"Yes, liberalism is seriously incomplete as a model of social order." But I would push back and submit this is by design. Classical liberalism is being criticized for failing to do something it never set out to do. Classical liberalism is intended as a political philosophy, a philosophy of government, not a complete model of social order. It never sought to nurture or mold thymos. This is expressed well in Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, which I will quote here at length:
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
Good government closes the circle of our felicities. It is not itself the complete circle. Culture and religion comprise the bulk of the circle. Government is just the "one thing more." Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..." It is government by Wu Wei.
In this system, thymos is the province of the people. It is the people and cultural and religious institutions of the West, not the political philosophy of classical liberalism, that have failed. They have failed because they have become captured by weak and wicked people and evil ideas. There is simply no political solution to this cultural problem. A country with a rotten culture and rotten ruling class will never be a good country, regardless of the form of government.
You are, however, 100% correct in your attack on status quo conservatism. The unholy alliance between status quo conservatives and progressives is the worst of all worlds. The progressives have seized the levers of political power and actively pulled those levers to erode the culture, with the status quo conservatives aiding and abetting them every step of the way.
So the issue is: Should we become social order conservatives and take back the levers of political power to use the progressive playbook against them, i.e. use tax revenue and deficit spending to attempt top down social reengineering of the culture?
Or should we recommit to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers and destroy those levers, once again ceding the development of character to the individual, the family, the church, the community, and other independent institutions?
We can call this the Boromir/Aragorn debate:
Boromir: "Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the Steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe! Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him!"
Aragorn: "You cannot wield it! None of us can. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. It has no other master."
(yes, I know going to LOTR to support my classical liberal leanings is cliche, and I know the ring has deeper meaning beyond the political, but it's just a good metaphor).
It seems to me that the case for social order conservatism relies somewhat on progressive thinking, setting as a baseline an imagined future in which upright and moral leaders undo decades of cultural degradation and engineer a society of character. But top down social engineering can only destroy character, it cannot build it. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. Also, given the fickleness of electoral politics, all levers that remain in place can and will be used by lunatics to degrade culture if and when the progressives regain their electoral footing.
So I say: cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom (which is in real life a never-ending battle rather than a single act), return to the Shire, kick out the foreign invaders, improve yourself, get married, have kids, run for local office, get involved in your local church, start a local chapter of Turning Points USA, create new cultural institutions to replace the rotten old ones. There is no political solution to the cultural chaos, other than to destroy the political mechanisms that foment the chaos. There are only cultural solutions, which must rise from the bottom up instead of the top down. The government must simply return to its basic function of providing personal security and otherwise leave development of the culture to the people.
Also, don't try to occupy Mordor. The orc strongholds cannot be defeated. They must be left to their own devices and prevented from encroaching upon healthy communities. Containment, not direct confrontation. Conservative communities must become shining cities on a hill that blue city residents look at with envy and over time seek to emulate.
Thank you, Mr. Warby, for consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking.
You could pair that with the brief Adams line: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Now, I personally chafe at the need for religion, but I can't deny that a society without it is going to fall apart.
But it appears that not just any "religion" will do, either. It would seem, following Tom Holland, Larry Siedentop, and others, that the cultural heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the resulting attitude towards humanity (all men are created equal; or equal in "human dignity"?) is a core element of our ideas behind both (classical) liberalism and our preference for a republican form of governance.
If morality is a mix of genetic instincts and cultural development (as I believe it is), it is also interesting to reflect on the content of many religious scriptures exploring and summarizing humankind's understanding of human nature, based on experience from the prior few thousand years of "civilization" and "mass society".
Yeah, the thing is that conceit was smuggled into Christianity by John Locke (long after the Reformation), not from Calvin or Luther, and certainly not from Catholic tradition or Judaism.
I would respectfully ask you to expand on that. Perhaps I am not yet educated enough or have misunderstood, but I thought it was the Jews (Hebrews?) who said man was created in the image* of G-d; and that Paul said something about male and female are equal in the eyes of Jesus and God?
Siedentop in turn cites 1) the selection of abbots by the monks in monasteries as an early form of "consent of the governed" and 2) the Western (and maybe common) law tradition growing out of the Church's initial work on canon law 1100ff AD.
But perhaps the real test was when slavery was finally outlawed in the West: Britain 1833? US 1865. Etc. While the distaff side still had to wait until 1922, at least at the US federal level.
*Some have proposed the reverse, that God was created in the image of man; and perhaps thus that man was created in the image of these guys: The First Humans After The Human-Chimp Split https://youtu.be/7Wq6XqyqQ34 :-)
Let's start from the beginning (so to speak). Judaism (the OT) posits God is the God of Israel, not of everyone. So no universal belief about equality of all men there, and we'll leave aside the injunctions dealing with treatment of slaves (since that is obviously problematic, and was useful to the Christian slave-holders of the Antebellum South - ya'll see this here God's word about slaves).
The Church (i.e. Catholic Church) was quite comfortable with the feudal order following the fall of the Roman Empire. It was Church doctrine until Vatican II that the ideal was the Confessor State (civil authority conjoined to Church authority) and that "error has no rights". If you can tease out a sense of human rights from that theology, or independent of it but acceptable to the Church you are a better man than I.
Lorenzo has gone to some length on how Roman law was preserved in the Church, so there is that - civil law as opposed to law from revelation. And, that dates back to pagan Rome - so nothing God-given there.
Now, the Magna Carta does talk about rights - rooted in custom and ancient tradition. And of course those were baronial rights against the power of the crown, only. That isn't inconsequential, but it doesn't scratch the itch we have here.
The Reformation (building on the Renaissance) opened up the intellectual ferment that would culminate in the Enlightenment, and that is where we really get into rights as we think of them. We get both equality and individualism and those are the building blocks of rights. Locke really is the philosopher that looked at rights as a "natural" thing, but still obviously sourced from God as the author of Creation. This then translates into our Declaration of Independence which may be the strongest source document on the subject. Kind of a weird twist, isn't it?
I tend to think that it was a clever trick to take the notion of Calvin that all are equally wicked in God's sight (save the pre-destined Elect) and turn that into we are all equal in God's eyes. And from that, we should have a set of civil rights in a secular government.
The Catholic Church was obviously against intellectual freedom—hence error has no rights. But it did have a concept of natural rights, coming from Greek thought applied to the monotheist notion of a universal moral order.
Much of what you are saying is correct in the chronological sense of how Christianity developed, but I still want to disagree. I would argue that is was Paul who created Christianity as a universal religion. It is doubtful that Jesus, or his brother James, and the apostles left in Jerusalem after Jesus death felt the same way, which explains the fallout between Paul and the others. In very simple terms Jesus and the apostles believed the way to the Kingdom of God was through works, Paul believed in salvation through faith alone. It is the belief in faith alone that opened up Christianity to universal belief.
"Lorenzo has gone to some length on how Roman law was preserved in the Church, so there is that - civil law as opposed to law from revelation. And, that dates back to pagan Rome - so nothing God-given there."
Yes, but one of the problems explained by Siedentop in the development of canon law was the fundamental difference in Roman law that did not recognize equality. Indeed the Romans believed the exact opposite: that there existed a natural inequality between men. The problem this generated was the inability to generalize across different but similar cases. Canon Law was able to generate general principles of law precisely because of the belief in equality.
I am not myself a believing Christian either. I am an apostate from the godless church of progressivism. I believe restoring reverence for the Western Canon, of which Christianity is of course a substantial part, and rejecting the postmodern progressive nonsense that has taken over during the course of the last century or so, would be sufficient to restore the traditional values that are necessary for a healthy republic as envisioned by Jefferson.
Great comment, and thanks for the Jefferson inaugural.
"... Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..."
And yet, partly or largely promoted by Jefferson, we have historically sought to rely on governmentally supplied schools to inculcate those values of character and responsibility in our children. While there was a time when such character building was augmented by parental and other adult behavior and example, it now appears the progressive program to devalue real education and critical thinking with indoctrination has led to poor support from our educational establishment.
Ditto on your final comment to Lorenzo on "consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking."
Education is an interesting case study in this respect. It is perhaps the most destructive weapon wielded by the progressives. Their take on the matter is captured well by Randi Weingarten's latest book, "Why Fascists Fear Teachers." Her framing is of course absurd. A more accurate framing would be "Why Classical Liberals and Conservatives Oppose Radical Leftist Indoctrination in Schools." But the point is the progressives aggressively seek to wield public education as a tool for teaching kids to oppose "fascism," by which they mean anyone to the right of Ibrahm X. Kendi.
This is a good issue for examining the Aragorn/Boromir, Social Order Conservative/Classical Liberal debate. You are correct that Jefferson's early and eager support for public education undermines to some extent my argument that development of character is outside the realm of government in the classical liberal view. But I think I can reconcile this.
The Social Order Conservative position on this issue would be to take over the education institutions and reshape them to teach traditional Western values and a classical Western education, in the same way the progressives seized those institutions and have used them to indoctrinate a generation of kids into woke ideology, gay race communism, critical theory, or whatever you want to call it.
The Classical Liberal approach in my view is encapsulated by the school choice movement. Give parents choices regarding the education of their children and let market competition decide.
Notably, Weingarten in her book appears to single out the school choice movement as the greatest threat to the progressive movement with respect to education. She says in an interview:
"In the book, I stress that today’s universal voucher movement is a direct outgrowth of white fear about upending segregation and the desire of white parents to get government funding to pay for private, racially-segregated schools. Although I made race a central focus of the book, I also wanted to address sexuality since the fear-mongering by the right has been extreme, with [President Donald] Trump and others making false claims about schools turning daughters into sons and vice versa." https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/randi-weingarten-on-why-fascists-fear-teachers-bader-20250915/
She doesn't seem to fear conservatives taking control of the levers of educational influence nearly so much as she seems to fear a decentralized system that empowers parents and enables development of parallel institutions. This makes me think this latter approach is more over the target.
Weingarten knows educational institutions as currently constituted are firmly progressive turf. If conservatives pass laws or create new curriculums emphasizing traditional values and classical education (as in Florida), the lessons will still be taught by overwhelmingly radical leftists. "Ok, class, today we're going to examine themes of misogyny, patriarchy, and white supremacy in Homer's Odyssey." "Ok, class, today we're going to examine the racist motives behind the American Revolution." There is no way social order conservatives can change the culture of the teaching profession from the top down. The terrain is too advantageous for the enemy.
Instead, the classical liberal approach is the way forward - move the locus of discretion (to use Thomas Sowell's terminology) from educational institutions to parents. Empowering parents will then enable development of new conservative institutions and over time diminish the power and influence of the woke madrassas and the top-down institutions that administer them. Woke madrassas will still remain in the blue cities. But, again, containment is the only realistic response. Ultimately, the classical liberal "wu wei" approach is the more realistic means of achieving the social order conservative goals.
The trouble with the school choice argument is (1) a lot of US parents hate it as they do not want ghetto kids sitting next to their child and (2) there are plenty of deeply “woke” private schools. While the unnaccountable classes educate teachers, control teacher and school accreditation and curricula, all the school choice in the world will not solve the problem.
I wonder whether school choice increases or decreases segregation. Weingarten apparently believes the entire motive of the school choice movement is white parents wanting to get their kids away from ghetto kids. I know my woke family members who are active in public education see school choice as an existential threat to their social engineering agenda. So right or wrong, the progressives believe school choice would result in less racial diversity in schools
How it plays out depends on local dynamics. It can generate pressure for better school performance. It seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient, measure.
Two things that jumped out from this excellent article. One moving authority to bureaucracies removes the feedback loop of voting and the people . 2 errors have no rights. That is absolutely beautifully said we have reached a place in society where to “error” is to strip you of all possible rights. This is to assumed one has errored in the first place.
I do see one issue with conservatism, though. The political left often presents an 'inspiring' vision of a utopian future—one that promises to satisfy envy by ensuring no one is better off than others, make life achievements independent of individual ability (in the name of equity), and guarantee a comfortable living regardless of merit. The path to this vision, they claim, requires dismantling the current society and capitalism. Fortunately, they are only in the early stages—primarily focused on denigrating the present and the past. There is still no discussion about what will happen to those who disagree once redistribution begins for real, rather than just cancellations and struggle sessions.
The challenge for the political right is to offer an equally inspiring movement. The conservative message—that progress is gradual and requires effort—is a much harder sell than the left’s promise that utopia will arrive if we simply silence (or eliminate) those pesky conservatives. After all, conservatives are seen as sinners against all Critical Theories, so it must be their fault. What could possibly go wrong?
Eric Hoffer was right: to defeat a charismatic movement, one needs a more charismatic movement. The question is whether conservatism can rise to that challenge. Will MAGA suffice?
Absolutely brilliant! I hope this paper has an exceptionally wide readership among the elite audience who matters. It’s far too intellectually rigorous to go viral, of course, but I have done everything I can to circulate it among my circle.
I read the article you linked, the 'Duel of Honor', which I found both fascinating and instructive. And I am wondering whether a similar test of character could not be devised that did not involve possible loss of life. A game based on the same odds of losing (I believe 1-2%) that entailed giving up all one's worldly possessions to charity?
Anyway, it was a great article, thanks for the link.
An easy one would be to force anyone who makes a prediction to place a bet based on that prediction. The inventive of public intellectuals is to always to make sensational and contrarian think pieces.
Your explication (and exclamation) against the ills and errors of progressivism is glorious:
"If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work."
When it comes to Plato [and it is amazing to me how readily I recognize the names of the big name philosophers but have never found the time to delve at all deeply into their ideas - only a very surface level of understanding. Shame on me?!]:
"Plato’s tripartite division of the psyche into the rational, the appetitive and the spirited (aka thymos). The first two liberalism grapples with: the last, not so much." As I have struggled to understand the mind set of people of faith, given my nonreligious upbringing and other study, I have postulated an evolution of a dual psyche with "modules" for rationality and reasoning, and for faith and transcendence. I can accept arguments that both of these features aided cooperation and early hominid species survivability, so are part of emergence from biology to society.
Could Plato's tripartite ideas lead to a trifold (or multifold) set of evolved psychological modules, each contributing "something" to our evolution?
Anglo conservatism was killed by Thatcher. Previously, from Disraeli until Edward Heath, conservatives acknowledged a common good that Included the working classes. Thatcher's triage ensured that the only politics possible on the right was free-market extremism. Perfect for globaly mobile capital, but fundamentally incompatible with a stable, settled, society of any kind.
In any case, the political economy of the Anglo states no longer supports social stability. The extant model assumes population replacement via mass migration. It increasingly restricts opportunities for family formation to the well-off. It aims for full spectrum atomisation for the sub-elite.
And why would investors in gilt-edged securities need a stable Britain? The masses can always be kept in line by the constabulary supported, as necessary, by auxiliaries from minority communities. The South Asian Ikhwhan and the sharia courts.
The lack of a language of social cohesion meant that dealing with economic stagnation became a one-sided game. If your notion of social action is either the state or “the market” then one is stuck in a policy loop. I have written elsewhere that the neoliberal policy regime is running out of puff because of the issues it does not manage to deal with. As the preceding social democratic policy regime similarly did.
Yes, clearly the current social strategy of the British elite is much as you say. Whether they can make it work is another matter.
Wetlands, like bottomland forests, support a lot of wildlife. Why expel them from your version of the past - unless life is distasteful to you? Doesn’t much matter what you call it.
They are what they are regardless of how you call them. Swamp reminds us that there are issues with them, wetlands turns them into touchie-feelie icons.
I remain unconvinced by the case for social order conservatism. Political discourse vastly overweights social cohesion relative to other values that people actually prioritize in their lived decisions.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, over the past hundred years literally billions of people abandoned towns and villages characterized by lower inequality, reduced crime, and stronger social bonds to pursue urban life featuring greater inequality, higher crime rates, and atomization. People may claim to value social order, but actions speak louder than words.
People demonstrate greater rationality when voting with their feet than when voting at the ballot box. Migration patterns represent the ultimate feedback mechanism—people consistently choose dynamism over stability, opportunity over security, and individual advancement over communal solidarity.
I don't see evidence that the neoliberal order caused declining social cohesion. The 1990s and 2000s, when trade as a percentage of GDP increased dramatically, also witnessed falling crime rates and youth mental health at historic highs. The timeline doesn't support claims that market liberalization destroyed social fabric.
Moreover, neoliberalism actually contributed to higher social cohesion through multiple mechanisms. Abundant evidence demonstrates that trade increases social trust and enables impersonal cooperation between strangers. Neoliberal labor market liberalization in countries like Germany and Denmark reduced unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, strengthening social cohesion by providing meaningful economic participation.
The electoral performance of different conservative models supports this analysis. Social order conservatism dominates European right-wing parties, which have fared significantly worse than Anglophone conservatism rooted in classical liberal principles. European conservatives' focus on preserving traditional social arrangements has proven less politically viable than Anglo-American emphasis on individual liberty and economic dynamism.
European social order conservatism has institutionalized the precautionary principle in regulatory frameworks, restricting adoption of transformative technologies like nuclear power, GMOs, fracking, and software innovation. This regulatory caution, justified by concerns about social disruption, has made Europe economically weaker and more vulnerable to pressure from America, Russia, and China.
This pattern mirrors Asian societies that desperately clung to traditional social orders during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only to be conquered by more dynamic civilizations. The irony proved particularly acute when many Asian countries fell not to great kings pursuing imperial glory, but to private corporations seeking profits for shareholders.
Social order conservatism represents a fundamentally defensive posture that sacrifices dynamism for stability, ultimately achieving neither. Societies that prioritize preserving existing arrangements over enabling adaptation and innovation find themselves overwhelmed by more flexible competitors who embrace creative destruction as the price of progress.
“Political discourse vastly overweights social cohesion relative to other values that people actually prioritize in their lived decisions.”
Conservatives have over-weighted aspects of social cohesion, but in a world where civilisations collapse, states fail and most wars since 1945 have been civil wars, social cohesion matters. You really cannot tell how resilient a social/political order is until it comes under serious stress.
More to the point, neither status quo conservativism nor liberalism has proved willing and able to defend our institutions against progressivist marches and decay.
Also, nothing I said above implies markets are the problem. I don’t think they are. Australia is one of the more de-regulated economies, and shows a high level of cohesion. We have over-done migration in recent times, fairly clearly, but that is a fixable problem, as the problem is scale way more than content.
Economic growth, social mobility and markets are inherently destabilizing. "Harmony" is just a emergent order from stable conditions. Once conditions change the social order will necessarily change.
If freedom and personal responsibility are longer the binding principles for Anglophone conservativism, and social order becomes the guiding light, then the political class will start entertaining every ridiculous paranoia of the populous.
A big part of the reason conservatism hasn't been able to stop environmentalism because ideologically they actually agree with them. These people are also paranoid about the supposed ecological collapse that will be triggered by unchecked human ambition.
Additionally as mentioned in my original comment, migration patterns consistently show that people prioritise economic opportunity over social cohesion.
And we can point to three cases where mass immigration fractured polities leading to civil war—the US in 1861-5 (see Fogel’s “Without Consent or Contract”), Lebanon 1975-1990 and (thankfully much more briefly) Jordan in 1907-1. Mass immigration is currently stressing Britain along its regional and class divides, hence quite serious discussion of the possibility of civil war.
The question is not what people prefer, the question is what are the consequences and in what circumstances. The Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck was a creation of a certain level of social order and was brought to an end by systematic coercion.
Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/
Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
Mass urbanisation had a great deal to do with the collapse of Tsarist Russia under the stress of war—a failure of resilience. It also had much to do with the rise of political anti-Semitism.
There is a lot more to social order than spontaneous order. Otherwise, state societies would not be so much more capable than stateless societies. Even among state societies, the level of state capacity matters. Which, one notes, affects which countries people attempt to migrate to.
Lorenzo, thanks...brilliant, as ever.
A welcome bit of momentary relief from observing disturbing current affairs. In Aus media the wheat keeps getting sorted from the chaff...
RIP Charlie Kirk, a good man killed for wanting to talk about ideas.
"Yes, liberalism is seriously incomplete as a model of social order." But I would push back and submit this is by design. Classical liberalism is being criticized for failing to do something it never set out to do. Classical liberalism is intended as a political philosophy, a philosophy of government, not a complete model of social order. It never sought to nurture or mold thymos. This is expressed well in Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, which I will quote here at length:
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
Good government closes the circle of our felicities. It is not itself the complete circle. Culture and religion comprise the bulk of the circle. Government is just the "one thing more." Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..." It is government by Wu Wei.
In this system, thymos is the province of the people. It is the people and cultural and religious institutions of the West, not the political philosophy of classical liberalism, that have failed. They have failed because they have become captured by weak and wicked people and evil ideas. There is simply no political solution to this cultural problem. A country with a rotten culture and rotten ruling class will never be a good country, regardless of the form of government.
You are, however, 100% correct in your attack on status quo conservatism. The unholy alliance between status quo conservatives and progressives is the worst of all worlds. The progressives have seized the levers of political power and actively pulled those levers to erode the culture, with the status quo conservatives aiding and abetting them every step of the way.
So the issue is: Should we become social order conservatives and take back the levers of political power to use the progressive playbook against them, i.e. use tax revenue and deficit spending to attempt top down social reengineering of the culture?
Or should we recommit to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers and destroy those levers, once again ceding the development of character to the individual, the family, the church, the community, and other independent institutions?
We can call this the Boromir/Aragorn debate:
Boromir: "Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the Steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe! Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him!"
Aragorn: "You cannot wield it! None of us can. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. It has no other master."
(yes, I know going to LOTR to support my classical liberal leanings is cliche, and I know the ring has deeper meaning beyond the political, but it's just a good metaphor).
It seems to me that the case for social order conservatism relies somewhat on progressive thinking, setting as a baseline an imagined future in which upright and moral leaders undo decades of cultural degradation and engineer a society of character. But top down social engineering can only destroy character, it cannot build it. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. Also, given the fickleness of electoral politics, all levers that remain in place can and will be used by lunatics to degrade culture if and when the progressives regain their electoral footing.
So I say: cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom (which is in real life a never-ending battle rather than a single act), return to the Shire, kick out the foreign invaders, improve yourself, get married, have kids, run for local office, get involved in your local church, start a local chapter of Turning Points USA, create new cultural institutions to replace the rotten old ones. There is no political solution to the cultural chaos, other than to destroy the political mechanisms that foment the chaos. There are only cultural solutions, which must rise from the bottom up instead of the top down. The government must simply return to its basic function of providing personal security and otherwise leave development of the culture to the people.
Also, don't try to occupy Mordor. The orc strongholds cannot be defeated. They must be left to their own devices and prevented from encroaching upon healthy communities. Containment, not direct confrontation. Conservative communities must become shining cities on a hill that blue city residents look at with envy and over time seek to emulate.
Thank you, Mr. Warby, for consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking.
You could pair that with the brief Adams line: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Now, I personally chafe at the need for religion, but I can't deny that a society without it is going to fall apart.
But it appears that not just any "religion" will do, either. It would seem, following Tom Holland, Larry Siedentop, and others, that the cultural heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the resulting attitude towards humanity (all men are created equal; or equal in "human dignity"?) is a core element of our ideas behind both (classical) liberalism and our preference for a republican form of governance.
If morality is a mix of genetic instincts and cultural development (as I believe it is), it is also interesting to reflect on the content of many religious scriptures exploring and summarizing humankind's understanding of human nature, based on experience from the prior few thousand years of "civilization" and "mass society".
Yeah, the thing is that conceit was smuggled into Christianity by John Locke (long after the Reformation), not from Calvin or Luther, and certainly not from Catholic tradition or Judaism.
Quite a recent innovation in Christian ethics.
I would respectfully ask you to expand on that. Perhaps I am not yet educated enough or have misunderstood, but I thought it was the Jews (Hebrews?) who said man was created in the image* of G-d; and that Paul said something about male and female are equal in the eyes of Jesus and God?
Siedentop in turn cites 1) the selection of abbots by the monks in monasteries as an early form of "consent of the governed" and 2) the Western (and maybe common) law tradition growing out of the Church's initial work on canon law 1100ff AD.
But perhaps the real test was when slavery was finally outlawed in the West: Britain 1833? US 1865. Etc. While the distaff side still had to wait until 1922, at least at the US federal level.
*Some have proposed the reverse, that God was created in the image of man; and perhaps thus that man was created in the image of these guys: The First Humans After The Human-Chimp Split https://youtu.be/7Wq6XqyqQ34 :-)
Let's start from the beginning (so to speak). Judaism (the OT) posits God is the God of Israel, not of everyone. So no universal belief about equality of all men there, and we'll leave aside the injunctions dealing with treatment of slaves (since that is obviously problematic, and was useful to the Christian slave-holders of the Antebellum South - ya'll see this here God's word about slaves).
The Church (i.e. Catholic Church) was quite comfortable with the feudal order following the fall of the Roman Empire. It was Church doctrine until Vatican II that the ideal was the Confessor State (civil authority conjoined to Church authority) and that "error has no rights". If you can tease out a sense of human rights from that theology, or independent of it but acceptable to the Church you are a better man than I.
Lorenzo has gone to some length on how Roman law was preserved in the Church, so there is that - civil law as opposed to law from revelation. And, that dates back to pagan Rome - so nothing God-given there.
Now, the Magna Carta does talk about rights - rooted in custom and ancient tradition. And of course those were baronial rights against the power of the crown, only. That isn't inconsequential, but it doesn't scratch the itch we have here.
The Reformation (building on the Renaissance) opened up the intellectual ferment that would culminate in the Enlightenment, and that is where we really get into rights as we think of them. We get both equality and individualism and those are the building blocks of rights. Locke really is the philosopher that looked at rights as a "natural" thing, but still obviously sourced from God as the author of Creation. This then translates into our Declaration of Independence which may be the strongest source document on the subject. Kind of a weird twist, isn't it?
I tend to think that it was a clever trick to take the notion of Calvin that all are equally wicked in God's sight (save the pre-destined Elect) and turn that into we are all equal in God's eyes. And from that, we should have a set of civil rights in a secular government.
The Catholic Church was obviously against intellectual freedom—hence error has no rights. But it did have a concept of natural rights, coming from Greek thought applied to the monotheist notion of a universal moral order.
The 1537 Papal Encyclical banning enslavement of indigenous peoples provides an example of this. https://www.papalencyclicals.net/paul03/p3subli.htm
Much of what you are saying is correct in the chronological sense of how Christianity developed, but I still want to disagree. I would argue that is was Paul who created Christianity as a universal religion. It is doubtful that Jesus, or his brother James, and the apostles left in Jerusalem after Jesus death felt the same way, which explains the fallout between Paul and the others. In very simple terms Jesus and the apostles believed the way to the Kingdom of God was through works, Paul believed in salvation through faith alone. It is the belief in faith alone that opened up Christianity to universal belief.
"Lorenzo has gone to some length on how Roman law was preserved in the Church, so there is that - civil law as opposed to law from revelation. And, that dates back to pagan Rome - so nothing God-given there."
Yes, but one of the problems explained by Siedentop in the development of canon law was the fundamental difference in Roman law that did not recognize equality. Indeed the Romans believed the exact opposite: that there existed a natural inequality between men. The problem this generated was the inability to generalize across different but similar cases. Canon Law was able to generate general principles of law precisely because of the belief in equality.
I am not myself a believing Christian either. I am an apostate from the godless church of progressivism. I believe restoring reverence for the Western Canon, of which Christianity is of course a substantial part, and rejecting the postmodern progressive nonsense that has taken over during the course of the last century or so, would be sufficient to restore the traditional values that are necessary for a healthy republic as envisioned by Jefferson.
Great comment, and thanks for the Jefferson inaugural.
"... Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..."
And yet, partly or largely promoted by Jefferson, we have historically sought to rely on governmentally supplied schools to inculcate those values of character and responsibility in our children. While there was a time when such character building was augmented by parental and other adult behavior and example, it now appears the progressive program to devalue real education and critical thinking with indoctrination has led to poor support from our educational establishment.
Ditto on your final comment to Lorenzo on "consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking."
Education is an interesting case study in this respect. It is perhaps the most destructive weapon wielded by the progressives. Their take on the matter is captured well by Randi Weingarten's latest book, "Why Fascists Fear Teachers." Her framing is of course absurd. A more accurate framing would be "Why Classical Liberals and Conservatives Oppose Radical Leftist Indoctrination in Schools." But the point is the progressives aggressively seek to wield public education as a tool for teaching kids to oppose "fascism," by which they mean anyone to the right of Ibrahm X. Kendi.
This is a good issue for examining the Aragorn/Boromir, Social Order Conservative/Classical Liberal debate. You are correct that Jefferson's early and eager support for public education undermines to some extent my argument that development of character is outside the realm of government in the classical liberal view. But I think I can reconcile this.
The Social Order Conservative position on this issue would be to take over the education institutions and reshape them to teach traditional Western values and a classical Western education, in the same way the progressives seized those institutions and have used them to indoctrinate a generation of kids into woke ideology, gay race communism, critical theory, or whatever you want to call it.
The Classical Liberal approach in my view is encapsulated by the school choice movement. Give parents choices regarding the education of their children and let market competition decide.
Notably, Weingarten in her book appears to single out the school choice movement as the greatest threat to the progressive movement with respect to education. She says in an interview:
"In the book, I stress that today’s universal voucher movement is a direct outgrowth of white fear about upending segregation and the desire of white parents to get government funding to pay for private, racially-segregated schools. Although I made race a central focus of the book, I also wanted to address sexuality since the fear-mongering by the right has been extreme, with [President Donald] Trump and others making false claims about schools turning daughters into sons and vice versa." https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/randi-weingarten-on-why-fascists-fear-teachers-bader-20250915/
She doesn't seem to fear conservatives taking control of the levers of educational influence nearly so much as she seems to fear a decentralized system that empowers parents and enables development of parallel institutions. This makes me think this latter approach is more over the target.
Weingarten knows educational institutions as currently constituted are firmly progressive turf. If conservatives pass laws or create new curriculums emphasizing traditional values and classical education (as in Florida), the lessons will still be taught by overwhelmingly radical leftists. "Ok, class, today we're going to examine themes of misogyny, patriarchy, and white supremacy in Homer's Odyssey." "Ok, class, today we're going to examine the racist motives behind the American Revolution." There is no way social order conservatives can change the culture of the teaching profession from the top down. The terrain is too advantageous for the enemy.
Instead, the classical liberal approach is the way forward - move the locus of discretion (to use Thomas Sowell's terminology) from educational institutions to parents. Empowering parents will then enable development of new conservative institutions and over time diminish the power and influence of the woke madrassas and the top-down institutions that administer them. Woke madrassas will still remain in the blue cities. But, again, containment is the only realistic response. Ultimately, the classical liberal "wu wei" approach is the more realistic means of achieving the social order conservative goals.
The trouble with the school choice argument is (1) a lot of US parents hate it as they do not want ghetto kids sitting next to their child and (2) there are plenty of deeply “woke” private schools. While the unnaccountable classes educate teachers, control teacher and school accreditation and curricula, all the school choice in the world will not solve the problem.
I wonder whether school choice increases or decreases segregation. Weingarten apparently believes the entire motive of the school choice movement is white parents wanting to get their kids away from ghetto kids. I know my woke family members who are active in public education see school choice as an existential threat to their social engineering agenda. So right or wrong, the progressives believe school choice would result in less racial diversity in schools
How it plays out depends on local dynamics. It can generate pressure for better school performance. It seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient, measure.
Dave, I couldn’t help but think of this excellent article by Tanner Greer while reading your comment- https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and-character/ Thanks for your thoughtful responses.
Thank you. I will take a look at that article.
Two things that jumped out from this excellent article. One moving authority to bureaucracies removes the feedback loop of voting and the people . 2 errors have no rights. That is absolutely beautifully said we have reached a place in society where to “error” is to strip you of all possible rights. This is to assumed one has errored in the first place.
Superb post with a great analysis of the problem!
I do see one issue with conservatism, though. The political left often presents an 'inspiring' vision of a utopian future—one that promises to satisfy envy by ensuring no one is better off than others, make life achievements independent of individual ability (in the name of equity), and guarantee a comfortable living regardless of merit. The path to this vision, they claim, requires dismantling the current society and capitalism. Fortunately, they are only in the early stages—primarily focused on denigrating the present and the past. There is still no discussion about what will happen to those who disagree once redistribution begins for real, rather than just cancellations and struggle sessions.
The challenge for the political right is to offer an equally inspiring movement. The conservative message—that progress is gradual and requires effort—is a much harder sell than the left’s promise that utopia will arrive if we simply silence (or eliminate) those pesky conservatives. After all, conservatives are seen as sinners against all Critical Theories, so it must be their fault. What could possibly go wrong?
Eric Hoffer was right: to defeat a charismatic movement, one needs a more charismatic movement. The question is whether conservatism can rise to that challenge. Will MAGA suffice?
Absolutely brilliant! I hope this paper has an exceptionally wide readership among the elite audience who matters. It’s far too intellectually rigorous to go viral, of course, but I have done everything I can to circulate it among my circle.
I read the article you linked, the 'Duel of Honor', which I found both fascinating and instructive. And I am wondering whether a similar test of character could not be devised that did not involve possible loss of life. A game based on the same odds of losing (I believe 1-2%) that entailed giving up all one's worldly possessions to charity?
Anyway, it was a great article, thanks for the link.
An easy one would be to force anyone who makes a prediction to place a bet based on that prediction. The inventive of public intellectuals is to always to make sensational and contrarian think pieces.
Your explication (and exclamation) against the ills and errors of progressivism is glorious:
"If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work."
When it comes to Plato [and it is amazing to me how readily I recognize the names of the big name philosophers but have never found the time to delve at all deeply into their ideas - only a very surface level of understanding. Shame on me?!]:
"Plato’s tripartite division of the psyche into the rational, the appetitive and the spirited (aka thymos). The first two liberalism grapples with: the last, not so much." As I have struggled to understand the mind set of people of faith, given my nonreligious upbringing and other study, I have postulated an evolution of a dual psyche with "modules" for rationality and reasoning, and for faith and transcendence. I can accept arguments that both of these features aided cooperation and early hominid species survivability, so are part of emergence from biology to society.
Could Plato's tripartite ideas lead to a trifold (or multifold) set of evolved psychological modules, each contributing "something" to our evolution?
Yes!!!! You've done it again. I can't with RINOS. This is why. They don't conserve anything except whatever the left has pushed through.
Anglo conservatism was killed by Thatcher. Previously, from Disraeli until Edward Heath, conservatives acknowledged a common good that Included the working classes. Thatcher's triage ensured that the only politics possible on the right was free-market extremism. Perfect for globaly mobile capital, but fundamentally incompatible with a stable, settled, society of any kind.
In any case, the political economy of the Anglo states no longer supports social stability. The extant model assumes population replacement via mass migration. It increasingly restricts opportunities for family formation to the well-off. It aims for full spectrum atomisation for the sub-elite.
And why would investors in gilt-edged securities need a stable Britain? The masses can always be kept in line by the constabulary supported, as necessary, by auxiliaries from minority communities. The South Asian Ikhwhan and the sharia courts.
The lack of a language of social cohesion meant that dealing with economic stagnation became a one-sided game. If your notion of social action is either the state or “the market” then one is stuck in a policy loop. I have written elsewhere that the neoliberal policy regime is running out of puff because of the issues it does not manage to deal with. As the preceding social democratic policy regime similarly did.
Yes, clearly the current social strategy of the British elite is much as you say. Whether they can make it work is another matter.
Wetlands, like bottomland forests, support a lot of wildlife. Why expel them from your version of the past - unless life is distasteful to you? Doesn’t much matter what you call it.
They are what they are regardless of how you call them. Swamp reminds us that there are issues with them, wetlands turns them into touchie-feelie icons.
I dunno. The Everglades has generally been referred to as a swamp, and it’s pretty damn iconic, at least to Americans of a certain vintage.
Against Social Order Conservatism
I remain unconvinced by the case for social order conservatism. Political discourse vastly overweights social cohesion relative to other values that people actually prioritize in their lived decisions.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, over the past hundred years literally billions of people abandoned towns and villages characterized by lower inequality, reduced crime, and stronger social bonds to pursue urban life featuring greater inequality, higher crime rates, and atomization. People may claim to value social order, but actions speak louder than words.
People demonstrate greater rationality when voting with their feet than when voting at the ballot box. Migration patterns represent the ultimate feedback mechanism—people consistently choose dynamism over stability, opportunity over security, and individual advancement over communal solidarity.
I don't see evidence that the neoliberal order caused declining social cohesion. The 1990s and 2000s, when trade as a percentage of GDP increased dramatically, also witnessed falling crime rates and youth mental health at historic highs. The timeline doesn't support claims that market liberalization destroyed social fabric.
Moreover, neoliberalism actually contributed to higher social cohesion through multiple mechanisms. Abundant evidence demonstrates that trade increases social trust and enables impersonal cooperation between strangers. Neoliberal labor market liberalization in countries like Germany and Denmark reduced unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, strengthening social cohesion by providing meaningful economic participation.
The electoral performance of different conservative models supports this analysis. Social order conservatism dominates European right-wing parties, which have fared significantly worse than Anglophone conservatism rooted in classical liberal principles. European conservatives' focus on preserving traditional social arrangements has proven less politically viable than Anglo-American emphasis on individual liberty and economic dynamism.
European social order conservatism has institutionalized the precautionary principle in regulatory frameworks, restricting adoption of transformative technologies like nuclear power, GMOs, fracking, and software innovation. This regulatory caution, justified by concerns about social disruption, has made Europe economically weaker and more vulnerable to pressure from America, Russia, and China.
This pattern mirrors Asian societies that desperately clung to traditional social orders during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only to be conquered by more dynamic civilizations. The irony proved particularly acute when many Asian countries fell not to great kings pursuing imperial glory, but to private corporations seeking profits for shareholders.
Social order conservatism represents a fundamentally defensive posture that sacrifices dynamism for stability, ultimately achieving neither. Societies that prioritize preserving existing arrangements over enabling adaptation and innovation find themselves overwhelmed by more flexible competitors who embrace creative destruction as the price of progress.
“Political discourse vastly overweights social cohesion relative to other values that people actually prioritize in their lived decisions.”
Conservatives have over-weighted aspects of social cohesion, but in a world where civilisations collapse, states fail and most wars since 1945 have been civil wars, social cohesion matters. You really cannot tell how resilient a social/political order is until it comes under serious stress.
More to the point, neither status quo conservativism nor liberalism has proved willing and able to defend our institutions against progressivist marches and decay.
Also, nothing I said above implies markets are the problem. I don’t think they are. Australia is one of the more de-regulated economies, and shows a high level of cohesion. We have over-done migration in recent times, fairly clearly, but that is a fixable problem, as the problem is scale way more than content.
Economic growth, social mobility and markets are inherently destabilizing. "Harmony" is just a emergent order from stable conditions. Once conditions change the social order will necessarily change.
If freedom and personal responsibility are longer the binding principles for Anglophone conservativism, and social order becomes the guiding light, then the political class will start entertaining every ridiculous paranoia of the populous.
A big part of the reason conservatism hasn't been able to stop environmentalism because ideologically they actually agree with them. These people are also paranoid about the supposed ecological collapse that will be triggered by unchecked human ambition.
Additionally as mentioned in my original comment, migration patterns consistently show that people prioritise economic opportunity over social cohesion.
And we can point to three cases where mass immigration fractured polities leading to civil war—the US in 1861-5 (see Fogel’s “Without Consent or Contract”), Lebanon 1975-1990 and (thankfully much more briefly) Jordan in 1907-1. Mass immigration is currently stressing Britain along its regional and class divides, hence quite serious discussion of the possibility of civil war.
The question is not what people prefer, the question is what are the consequences and in what circumstances. The Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck was a creation of a certain level of social order and was brought to an end by systematic coercion.
Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/
Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
Mass urbanisation had a great deal to do with the collapse of Tsarist Russia under the stress of war—a failure of resilience. It also had much to do with the rise of political anti-Semitism.
There is a lot more to social order than spontaneous order. Otherwise, state societies would not be so much more capable than stateless societies. Even among state societies, the level of state capacity matters. Which, one notes, affects which countries people attempt to migrate to.