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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Is the downvote on this post for Kronick or for me? Feel free to elaborate.
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Few desire to live in a state of unceasing change…
We are all conservative at heart. Witness how far we will go to avoid letting the computer install updates.
-ethyl
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So true. I’ve been in a state of ceaseless warfare against the stupid updates. Lord, how I detest the updates.
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It’s entropy: a constant battle. It’s in the history of humanity from the very beginning: the heroes are those who want to restore whatever it is that is being lost.
I wonder whether this may have something to do with the parlous mental state of GenZers. They’ve never known real stability in their lives, which have been dominated by constant flux and inane sloganeering such as “change is good!” as the dominant leitmotif in their lives. How dies that play out on a mass psychological level?
Also, the insane growth of autism in Western societies: could this have to do with higher stress levels in younger parents? I haven’t done much research in this area, so it’s just a thought. Might anyone here shed some light on this?
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The only thing that this comment has to do with the original subject is that Wallace Stegner was ‘conservative’. I wanted to post this as a reply to the posting about another Stegner book that Clarissa had posted but could not find it.
This is a recommendation for her, or anyone else that might like Stegner’s writing.
All the Little Live Things
Joe and Ruth Austin, sixtyish, retire, withdraw, in California after their son, an existentialist with whom Joe could never sympathize, dies. On the one hand, on his property, he is confronted with a reproachful reminder of his boy, a bearded graduate student who squats on his property and does a Tar-Zen bit in a treehouse. Nearby the Catlins move in, a young couple, and Joe is particularly susceptible to Marian, frail, loving, and fiercely defensive of “all the little live things” and a belief that there are no evil forces in nature. Even though she is being rapidly destroyed by cancer and her race against death is being run against the birth of a child. All of this then refutes resignation with involvement, equates life in terms of its loss, even though it fails to mediate any of the other problems between the mature citizens and the coffeehouse kooks. “Why does the older generation feel as it does about what is happening in the world today?” (the publishers). Probably for the same reason that that same generation feels as it does about what is happening in the novel today—and this book will be a very compatible compromise, certified by its Literary Guild selection for August. – Kirkus Review
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This book is queued up on my reading list thanks to you. I’ll get there, I promise. And I know I’ll love it because this is one of my favorite authors of all times.
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