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Conservativism, conservatives

Sunday 29th of March 2026

Conservatism Conservatism is to a large extent self-eroding. A philosophy that (rightly) salutes enterprise will not attract enough people who want to serve in the culture-shaping institutions. Sure enugh, the culture becomes less and less conservative. This problem is all the more acute in the US,  where conservatism so exalts the profit motive that it is itself an industry. Burning away in the Republican gut is a historic grievance. Even as the “movement” achieved electoral  success over half a century, the texture of life in the country went the other way.  Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 31, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Conservatism What passes for “conservatism” now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then. Today, what passes for the worldview of  “the right” is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or  Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism. The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me then has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression. David Brooks, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 [“then” is the 1980s] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Maybe you do not care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. David Frum, Trumpocracy © 2018 Kwiple.com
Conservatives No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals — the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once and a while they have allowed a piece of the cat's anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books, August 16, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Postwar American conservatism, like it counterparts in Europe, understood security as having five dimensions: “national security,” “law and order,” religious and cultural continuity, economic stability for most workers, and regulation for safer products and a less dangerous environment. … To put it crudely, the story of American conservatism since the 1980s is the narrowing of the idea of security by stripping away these last two dimensions and upping the ante on the other three. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Yet the “optimistic conservatism” of the fin de siècle [Anne Applebaum's term for 1990s Republicans] was the outlook that brought us the invasion of Iraq, the legitimation of torture,  and the unprecedented, unconstitutional expan-  sion of executive power under Bush and Cheney. In league with liberal interventionists, these “energetic, reformist, and generous” conservatives [Applebaum's description] ushered in the calamitous policy of regime change – a euphemism that conflates imperial ambition with “ambition to share [American] democracy with the rest of the world.” In this context, sharing is a bad joke. The regime changers are in effect saying, You know you want to be like us, and if you don't, we have the guns to persuade you. Jackson Lears, NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 14, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives say It could always be worse © 2018 Kwiple.com
Conservatives say It's always been that way © 2018 Kwiple.com
Conservatives say Stand athwart history, yelling Stop,  at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. William F. Buckley, Jr., National Review, November 19, 1955 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Pseudo-conservatives The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition. Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt—1954” © 2020 Kwiple.com