I have read my Kirk and Hayek and Buckley, in What is a Conservative?, and I have had the good fortune to know some great conservative thinkers. I recently read the excellent The Right, an unmissable history by Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute. Of course, I love Chesterton. But in some basic sense, I would struggle to tell you exactly what a conservative is in America, other than someone who is not a liberal. The modern conservative tradition, in the world-historic sense following the American and French revolutions, can count as its founder Edmund Burke, who was once the head of the philosophy department in Ireland where I studied in undergrad. I have read his work, too, and in parts cherished it. But it seems to me in the European context that, when the word was coined, it had a pretty specific meaning. A “conservative” was someone dedicated to conserving the power of the institutions of the monarchy and the church in the life of the culture and the state. Here in this brilliantly revolutionary republic, we officially disallow those things in the state while we accept it as the main idea that will flourish in our culture. It makes for some confusion.

People certainly tell me I am a conservative sometimes, which may be one answer to the question, “What is a conservative?” (Though in some parts of the country, people tell me I am a lib[eral].) To listen to my old friends in Manhattan or my old colleagues at left-wing magazines, I am certainly not in the liberal tribe in any good standing. Puzzling over this, I could look into deep philosophical or personal characterological background. But last week, I think I found one good argument for my being a conservative, besides that it’s very important to me to say “my being” rather than “me being,” because a gerund (a word ending in -ing) is a noun that takes a possessive. That is, I read the new additions to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, and to quote National Review’s famous mission statement, it sure seemed like it was time to “stand athwart history yelling Stop.”