Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next.

If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

Whether they were wrong the first time or are wrong now, what matters is that conservatives rarely set aside immediate enthusiasms to discover why society changes in one way and not another — and what, if anything, they can do about it. They live in an eternal present that must be defended against a dreadful future. When that future inevitably arrives, it becomes the thing that must be defended against the next change. Changes keep happening, but conservatives remain the same. Some reactionaries reject every alteration, and that too is unserious. Why worry about what you are powerless to preserve or bemoan a defeat today when you know you already lost sixty or 600 years ago?