In what was surely the most compelling speech of the decade, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared that the United States “has lost its civil courage.” Another way of saying this would be that America has lost the courage of its convictions. But it is impossible to have the courage of our convictions unless we have our convictions, and these we seem to have lost. It should not come as a surprise that we find it difficult to decide what America ought to do in the world, since we can hardly know what we want or need until we know what we are.
American conservatism is in the same boat. Conservatism presupposes that there is something worth conserving—but we can hardly know what to conserve without knowing what America is and what it stands for. To be sure, no one can justly accuse conservatism of having lived an unexamined life over the past forty years. But a political movement cannot form itself around a Socratic declaration of ignorance, however ironic (though in 1972 the Democrats almost succeeded). A political movement cannot philosophize, but a decent one has need of philosophy. In his great book on the Ancien Regime, Tocqueville observes that it is altogether understandable for a badly governed nation to desire to govern itself instead. “But a desire for independence of this kind, stemming as it does from a specific, removable cause … is bound to be short-lived,” he writes. “Once the circumstances giving rise to it have passed away, it languishes and what at first sight seemed a genuine love of liberty proves to have been merely hatred of a tyrant.”
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