It’s a dirty trick. The people who spent fifty years overturning old assumptions now accuse anyone who objects of being a radical. The accusation is repeated so often that it has almost become accepted without examination. But conservatism, properly understood, isn’t a radical philosophy. It’s almost the opposite. It’s an argument for restraint, continuity, ordered liberty, and respect for institutions that have survived because, more often than not, they contain wisdom we didn’t invent. There’s nothing radical about believing parents should have the principal role in raising their children.
There’s nothing radical about believing men and women are different, that borders ought to be enforced, that criminals ought to be prosecuted, that the government should live within some reasonable relationship to its means, or that citizens should be free to speak, worship, work, own property, and raise families without constant interference from Washington. Those weren’t fringe ideas when most of us were growing up. They were ordinary American assumptions.
What changed wasn’t conservatism. What changed was the country around it, and especially the institutions which shape our politics, culture, education, entertainment, and public life.
For years, the political Left has pushed one boundary after another. Each new demand was presented as modest. We were told that nobody wanted to go any farther. Then, once the new position was established, the next demand arrived, and anyone who still defended yesterday’s consensus was treated as though he had wandered in from some dark corner of history.
We’ve watched it happen on marriage, sex, and gender. Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage when he first ran for president. Hillary Clinton did too. That wasn’t considered radical or hateful at the time. But the argument didn’t stop with civil marriage. It moved into disputes over whether religious believers, bakers, photographers, adoption agencies, schools, and other institutions could be required to participate in conduct that violated their convictions.
Then came gender ideology. Americans were first asked to accept that sex and gender were separate concepts. Then we were told that men could become women. Then males began competing in women’s sports. Bathrooms, locker rooms, school policies, pronouns, and children’s education were pulled into the debate. People who said biological sex is real suddenly found themselves treated as if they were making some shocking new political claim. In truth, they were saying what nearly everyone in America had said without controversy a generation earlier.
Who radicalized whom?
The same thing happened with immigration. There was once broad agreement in both parties that a sovereign nation had a right to control its border, enforce its laws, deport people who entered illegally, and expect newcomers to assimilate into the country they chose to join. Democratic presidents said those things. Democratic senators voted for enforcement measures. None of it was considered extreme.
Over time, however, ordinary immigration enforcement came to be described as cruel. Deportation became morally suspect. Sanctuary cities grew to be fashionable. Illegal entry was often discussed as though it were merely an administrative inconvenience, while Americans who objected to millions of unlawful crossings were accused of fear, prejudice, or worse. Eventually, a demand for a secure border became the radical position.
Race followed much the same course. The great moral victory of the civil-rights movement was the rejection of the idea that Americans should be judged by the color of their skin. The aspiration was equal citizenship, equal protection, and a country in which race mattered less, not more. Yet over time, large parts of the Left moved away from that ideal and back toward racial categories, racial preferences, racial quotas, racial guilt, and the constant sorting of Americans into oppressors and victims according to ancestry and skin color. Then, we were told that colorblindness itself was suspect, that institutions should treat people differently in the name of correcting past wrongs, and that children should be taught to understand themselves through racial identity. Conservatives who still believe the law should treat every citizen as an individual, without favor or penalty because of race, are now sometimes described as the extremists. That’s an extraordinary reversal of the principle Americans were once taught to admire.
Crime followed the same path. Americans once understood that one of government’s first duties was to preserve order. Police were supposed to arrest criminals.
Prosecutors were supposed to prosecute them. Judges were supposed to impose sentences authorized by law. Then came campaigns to defund police departments, eliminate cash bail, decline prosecution of entire categories of offenses, reduce penalties, and treat enforcement itself as part of the problem.
People saw what followed in city after city. It’s becoming a nightmare. Stores locked ordinary merchandise behind plastic. Businesses closed. Families changed where they walked, shopped, and spent time. When voters finally demanded more police, more prosecution, and more accountability for repeat offenders, they were told they had moved to the extreme right. They hadn’t. They had simply grown tired of an experiment they never asked for.
Education has traveled the same road. Parents once assumed that sending a child to public school didn’t mean surrendering authority over that child’s moral upbringing. Then parents began discovering controversies over race, sexuality, gender identity, pronouns, school libraries, parental notification, and what teachers were able to discuss with young children. When mothers and fathers began showing up at school-board meetings and demanding answers, much of the political establishment acted as though the parents were the problem.
But the parents hadn’t suddenly changed. The institutions had.
The same is true of free speech. Older liberals once regarded free expression as almost sacred. They defended offensive speech because they understood that the First Amendment means very little if it protects only popular opinions. Somewhere along the way, that tradition weakened. Universities began shouting down speakers. Employees lost jobs over political opinions. Social media companies became more aggressive in policing disputed claims and political debate. Activists began describing speech itself as a kind of harm.
Conservatives responded by defending the old rule: let people speak. Let bad arguments be answered by better ones. Don’t give government, corporations, universities, or ideological mobs the power to decide what every American may say. Somehow, defending that older liberal principle became another mark of supposed right-wing radicalism.
Government has changed too. The national debt climbed into the tens of trillions. Trillion-dollar deficits became routine. Federal agencies accumulated extraordinary authority over subjects that previous generations would have considered local, private, or beyond Washington’s proper reach. Emergency powers expanded. Regulations multiplied. Unelected officials came to exercise tremendous influence over the daily lives of people who would never know their names.
Conservatives continued to make the same argument they had made for decades: government should spend less, borrow less, regulate less, and remain within the constitutional boundaries placed upon it. That position didn’t become more radical. Washington simply moved farther away from it.
Technology has made the problem even more obvious. Cameras can record license plates almost everywhere a person travels. Phones can reveal where we’ve been. Corporations accumulate vast amounts of information about our habits, purchases, interests, and movements.
Government possesses surveillance capabilities that earlier Americans could hardly have imagined. Yet when someone says a free people ought to be suspicious of all this, he is often dismissed as paranoid or anti-technology.
That suspicion isn’t new. It’s deeply American. The Founders were suspicious of concentrated power because they understood human nature. They didn’t believe good intentions were enough. Neither should we.
The pattern has become familiar. A longstanding social norm exists. Progressives challenge it and insist that the proposed change is limited. Conservatives resist and are told they’re overreacting. The change is adopted. Then the next demand arrives. The ground moves again.
Eventually conservatives stop retreating, organize serious resistance, and announce that there are some things they simply won’t surrender.
At that point, the resistance itself is called radical. That’s how political language gets turned upside down. It’s true that today’s conservative movement is angrier than it was twenty years ago. It’s more skeptical of universities, corporations, federal agencies, the national press, and even the Republican establishment. But that skepticism didn’t materialize out of thin air. People watched institutions they once trusted become increasingly hostile to their values. They watched political leaders promise one thing at election time and do another once safely back in office. They watched every compromise become the starting point for the next demand.
Eventually people noticed that compromise always seemed to move in the same direction. So they stopped moving.
That’s the part our critics refuse to understand. There is a difference between radicalism and reaction. If someone keeps moving the fence toward your house, defending your yard will eventually look aggressive to them. But you’re still standing in the same yard.
That is where a great many conservatives find themselves today. We aren’t asking America to commence upon some unprecedented social experiment. In most cases, we’re asking for things Americans took for granted within living memory: secure borders, equal treatment under the law, parental authority, recognition of biological reality, fiscal restraint, public safety, free speech, religious liberty, constitutional government, and a culture confident enough to defend its own inheritance.
For years, we were told to tolerate the changes. Then we were told to accept them. Then to celebrate them. Eventually we were told that refusing to participate in them was itself evidence of extremism.
Thankfully, some Americans have finally answered no. That doesn’t make them radicals. It may simply mean they have remembered where the line used to be, and decided they have retreated far enough.
Senator Chris McDaniel
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 