Damon Linker's category error

Here’s Damon’s definition:

The [conservative] impulse is toward protecting something that exists so that it might persist and even thrive into the future. In that respect, conservatism isn’t a destructive impulse or even a reformist one. It wants to keep things in our world (or some specific things within that world) as they are.

This isn’t wrong, per se; it’s more of a “yes, but” or even a “yes, and” situation. We should preface this by saying that conservatives themselves have been debating the definition of conservatism from time immemorial. “There is nothing more quintessentially conservative than debating the meaning of conservatism,” I noted in the American Mind back in July. “In his 1964 essay, ‘Notes Towards an Empirical Definition of Conservatism; Reluctantly and Apologetically Given,’ William F. Buckley admitted that he had ‘never failed to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning of conservatism.’ Richard Weaver’s consciously obtuse definition of conservatism — ‘a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation’ — was itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ultimate futility of defining the term.”

The reason that the meaning of “conservative” is subject to controversy is at least partially because there are many kinds of conservatives with many different ideas of what that specifically entails. Damon’s brief outline of the term may capture a certain genre — Michael Oakeshott’s preference for “the familiar to the unknown” and “the tried to the untried,” for example — but it’s incomplete. Conservatism isn’t merely the impulse to “keep things in our world (or some specific things within that world) as they are”; in practice, it is, in fact, often a “reformist” impulse and, even occasionally, a “destructive” one. (Remember that Ronald Reagan ran on closing down the Department of Education!) Conservation actually requires adaptation and change. As Edmund Burke put it, “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation.”