I am catching up to the spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books in extremely dilatory fashion. One of the highlights of this issue is, unsurprisingly, William Voegeli, CRB senior editor. Voegeli is always worth reading, capable of distilling complex issues and multiple works into a trenchant analysis, at once erudite and digestible.
This time, his subject is a modest one: er, conservatism. Surveying several recent books as well as current political developments, Voegeli charts a course between the Scylla of Lincoln Project–style anti-Trump monomania and the Charybdis of apocalyptic Trump adulation and late-republic political desperation. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part of his conclusion, addressed to many of his compatriots, is especially worthwhile:
How, then, do conservatives navigate the foggy question of whether or not a republic is too far gone to be conserved? The least bad approach, I submit, is a variant of Pascal’s Wager: faced with a quandary in which we do not, and fear that we cannot, know the answer to an important question, we should select the answer that will have the least damaging consequences if we turn out to be wrong. So, which would be the bigger mistake—to keep fighting to preserve a republic that turns out to be beyond resuscitation, or to give up defending one whose vigor might yet be restored?
The question answers itself, especially in the American context. Those who abandon conservatism for counter-revolution are either fighting to reestablish America’s founding principles, or for a new founding based on new principles that will prove more resilient than those of 1776 and 1787. In the former case, there’s no functional difference between conservation and counter-revolution. Both are interchangeable terms describing the effort to make principles proclaimed in the 18th century work as well as they can in the 21st. In the latter case, the counter-revolutionaries need to explain why their principles are superior to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s. The failure to provide such an explanation would not only show an indecent disrespect for the opinions of mankind but vindicate fears that the counter-revolutionaries are no less enthused about chaos and averse to clarity about ultimate objectives than the revolutionaries they war against.
The central conservative impulse is that because valuable things are easy to break but hard to replace, every effort should be made to conserve them while they can be conserved. Conservatives, opposed to assisted suicide as a medical procedure, should be equally reluctant to perform it as a political procedure on a republic that, however debilitated, has time and again proven resilient, confounding those prepared to write its autopsies and deliver its eulogies.
Wise words from a wise man.