American conservatism: Theory and Contemporary Political Ideology

The national narratives of most European peoples celebrate their moment of settlement into a particular place, an end to nomadic wandering, and the taking up of agriculture (and Christianity). It is striking that Americans celebrate not our settlement but rather our movement—setting off for the frontier. The liberal narrative of America as a “universal nation” corresponds to this unsettledness: to be a “universal” nation is precisely not to be a nation, agens. Traditional conservatives have been endeavoring to settle America, to celebrate our arrival and not our departure, our actuality and not our potentiality, to bring Americans to see their national experience both as more particular than universal (which is to say, ideological) and as more in continuity with European precedents than in discontinuity; hence, Russell Kirk’s determined effort to view the American War of Independence as “a revolution not made but prevented” and his Eurocentric account of “the roots of American order.” At this historical moment, with America incontestably the greatest power on Earth and with American popular culture driving all before it, such a project of self-limitation may seem a fantasy. And yet it was only yesterday evening, historically speaking, that the sun never set on the British Empire. Today, the captains and the kings have long departed. As that most eccentric of American thinkers, the nineteenth century Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, observed,20 the American regime is the greatest political achievement since Rome; but it is not the city laid up in heaven. Like every achievement within the saeculum, its justice is limited and mortal. The sun too will set on the era of American exceptionalism. When it does, those who have placed their fondest hopes in the promises of ideological politics may feel themselves dispossessed and demoralized; but those who have hearkened to the teachings of the traditionalists may find themselves, at last, at home.