Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what conservatism means. I mean what it means to be a conservative thinker today. I don’t consider that I am one, so I checked around to see who is. Historically, Edmund Burke, John Adams, Thomas Carlyle. In economics Adam Smith and later Milton Freedman and the Chicago School and Friedrich Hayek on the libertarian spectrum. William F. Buckley and many others I don’t know.
I understand that conservative thinkers honor tradition, which today means institutions like the nuclear family and its wider implications, formal religion and its beliefs and practices. They honor a duly enacted constitution and the rule of law it entails. Tradition for some of these thinkers may extend to a hereditary monarchy with its aristocracy, but even these hopefully acknowledge it has evolved to expect free and fair elections in government.
All this seems comprehensible to someone who sees herself as a progressive liberal, but where I have trouble is when tradition becomes rigid and can’t grow and change with the evolution of world experience. And things have changed. Slavery has been abolished, though forced labor and exploitation continue. Women in almost all countries have the legal right to vote, to hold property and to obtain a divorce. Many countries have laws and regulations to protect and guarantee the rights of citizens to vote freely. Labor has legal rights and protections. All these are legal changes that have evolved out of traditional practices of government.
There are other rights that have evolved legally – reproductive rights (though these are starting to be whittled away), same-sex marriage and a few laws protecting transgender rights – although these are clearly still on the fringes of acceptance. I have only the slightest acquaintance and understanding of Project 2025, but what I have seen speaks of restoring the sanctity of the nuclear family, dismantling the administrative state, defending the borders and securing “God-given” individual rights to live freely. And a free use of the Vesting Clause to justify a position the writers call “Unitary Executive.”
The trouble is this agenda runs slam into the evolution of historical experience. Human beings have moved beyond the nuclear family, and most of what conservatives dislike in the federal government has evolved to support the evolution of human experience – the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Voting Rights Act, and more. All this is what conservatives label “woke.” To me, DEI is the prize of this evolution. We no longer can recognize some people as naturally more privileged than others and the axiom that all you need is the right attitude and hard work to get to the top. Not if you’re not white.
As a nation built of immigrants, though historically many have struggled, we respect them, or say we do. Not any more. Personally I find the goal of returning to a white, Christian nation an enormous and terrifying step backward, and as the present administration pushes forward the 2025 agenda it’s becoming more brazen about what those goals entail: a brutal disregard for human beings and for difference of background and skin color.
Conservatives have a right to their personal beliefs: they don’t have a right to force them on other people. Accepting differences, I think, is really the foundation of democracy, but wait – conservatives don’t seem to want democracy. Some seem to want to jump four or five centuries back to the divine right of kings!
My real fear is that these conservatives, who believe in and honor tradition, which to me means the Constitution and the rule of law, are twisting and mauling those very institutions to achieve their ends. Summarily blocking a Supreme Court nominee and then, in similar circumstances, forcing through another. Disregarding the constitutional laws governing redistricting in their determination – and fear of the response to what they’ve already done? – to expand Republican control of Congress. Arresting and incarcerating without access to a lawyer any person of color they feel they can manage to remove from this country. Extorting and blackmailing their way into education to force an unenlightened agenda into schools, colleges and universities.
Tradition and conservative values mean honoring precedent that has been formally and legally established. Playing by the rules of the game. They don’t sanction or authorize thuggish, autocratic actions to get your way willy-nilly on the backs of people. The evolution of human experience and thought can’t be stopped by clinging to traditions that in many cases have been irrevocably modified. Surely Edmund Burke and John Adams would agree.
Kathy Gregg lives in Amherst.