TRUE CONSERVATISM

A deeply nuanced view of conservatism as a disciplined guardian of traditions and institutions deserving of “attention and care.”

Forget MAGA: It has nothing to do with the conservatism of Friedrich Hayek, Edmund Burke, or Baruch Spinoza. But forget humanism as a progressive might see it, too—as an all-embracing egalitarianism, that is. Former Yale law dean Kronman picks up themes he developed in his earlier books Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan and especially The Assault on American Excellence to announce traditionalist tenets that, in their way, have a radical tinge to them. A “truer conservatism,” he writes, centers on a belief in the value of the past, of the “connection to the eternal and divine,” of honoring the dead, and of recognizing that not all things are equal: Some things are rarer and finer than others, and some people have talents and abilities that are superior to others’. The last twig is perhaps the thorniest, for, going back to the Greeks, Kronman insists that equality as the primary value “denies the ancient truth that freedom is for the sake of excellence, not the other way around.” This, he adds, does not rule out the desirability of equality of opportunity or the law; still, his view comports with the distinctly nonprogressive one that, as de Tocqueville feared, we are destined to a culture (a loaded word, that) of mediocrity in a time when “the splendid and rare” are put on a par with the everyday and shabby. Forever looking back to Aristotle, Cicero, Nietzsche, and other stalwarts, Kronman’s conservatism has points in common with libertarianism and classical liberalism, if with more emphasis—again, nuanced—on religion. Yet his traditionalism, shunning “enlightened biases,” is subtly distinct from dominant schools such as judicial originalism, which he derides: “Originalists may support conservative positions—that is debatable—but they certainly do not do so for conservative reasons.”

Rigorous and philosophically demanding, Kronman’s book invites principled argument from every side.