What Do We Mean When We Say We’re Conservative?

David Brooks, Edmund Burke, my politically mismatched family, and why left versus right doesn’t tell the whole story

For several years, when someone has told me they are a conservative, I have sometimes responded with a question:

“What kind of conservative? Reagan/Goldwater conservative or MAGA conservative?”

I ask because those seem like very different things to me.

I have always thought of the Reagan/Goldwater tradition as emphasizing limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, personal responsibility, constitutional government and a strong national defense. MAGA conservatism seems different—more populist, more distrustful of institutions and elites, more nationalistic, and much more willing to disrupt the existing order.

Recently, however, I listened to a conversation with David Brooks at Harvard that made me wonder whether I have been asking the wrong—or at least an incomplete—question.

Brooks talked about Edmund Burke.

And Burke gave me another way of thinking about conservatism.

What exactly are conservatives trying to conserve?

Burke's conservatism was not primarily a checklist of policy positions. It was a way of thinking about society and change.

Human institutions are imperfect because human beings are imperfect. But institutions that have developed over generations often contain wisdom and experience that we don't completely understand. Therefore, when something isn't working, the conservative impulse should generally be to understand it, preserve what is valuable, and carefully reform what is broken.

That doesn't mean resisting all change.

Quite the opposite. Institutions sometimes have to change in order to survive.

But Burke was deeply suspicious of the idea that we can tear down complicated social institutions and simply design better ones from scratch.

Brooks described his own conservatism in similar terms. He distinguished the conservatism he grew up with—a conservatism based on affection for American traditions and institutions—from a conservatism increasingly organized around opposition to the left.

That distinction got my attention.

Maybe the question isn't simply whether someone is conservative.

Maybe the better question is:

When you say you're conservative, what exactly is it that you want to conserve?

Then I started thinking about people I know

That's when my neat political categories started falling apart.

I have a good friend who considers himself both a Christian and a conservative. He is an elder in a Southern Baptist church.

If you stopped there, you might think you knew quite a bit about his politics.

Except his family is deeply invested in public education. He, his wife, his three children and two of their spouses have connections to public education. His church's associate pastor, who handles the church's business affairs, also serves as mayor of the town and is known as a builder rather than a divider.

My friend has told me that their loyalty to public education and the civic involvement of church leaders have contributed to their church being regarded as relatively “liberal” within their Southern Baptist surroundings.

I find that fascinating.

What is particularly liberal about supporting the school that educates your community's children? What is unconservative about a pastor serving his community as a mayor who tries to bring people together?

Through a Burkean lens, those things look surprisingly conservative.

Church. Family. School. Local government. Community.

These are the institutions that hold a society together.

Then there are my children

My daughter has been a public-school educator for 20 years and teaches social studies and psychology.

If you asked her, she would probably call herself a liberal. Socially, she certainly is.

But when I look beyond particular social issues, I see something different. She believes in institutions. She works within them. She believes public schools are worth improving rather than abandoning. Her instincts about government and society are often much more reformist than revolutionary.

In that sense, my liberal daughter may have a surprisingly Burkean political temperament.

My son is almost the mirror image.

Politically, he is far to her left. He is anti-capitalist, socialist and perhaps even somewhat anarchist in temperament. He is strongly environmentalist.

His inclination toward institutions he believes are fundamentally unjust is not to preserve them.

It's closer to:

Burn it down and build something better.

Then there is my older sister.

She is on almost the opposite end of the conventional political spectrum from my son. She is firmly MAGA in political outlook, although, interestingly, she despises Donald Trump personally.

Her instinct toward institutions she believes have become corrupt is also:

Burn it down.

And that's when something clicked for me.

My socialist son and my MAGA sister would probably disagree about almost everything concerning what a better society should look like.

But they may agree about something deeper:

The existing system is so fundamentally broken that incremental reform isn't enough.

Different diagnosis.

Different villains.

Very different destination.

But a surprisingly similar attitude toward the existing order.

Meanwhile, my socially liberal daughter and my conservative Baptist friend might disagree about plenty of policy questions while sharing another instinct:

Our institutions are imperfect, but they are valuable. Work within them. Fix what is broken. Preserve what works.

Our traditional political spectrum doesn't capture that.

Maybe politics needs two axes

We usually imagine politics as a single line:

Left ←————————————→ Right

That tells us something important.

It tells us something about what kind of society a person wants.

But perhaps we need another axis:

Preserve & Reform

↑

│

│

↓

Disrupt & Replace

That produces four very different political temperaments:

	Left / Progressive	Right / Conservative
Preserve & Reform	Progressive Reformers	Burkean Conservatives
Disrupt & Replace	Left Radicals	Right Populists

Suddenly some of the strange alliances and divisions in American politics make more sense.

People can disagree about where society should go while agreeing about how democratic change should occur.

And people can vote for the same candidates while possessing fundamentally different ideas about institutions, restraint, compromise and political power.

Perhaps we have been paying too much attention to the horizontal axis and not nearly enough to the vertical one.

Where does that leave me?

I describe myself as a right-leaning moderate and an independent.

But even that description doesn't tell you very much.

I am pro-environment, although I'll admit that my commitment hasn't required a great deal of personal sacrifice.

I consider myself pro-life, but I also believe another person's choice is largely none of my business.

I believe we have a responsibility to support and nourish our neighbors.

I believe there is far too much money in American politics and that money inevitably creates opportunities for corruption. I think meaningful campaign-finance reform would be a good place to begin addressing that problem.

I love and support my gay and lesbian friends and would welcome them in my church. At the same time, I remain uncomfortable with same-sex marriage being performed in my church. I would have no problem with my pastor choosing to officiate a civil union outside the church.

You may agree with those positions.

You may disagree with every one of them.

That's almost beside the point.

What I've realized while thinking through all of this is that there is another principle underneath them.

I can have convictions about how I should live without believing everyone else must be required to live according to all of my convictions.

That's pluralism.

And perhaps pluralism deserves its own place in our understanding of political temperament.

Which brings me to Christianity

This becomes particularly important because of the growing discussion of Christian nationalism.

I am a Christian. My faith inevitably influences the way I think about politics, morality and my obligations to other people.

I don't know how it couldn't.

But there is an important distinction between saying:

“My Christianity should shape the way I participate in society.”

and saying:

“Political power should be used to make society conform to my Christianity.”

Those aren't the same thing.

This is where Brooks's larger argument became particularly meaningful to me.

He argues that healthy societies are repaired in roughly this order:

Cultural → Civic → Political.

In other words, politicians usually don't create the moral vision that repairs a society. Culture changes first. People develop different ways of living. Communities and civic institutions embody those values. Politics eventually follows.

That suggests a very different role for Christianity than simply capturing political power.

The church forms people.

Those people become parents, teachers, business owners, volunteers, neighbors, mayors and voters.

Their faith influences the way they treat other people and the institutions they serve.

Christianity changes society because Christians live differently within society—not merely because Christians gain enough votes to control it.

That distinction seems especially important right now.

Burke versus “burn it down”

None of this means Burke was always right.

“Preserve and reform” can become an excuse for tolerating injustice.

There are institutions that should have been destroyed. American slavery is the most obvious example. There are moments when incremental reform is morally inadequate.

And populists are sometimes right about institutional failure.

Universities can become insulated.

Government agencies can become bureaucratic and unaccountable.

Corporations can abuse power.

Political systems can become corrupted by money.

Experts can become arrogant.

Public institutions can lose the trust of the people they are supposed to serve.

The Burkean response cannot simply be:

Trust the institution.

Institutions have to earn and maintain trust.

But the opposite response—destroy institutions because they have disappointed us—carries its own enormous danger.

The question becomes one of judgment:

Is this institution fundamentally illegitimate, or is it an imperfect institution worth repairing?

That may be one of the most important political questions of our time.

Maybe I've been asking the wrong question

So I think I am going to retire—or at least modify—my old question.

When someone tells me they're conservative, instead of immediately asking whether they're a Reagan/Goldwater conservative or a MAGA conservative, I might ask:

“What do you think conservatives should conserve?”

And maybe I'll follow it with another:

“When an institution you care about is failing, do you want to repair it or replace it?”

But those questions shouldn't only be asked of conservatives.

I should ask my liberal friends the same thing.

And my socialist friends.

And myself.

Because perhaps understanding someone's politics requires at least three questions:

What kind of society do you want?

How do you believe we should get there?

And how much room are you willing to leave for your neighbor to disagree with you?

The first question helps locate us somewhere between left and right.

The second tells us whether our instinct is to preserve and reform or disrupt and replace.

But increasingly, I think the third may be the most important.

Because a functioning democracy doesn't require us to agree.

It requires us to live together when we don't.

And perhaps the most important thing worth conserving is our ability to do exactly that.