{"id":953,"date":"2026-07-12T07:07:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T07:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=953"},"modified":"2026-07-12T07:07:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T07:07:28","slug":"standing-athwart-despair-the-case-for-cheerful-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=953","title":{"rendered":"Standing Athwart Despair: The Case for Cheerful Conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For some years, I have kept a folder marked \u201cConservative Gloominess.\u201d It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be; harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives; despairing portraits of U.S. or European society. What\u2019s odd, or at least uncharacteristic, about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance\u2014to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there\u2014but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation.<\/p>\n

Read more Restoring Obscenity Regulation: Lessons From America\u2019s Founding Era<\/a><\/p>\n

From time immemorial, conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan<\/em>,\u00a0The Decline of the West<\/em>,\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than\u2014than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal\u2014that is, opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word \u201cliberal,\u201d Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called\u2014perhaps John Fonte\u2019s marvelous coinage \u201ctransnational progressives\u201d is best\u2014they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.<\/p>\n

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that \u201cthe essence of Toryism is enjoyment.\u201d What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that \u201cGod made the world and saw that it was good.\u201d Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important difference is the degree of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind\u2019s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I, for one, hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent bout of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess\u2014the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on\u2014much more difficult and much less satisfying. As a laborer in the vineyard, I speak feelingly on the subject.<\/p>\n

This brings me to the issue of truth. Conservatives are realists. They like to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde\u2019s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade unless it is explicitly outlawed, just as they prefer to call \u201caffirmative action\u201d \u201cdiscrimination according to race or sex,\u201d taxation \u201cgovernment-mandated income redistribution,\u201d and \u201cIslamophobia\u201d a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible \u201cmulticulturalists\u201d colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of his book Comeback: Conservatism that Can Win Again\u00a0<\/em>(2007), the commentator David Frum took issue with Russell Kirk\u2019s invocation of \u201cthe permanent things.\u201d \u201cHow few of those there really are!\u201d Frum writes. \u201cThe fact of change is the great fact of human life,\u201d he says, pleading with conservatives to \u201cadapt\u201d to change and retake the intellectual and political initiative.<\/p>\n

Some such rhetoric might be required on the hustings. But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0but merely\u00a0a<\/em>\u00a0great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one \u201cadapts\u201d more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. \u201cWhen it is not necessary to change,\u201d Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, \u201cit is necessary not to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Culture War Victories<\/a><\/p>\n

I recognize that \u201cchange,\u201d like its conceptual cousin \u201cinnovation,\u201d is one of the great watchwords of the modern age. But William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of\u00a0National Review\u00a0<\/em>in November 1955, that a large part of the magazine\u2019s mission was to \u201cstand athwart history, yelling Stop.\u201d It\u2019s rare to hear someone quote that famous line without a smile, the smile meaning, \u201cHe wasn\u2019t really against change, innovation, etc., etc.\u201d But I believe Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that, once upon a time, made National Review<\/em>\u00a0unzeitgem\u00e4sse<\/em>, or \u201cuntimely\u201d in the highest sense of the word.\u00a0National Review<\/em>, Buckley wrote, \u201cis out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and Henry Steele Commager are\u00a0in<\/em>\u00a0place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The late Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In an essay titled \u201cWhy You Should Be a Conservative,\u201d which deserves to be better known than it is, he rehearses the familiar scenario:<\/p>\n

[BLOCK]A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.<\/p>\n

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a \u201creform\u201d proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, \u201creform.\u201d[END]<\/p>\n

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that \u201creform\u201d so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed. The great Victorian Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that \u201cthe melancholy, long, withdrawing roar\u201d of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating \u201cremnant\u201d of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them\u2014but so did that enabling remnant. Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a \u201csaving remnant\u201d large and vital enough to become \u201can actual\u201d power that could stem the tide of anarchy. I hope he was right.<\/p>\n

Read more The 2026 Midterm Vigil (No. 2): The Democrats\u2019 \u2018Failure to Miscommunicate\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some years, I have kept a folder marked \u201cConservative Gloominess.\u201d It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nStanding Athwart Despair: The Case for Cheerful Conservatism - Urban Economy news<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=953\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Standing Athwart Despair: The Case for Cheerful Conservatism - 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