, so long as their forms do not corrode the shared civic ecology that makes pluralism possible in the first place.
Within this framework, the steward’s task takes three forms depending on circumstance:
Preservation is required when institutions under attack still perform their functions well. Marriage is under cultural assault precisely because it imposes durable obligations that expressive individualism can’t justify. Conservatives defend it because it still performs one of society’s core generative functions: stable child-rearing and intergenerational duty.
Reform is required when institutions are eroding but remain salvageable. Universities no longer reliably educate students in knowledge, virtue, and critical thought, but the need for institutions that form young people remains permanent. The conservative response is to restore academic standards, eliminate political litmus tests, and rebuild genuine liberal arts curricula. The goal is to make universities once again perform the function for which they exist.
Construction is required when existing institutions have failed so completely that they cannot be salvaged. If a denomination’s churches no longer transmit the faith, form congregants in virtue, or provide community, and reform efforts have been exhausted, then the conservative builds new institutions that serve the permanent need rather than clinging to a form that has been entirely hollowed out.
The difficulty is discernment. Reasonable conservatives will disagree about whether a given institution has reached a point where reform is insufficient and construction is required, but the question itself is clear: does this form still serve its function? If yes, preserve or reform it. If not, replace it with something that does. The form is negotiable. The function is not.
Rich in Vision
The question “what are we conserving?” was always a trap. But recognizing the trap is only the beginning. The crisis is that the conservative movement has become intellectually homeless, living in the ruins of 20th-century institutions while refusing to draft blueprints for 21st-century forms that serve the same permanent human needs. Conservatives have become defenders of forms whose functions they no longer articulate.
Consider the difference in practice. A reactive conservatism says: “We oppose gender ideology.” A constructive conservatism says: “Human beings are sexed, embodied creatures. Sexual differentiation is constitutive of who we are and serves essential social functions. Recognizing this reality produces better outcomes: children benefit from sexual complementarity; women’s sports remain meaningful; adolescents are protected from experimental medicine. We defend biological reality because human dignity requires acknowledging what humans are.” The first is negation. The second is a vision. Only the second can persuade anyone not already convinced.
We have become a movement rich in grievance and poor in vision, capable of resistance but incapable of rule. The path forward requires the opposite: a conservatism rich in vision and fit to govern, one that knows what it must break, what it must build, and what it will defend.