I hear echoing in my head that great line from Chateaubriand, which I have selected as my epigraph: “I can’t stand the pride of victory”. Anyone who does not share this same sentiment, I contend, shares in no real spirit of conservatism. They might support particular policies that are conservative-coded in a particular place and time, policies I myself generally do not support. But the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime. […]
Old men returning to childhood: this is a fairly good characterization of the species of conservatism I am attempting here to draw into relief — not the later childhood we call “adolescence”, where the passions grow focused on acquisition of power and status, but the first childhood, of kinship with trees, when one still has a choice of standing outside the narrowly human conflicts that serves as the motor of history and that also keeps most of us busy, with our own minuscule struggles, for the greater part of our lives. Chateaubriand spent that greater part of his life bemused, perplexed, disappointed, in love with a past of which he was never really sure whether it was his own, or humanity’s own. He was certain, anyhow, that no human effort was ever going to deliver us into a happier earthly condition — for the only real happiness is blessedness, which, in any composition with the modifier “earthly”, really does produce an oxymoron.
… But I do wish there were still some proper conservatives out there, with the learning and wisdom to recognize Chateaubriand’s outlook as a significant part of their venerable lineage, to acknowledge and to embrace the melancholy and the tragedy, to be able to regret all that is lost even as one faces up honestly to the inevitability of loss. […]
And this new arrangement is certainly not going to be a victory for conservatism either, no matter how messily that term continues to be employed. Any conservatism that is worth the name is a conservatism of spirit and of temperament. Wistful, melancholic, and utterly resistant to interpretation by anyone who is a zealot for anything, it is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of any reign of terror, today no less than in 1792.