On being a conservative liberal

That made me an unusual conservative once I became one (in graduate school). I had no real attraction to the surging, striving form of American conservatism that leads some to lament decadence and stagnation or to propose schemes that might inspire greater economic and cultural dynamism. It placed me miles away from Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of Thomas Paine’s line about how it’s possible and desirable to “begin the world over again.” (That quintessentially American sentiment has always struck me as delusional and potentially dangerous.)

My resistance to change also left me suspicious of narratives of decline, whether they came from the religious right or the heated imagination of would-be gurus of renewal like Peter Thiel. “National Greatness Conservatism” inspired an eye roll when it was popular among neoconservatives in the late 1990s, as did Donald Trump’s promise, nearly two decades later, to “Make America Great Again.”

Greatness? Meh.

In place of restless political, economic, and cultural striving, I longed for what a character in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” describes as “peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams.” Oakeshott’s words sounded to me like such a goal. A place of rest. Constancy. Contentment. Stability. Reaching it, and then holding onto it. Preserving it against the ravages of change.