A couple of months ago, I spent a week thinking about traditionalists. I do think of myself as a traditionalist, though I don’t plan to fight anyone for the label. I respect traditionalists’ right to define their own boundaries.
I would fight for the label “conservative.” That shoe fits. The longer I linger in the political world (at the fringes perhaps, but still), the clearer I am on what I think it means, and why it fits me. I’ll lay out the reasons this week.
A few years back, I was invited to a conference hosted by ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. If you’re not familiar with this organization, it’s an old and historically respected conservative institution that has long specialized in bringing conservative ideas to university campuses, particularly for the benefit of undergraduate students. William F. Buckley Jr. was its first president. It used to be a bulwark of fusionist conservatism, focusing on liberty, great works of Western Civilization, constitutionalism, and related topics. If any organization anywhere clearly merited the label “conservative,” it was ISI.
There were young people at the conference, as one would expect. But, as they told me, they didn’t like to be called “conservatives.” I was dumbfounded. At an ISI conference? How is that possible?
Also, I was almost afraid to ask, but… what did they wish to be called?
Nationalists. They wanted to be “nationalists.”
I found that quite disheartening. Perhaps even alarming. I do not assume that every self-described “nationalist” is simply a fascist, but nationalism is a very sticky thing. It has considerable potential to go wrong. Then there’s a further point, which is equally crucial: we still need conservatives. There is in fact a very real sense in which “conservatism” is a genuinely modern thing, a creation of our own era. But we still need it, and we need some share of our young people to understand why conservatism is needed. ISI seems to have shrugged off that mission. Let’s hope someone else picks it up.
Tomorrow’s essay will consider: What kind of moment are we living in right now? What explains the rising sense of panic that so many people seem to feel? On Thursday, I will connect this to conservatism and explain how it can help.