A frequent criticism of conservatism is that all it does is try to preserve the achievements of yesterday’s radicals. As Ambrose Bierce put it, radicalism is the conservatism of tomorrow injected into today. In 1947, professor of Political Science Bernard Kronick addressed this criticism in an article he published in Southwestern Social Science Quarterly. I love reading Humanities scholarship from before year 1970 because it’s enormously better written than anything you can find today. Kronick, who was born in 1915 and was almost a child in intellectual terms when he published “Conservatism: A Definition”, wrote beautifully. His article is very easy to understand for anybody who is a normal, intelligent and well-read person. There’s zero jargon and a lot of love for the language.
In any case, Kronick says that yes, it’s true that today’s conservatism is yesterday’s radical progressivism. But so what? It still plays the crucial role of slowing the pace of change and making sure that we don’t careen into insane things that will end up destroying us. It is a socially useful task, Kronick says, to modify the manner in which change is introduced while accepting that it will happen eventually.
Conservatives are at a disadvantage, Kronick points out, because their position is by necessity defensive. Their achievement in slowing down change is never recognized because the accolades for introducing the changes always go to the radicals who proposed them, even though these changes could have been terrible without the staying and moderating hand of conservatives. As a result, the conservative movement feels like being nothing but a group of losers. As Kronick says:
The conservative by his very admonitions destroys the likelihood of his fears being realized. He is subsequently ridiculed for what seem to have been foolish fears.
Even when they accomplish little of a positive character, conservatives prevent immeasurable harm. For enormous chaos would result were radicals to have it entirely their own way.
This is why, Kronick reminds us, conservatism is absolutely essential when a society experiences a crisis or undergoes rapid change.
Kronick wrote at a different time and some of his ideas look quaint as one reads them in 2026. This, for example, put a sad smile on my face:
Few desire to live in a state of unceasing change. No people going about its daily business wishes to have its way greatly disturbed for light and transient causes. They desire tranquility above all.
You can hear in Kronick’s words the calm currents of an unhurried time that had not yet witnessed people falling in love with speed, change, and transgression for its own sake.
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