Against the Enlightenment idea of a society built on a social contract of free individuals, Burke celebrated the intergenerational character of social order. Every generation receives a civilizational inheritance from the distant past; its first duty is to steward that inheritance for the generations of the future. Against the specter of democratic individualism, Tocqueville describes the family and religion as bequests we receive from the aristocratic past. Both ask themselves, and their readers: How might we preserve and transform these precious elements of our inheritance from the pre-Enlightenment age so as to keep them vibrant in a world shaped by the Enlightenment’s individualistic principles — principles intended to unleash the energies of creative destruction?

A simply modern conservatism — a conservatism without Burke’s and Tocqueville’s appreciation of the elements of social order that predate the Enlightenment — has no positive vision to serve as a counterweight to the momentum of liberal individualism. A simply modern conservatism can aspire to nothing more than forever begging a dominant Left to pursue its efforts to escape from the past a bit more slowly.

Many on the new right perceive something like this. They are searching for principles that would allow them to propose an alternative direction to their society, rather than simply urging it to go in its current direction at a diminished speed.