In Defense of (Liberal) Conservatism

What must change if the republic is to endure

I have come to believe that the United States needs a conservative movement.

The truth is that I am not a progressive. It is not in my personality to agitate for change. My first instinct is to ask what a change will cost, what it might disturb, and whether the people proposing it understand the thing they intend to alter. I feel the weight of continuity. I am suspicious of anyone who treats a society as raw material.

I do not look down on people who agitate for radical change. They are often the first to see injuries that a stable order has taught everyone else to regard as ordinary. I have come to agree with much of the progressive left’s and the social democratic critique of our political economy, especially its account of the moral emergency created by wealth inequality. A society in which millions live one illness or missed paycheck from disaster while a small class accumulates fortunes beyond any conceivable private use is disordered. The order I am inclined to preserve is already failing to preserve the lives within it.

This will still surprise some readers. I support higher taxes on wealth, a larger social state, labor power, aggressive antitrust enforcement, constitutional amendment, and the reconstruction of institutions that American conservatives have spent half a century trying to weaken. I support a general amnesty for nonviolent immigrants, followed by legal status and an eventual path to citizenship. I want a federal government capable of governing. I want the people who attempted to overturn the last constitutional order prosecuted, the people who financed them exposed, and the doctrines that made their attempt possible removed from American law.

If I listed every policy preference I currently hold and handed the list to the people who classify political identities for a living, most would place me somewhere on the progressive left. They would have a reasonable basis for doing so. Yet the classification would miss something fundamental about how I arrive at those positions, what I fear, and what I am trying to preserve.

It would also exaggerate how far these preferences sit from the American public. The exact margin changes with the wording and the income threshold, but the direction has been remarkably durable. In 2007, Gallup found that 66 percent of Americans believed upper-income people paid too little in federal taxes and 71 percent said the same of corporations (Gallup). In 2019, Pew found 58 percent support for raising taxes on household income above $250,000 and 68 percent support for raising taxes on large businesses and corporations (Pew Research Center). Gallup found in 2025 that 70 percent still believed corporations paid too little, a view it reported had changed little since the question was first asked in 2004 (Gallup). Pew’s 2025 survey found 63 percent support for higher corporate rates and 58 percent support for higher rates on household income above $400,000 (Pew Research Center). More narrowly targeted proposals can poll higher still: a 2019 survey found 70 percent support for increasing taxes on families earning more than $10 million a year (Fox News).

The political class nevertheless discusses these ideas as electoral contraband. On television panels and inside campaign strategy shops, higher taxes on wealth and corporate power are treated as concessions to an activist fringe, dangerous in a general election and safely ignored once a primary ends. This is something elites tell one another, repeat often enough to acquire the texture of practical wisdom, and rarely test against the electorate they invoke. The polling record says otherwise. The allegedly radical position has commanded majority support across pollsters, question wordings, and political eras, with some formulations drawing support even from Republican voters. The nonstarter keeps winning the argument that respectable politics refuses to have.

None of this sounds conservative in the vocabulary of American politics.

The vocabulary is broken.

Every democratic society needs a conversation between its appetite for change and its instinct for continuity. The first asks whether the existing order is just. The second asks what the effort to improve it might destroy. A healthy polity needs both questions asked in good faith, because societies can preserve injustice for generations and can also demolish, in a season of certainty, institutions they will spend generations trying to recover.

That conversation requires a liberal conservatism: liberal in its commitment to constitutional government, equal citizenship, pluralism, and the rule of law; conservative in its respect for inherited institutions, accumulated social knowledge, and the moral claims of people who must live through whatever transformation politics proposes.

The United States currently has no political movement adequate to that role.

The Republican Party calls itself conservative. It is a wretched coalition of oligarchs, reactionaries, nativists, authoritarians, religious revanchists, and Donald Trump. The factions disagree about the country they want. They agree that the constitutional order stands in their way.

The oligarchs want a state too weak to restrain private power and strong enough to protect it. The nativists want citizenship reorganized around blood, inheritance, and cultural submission. The reactionaries want to reverse social settlements they never accepted. The fascists want the will of the leader to outrank the law. Donald Trump wants whatever Donald Trump wants at the moment he wants it, and an entire political party has spent a decade converting those wants into a theory of executive power.

The tech right is unusually candid about the destination. Curtis Yarvin has argued for replacing democratic government with a sovereign executive modeled on a corporate chief. His state would be run as a company, its ruler accountable to something resembling a board rather than an electorate. Asked about the model, he has described the desired figure as a CEO or dictator. This vision now circulates among people with money, platforms, and access to power (CNN).

Calling this conservatism should embarrass anyone with an elementary understanding of the word. These people propose to abolish the constitutional arrangements under which the country has existed for more than two centuries. They regard the separation of powers as friction, an independent civil service as sabotage, judicial review as legitimate only when it serves them, elections as suspect when they lose, and the public as a problem to be managed. Their political project is revolutionary. Its aesthetic is restoration because reactionaries prefer to dress the future in costumes stolen from the past.

The CEO monarch is still a monarch. A purge is still a purge when the men conducting it call themselves efficiency experts. The liquidation of constitutional government does not become conservative because its beneficiaries own copies of Edmund Burke.

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Conservatism begins with a fact about human beings: we inherit more than we understand.

No generation creates the country in which it lives. We arrive inside languages, laws, customs, institutions, obligations, memories, and forms of trust built by people whose names we will never know. Much of this inheritance is unjust. Some of it is absurd. All of it precedes our consent, yet without it we would possess no common world in which consent could matter.

Tradition is the memory of a society carried in practice. It tells people how to inhabit institutions whose formal rules never fully describe them. A Constitution can assign powers, but it cannot by itself produce restraint. A statute can create an office, but it cannot make its holder honest. Courts can announce rules, but they depend upon a public habit of accepting judgments one has the power to resist. The written order survives through unwritten disciplines.

Those disciplines are fragile. They can become excuses for exclusion and shields for corruption. They can also carry knowledge that reformers notice only after they have destroyed it. The conservative insight is that social practices deserve attention before demolition because their purposes may be distributed, tacit, and difficult to reconstruct.

This insight does not make tradition sovereign. An inheritance can be refused. The United States has had to refuse a great deal of its own: slavery, segregation, the political subordination of women, the criminalization of homosexuality, the casual impunity of capital. Every one of those refusals disturbed an established order. Every one was necessary.

A living tradition survives by learning. Edmund Burke’s familiar sentence remains useful: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (Reflections on the Revolution in France). Change is how a political inheritance answers the moral knowledge acquired by the people living within it. A country that cannot change eventually forces reform to arrive as rupture.

That is the tension a democratic polity must maintain. Progressivism at its best forces the country to hear the people whom its arrangements injure. Conservatism at its best forces reform to account for complexity, continuity, and cost. Liberalism supplies the rules under which the argument can continue without either side acquiring the power to end it.

The parenthesis in this essay’s title matters. Conservatism detached from liberalism becomes hierarchy in search of a justification. Liberalism detached from any conservative instinct can begin to mistake the removal of limits for freedom. Liberal conservatism accepts change while insisting upon a world stable enough for human beings to make lives inside it.

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I hold views that fit comfortably within that disposition.

The rate of social change matters. Human beings have finite capacities for adaptation. Institutions have finite capacities for absorption. A reform can be just in its object and destructive in its pace. Politics must care about the interval between announcing a new arrangement and making it livable.

Culture matters. A nation cannot sustain itself through procedure alone. People need stories, rituals, symbols, places, and memories that allow strangers to recognize one another as participants in a shared project. These things should remain open to reinterpretation because the nation belongs equally to citizens whose ancestors arrived yesterday and citizens whose ancestors arrived before its founding. Shared culture becomes stronger when more people can claim it without surrendering themselves.

Institutional legitimacy matters. The slow, frustrating procedures of constitutional government express a moral truth: other people exist, they disagree, and they cannot be wished away. Compromise is frequently ugly because pluralism is real. A government that moves at the speed of one man’s will has solved the problem of disagreement by abolishing the political standing of everyone else.

Order matters too. The law must be predictable, public, and equally applied. Violence cannot become an ordinary instrument of political competition. Contracts must mean something. Elections must settle who governs. Public officials must possess enough authority to act and face enough constraint to remain servants of the constitutional order.

These commitments place me in direct opposition to the movement that has monopolized the conservative label.

The modern Republican Party accelerates social change in the most destabilizing form available: it changes the regime itself. It converts public offices into instruments of personal rule, replaces professional administration with loyalty, treats legal constraint as an insult to electoral victory, and asks millions of Americans to reorganize their understanding of citizenship around obedience to a leader. The party that speaks most often of order has made organized lawlessness its method. The party that praises tradition has broken the republican tradition at its point of greatest vulnerability: the peaceful transfer and lawful exercise of power.

The unitary executive pipeline has spent decades preparing the legal architecture for this turn. Its achievement is a more powerful president presiding over a weaker presidency, with personal authority expanding as the institutional capacity and independence of the executive branch collapse. The gaslighting now directed at the country completes the project by attacking the public’s ability to name what it sees.

Nothing about this conserves the American republic.

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The work of conservation has therefore moved elsewhere.

Conserving a constitutional democracy captured by wealth requires taxing wealth. Extreme concentrations of private power do not remain private. They purchase speech, access, law, media, expertise, and eventually the state itself. A republic in which a handful of men can acquire the infrastructure of public discourse and bargain with governments as peers has already permitted economic inequality to become constitutional inequality.

Progressive taxation is an act of democratic maintenance. It keeps fortunes from hardening into dynasties and markets from producing sovereigns. The point is not punishment. The point is preserving a political order in which citizenship carries more authority than ownership.

Antitrust belongs to the same work. A competitive market cannot survive if its winners acquire the power to close the market behind them. Concentrated corporate power weakens communities, disciplines workers, dictates terms to suppliers, and converts economic dominance into political command. Breaking that power apart preserves the market from monopoly and the republic from private government.

Conserving a nation of immigrants requires bringing millions of settled people inside the law. Men and women who have lived here for years, worked, raised children, paid taxes, and built communities should have a legal status that reflects the lives they actually lead. General amnesty for nonviolent immigrants, followed by a path to citizenship, would strengthen the civic order by allowing those lives to enter it fully. A permanent population compelled to live outside the law corrodes the law and invites exploitation. Citizenship is how a republic turns presence into membership and membership into obligation.

Conserving the rule of law requires prosecutions. A legal system that declines to punish attacks upon itself teaches future attackers that patience will be rewarded. Mercy can belong to justice only after accountability has established that the law exists. The American habit of “moving on” has become a mechanism by which powerful people transfer the cost of their reconciliation to the public.

Conserving the Constitution requires amendment. The present emergency has exposed defects that custom once concealed: emergency powers broad enough to swallow legislative government, a pardon power capable of rewarding crimes committed for a president, an executive branch vulnerable to conversion into personal machinery, and a constitutional enforcement system too dependent on the good faith of officials whose bad faith it was designed to constrain.

Repairing those defects does not betray the Constitution. Article V is part of the Constitution. Amendment is one of the means by which the constitutional order survives knowledge its authors could not possess. A country devoted to becoming more perfect must remain unfinished. Perfection would mean stasis, and political stasis maintained by power has another name.

The reforms required may be severe. Presidential power must be bound more clearly. Public corruption laws must reach the forms of corruption modern oligarchy actually practices. The civil service must be insulated from personal purges. Congress must recover powers it surrendered through cowardice and convenience. Voting rights must rest on firmer ground than the temporary composition of the Supreme Court. The constitutional order needs defenses designed by people who now understand how close it came to being lost.

Radical circumstances can make extensive reform the conservative course. The scale of a remedy should answer the scale of the damage. A surgeon preserving a life does not choose the smallest incision as an article of faith.

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American politics has confused conservatism with the defense of whoever currently possesses power. That confusion serves the possessors very well. It allows oligarchs to call taxation radical while they redesign the state around their fortunes. It allows presidential absolutists to call constitutional constraint subversion. It allows men proposing monarchy to present themselves as guardians of an inheritance they intend to liquidate.

The inheritance is ours too.

The Constitution belongs to the people who want to amend it so it can survive. The rule of law belongs to the people willing to apply it to presidents and billionaires. The national tradition belongs to every citizen prepared to carry its best commitments forward and repair the injuries committed in its name. No faction acquires title to the past by shouting loudest about it.

I want a conservative movement capable of saying that something precious has been handed down to us, that we are responsible for understanding it, and that our freedom includes an obligation to deliver it alive to people we will never meet. Such a movement would know that conservation sometimes requires restraint and sometimes reconstruction. It would distinguish an institution’s age from its worth, continuity from inertia, and order from domination.

It would oppose the revolutionary right with the confidence of people defending their country from men who have mistaken possession for inheritance.

What must be conserved is the republic: the constitutional structure, the habits of pluralism, the shared culture, the equality of citizenship, and the possibility of peaceful correction. Anything that threatens those things deserves opposition, whatever costume it wears and whatever label it claims.

The country needs change because the country is in danger. The work ahead is constitutional, economic, cultural, and moral. Its purpose is conservation.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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