Why would anyone, of any age, want to be a conservative? When I was a younger man, my thoughts were mostly preoccupied with the future. I was a cash-poor Christian school teacher right out of college, and I thought about how my career would advance. I was a single man when I graduated from college, and I looked forward to meeting a girl who would become my wife. I thought about fatherhood, what it would be like to own a home, and all the sorts of things people think about when they first get started in life. Why would young people be attracted to conservatism?
Now that I am in my fifties, I think more about the past. Since I likely have more days behind me in this life than ahead of me, what is the use of aiming for lofty goals in my family or in my career? My children are wonderful, and they are on the cusp of leaving home and starting their own families and careers. I have reached all of my career goals, and have no further professional ambitions, other than to finish my teaching and writing career with dignity. If statistics have any reliability as a guide, I have maybe thirty more years of life left. When I am gone, the vicissitudes of life will no longer be my problem. Why care about conservatism?
Maybe I’d want to be a conservative because I want to see my political party in power. Or maybe I want to win arguments on social media, and my conservative politics can help me own the libs. Or perhaps I can only be happy when I’m miserable, particularly when things change. Apparently the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel is making some changes to their restaurant ambiance, decluttering and brightening up the dining rooms with white paint. Horrors!
What is the point of conservatism? Is conservatism only relevant for politics and partisanship? Is it only the neighborhood crank, the peevish uncle, or the lunatic on Facebook that has an interest in being a conservative? Or is being a conservative like being a traditionalist, resisting change for no better reason than, “we’ve always done it this way”?
In other words, can we think of any good reason to be a conservative other than politics, culture wars, or traditionalism?
Of course we can! When conservatism is only about tradition for tradition’s sake, maintaining the status quo, or fleeting partisan power mongering, it is repellent, not attractive; it is boorish, not classy; and it is misanthropic, not humanistic. In my recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, I attempt to lay out an alternative vision.
American conservatism is as old as the Republic, and that conservatism has always been far upstream of politics. Politics is important to conservatives, but cultivating the permanent things—the good, the true, and the beautiful—is of primary importance. Conservatism is a temperament, a disposition, an attitude that looks to conserve those things in humanity that make life worth living.
I also think of conservatism as aspirational. Conservatives do not value the permanent things like Aesop’s dog in the manger, or as a miser who stuffs a hoard of cash in the mattress. We seek the conservation of the permanent things for the sake of the freedom and flourishing of individuals, societies, and the nation. Aspirational conservatism aims for an ever-higher destiny for persons, guided by the best of American tradition, while always acknowledging human limitations, the inevitability of change, and the ubiquity of imperfection. In this way, conservatism was made for man, not man for conservatism.
Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future.
The best way to explain aspirational conservatism is to point to concrete examples, rather than rely on the theoretical or the abstract. The best man, the greatest man, I have ever known in my life is my grandfather. Jasper N. Dorsey (1913–90) was a husband, father, and grandfather, an Army officer in World War II, and a loyal citizen of his home state of Georgia. His career began in 1936 after graduation from the University of Georgia: he climbed telephone poles for the phone company, earning twenty-two dollars a week. He retired from AT&T in 1978 as CEO of all operations in Georgia. He spent his last years, 1978 to 1990, as a syndicated columnist for forty newspapers across Georgia. We called him “Papa.”
Papa was a devoted Christian, a conservative of the William F. Buckley school, and an indefatigable optimist. His optimism was not of the overbearing or annoying sort, nor was it based in naiveté. Papa came of age in the depression. He worked his way through college by finding employment at a rock quarry, loading rocks on wagons. His hands were so rough, he said, he could strike a match on his palm to light a cigarette. As a college senior in 1935, he came close to death from malaria; he and my grandmother lost their firstborn baby days after his birth; and they lost their twenty-one-year-old son, who died in a car accident driving home in a rainstorm.
Nevertheless, Papa was full of joie de vivre. He loved animals—dogs, cats, pigs, and mules. He loved food. He relished feasting on tomatoes, cucumbers, collard greens, turnip greens, okra, radishes, sweet potatoes, and all kinds of vegetables. He loved the thrill of bird hunting, loved the Georgia Bulldogs, loved Coca-Cola, loved his native town of Marietta. He loved his wife of fifty-one years, his daughter (my mother), and my brother and me. He read history, literature, and political philosophy, and especially enjoyed the ancient Greeks and Romans. His columns sparkled with his wit and eloquence on all these subjects, including politics and economics.
In his weekly columns, Papa overflowed with gratitude for people he loved and admired, places he’d had the opportunity to visit, and the inestimable pleasures of reading good books. “The best memories,” he wrote in 1985, “are often the simple things that are beyond price; a letter of encouragement, a book earned as a reward, a note of thanks for a small kindness, praise for an early achievement, or an award of recognition which required self-denial and hard effort.”
He loved books like no one person I have ever known. I have many of Papa’s books, and the notations in his old books are a lasting and living connection I have with him, even though he is gone. “With the marvelous world of books,” he wrote, “we own the magic carpet. We can visit all the ancient, exotic seas and shores. And everyone can go—rich and poor alike. As a child I was greatly blessed by my initiation into the world of books. With them, there is no boredom or monotony. The world is before you.”
Papa loved animals, and wrote about them in his columns. He wrote about the dog they owned when they bought their first house in 1947. He was a German Shepherd named Booger, who quickly “took possession of us and the neighborhood.” Booger was a fine guard dog against magazine salesmen and mailmen, and was always accompanied by a big Doberman, whom Papa called Booger’s “assistant dog.” “These two dogs loved children and neighbors but terrified deliverymen and peddlers.” He also wrote about a cat they named Mama. After acquiring Mama in 1968, she delivered thirty-four kittens by 1971! They brought a Schnauzer dog named Jackson into the home to keep Mama company, and she “raised him like a kitten.” Mama disappeared for over two weeks at one point, and we all thought she was dead. She limped back home having been run over by a car, but the vet fixed her up, and she lived till the ripe old age of fifteen, “doing all the cat work on a large lot, and without any help at all, except from her dog.” Papa closed that column with these memorable words: “If people ask for divine guidance, work real hard and are lucky, they can be as good as dogs and cats.”
To close the year 1986, Papa wrote his audience a benediction as they looked forward to a new year. His words summed up his whole personality and his love of life. He wrote,
I wish you old friends and new, to share your pleasures, to rejoice with you in your triumphs and to stand with you when life knocks you down. Friends to lift the ache of loneliness and dull the edge of grief; friends who’ll listen to your stories with a smile and laugh at your jokes, even when they aren’t funny.
I wish you a mind unafraid of mental adventure, a mind tickled by curiosity and awed by the wonder of small things; a heart that trusts beyond reason, even when faith is assailed by overwhelming odds.
I wish you work to do that has meaning and value both to you and others, work that challenges and inspires and offers the unique human thrill of accomplishment beyond expectation.
I wish you an abiding sense of humor, the power to see the ridiculous in life and in oneself, to be entertained rather than shamed by it. And the mysterious, wonderful ability to make others laugh.
I wish you a consuming desire for justice tempered by mercy, a sense of responsibility leavened by lightheartedness, the grace to forgive without rancor and the humility to be forgiven without resentment.
I wish you the capacity to see beauty not only in grandeur in great mountains, in great symphonies, but in small things in unexpected places, to hear music in common sounds, to see art in common sights and to retain forever a zesty appetite for the hors d’oeuvres of life; the stranger’s smile, the meaningful touch, the lingering sound, the scent of nostalgia, the piquant flavors of the stew of existence.
I wish you a new year filled with accomplishment, good health, and the warm relationships that so often come to those who embrace life instead of rejecting it.
Auntie Mame said it: Life is a banquet, and some poor fools insist on starving to death. God bless you and keep you in the hollow of His hand.
Papa was a great humanist, but his humanism was tempered by his strong belief in the reality of human sin and fallenness. He was a critic of anti-human ideologies and practices, such as abortion, the sexual revolution, corruption in government, disarmament in the face of the Soviet threat, and the trivialization of education. He could mock shady politicians with an acid wit, like when he wrote of the liberal Georgia senator Wyche Fowler that “he has all the qualities of a dog, except loyalty.” He was committed to the American tradition of self-government and individual liberty, to religious freedom and freedom of religious expression in the public square, and was a great defender of the unborn.
What is the point of being a conservative? Being a conservative means that, like Papa, you aspire to a greater destiny as a human person. Aspirational conservatism is looking to the best of American tradition in the interest of improvement as individuals, as families, as societies, and as a nation. Aspirational conservatism is not utopian, because it is realistic about human limitations. But limitations are not constraining, they are liberating. Freedom, for instance, is made true by the constraints provided by just law and order. Limitation of resources teaches us the value of patience, thrift, and stewardship for the benefit of ourselves and of those who would come after us. And limitation of mortality helps us remember that we will not live forever, so we must make the most of the opportunities we have before us in the present. We can then do what we love, but also come to love the things we have to do. Therein is the key to contentment in a life of limitations.
Americans have always been a people of aspiration. Christians are also people of aspiration. Christ commanded us to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). We all know what it means to strive for improvement in our physical, moral, and spiritual lives. To be an aspirational conservative is to heed the call of Jewel the Unicorn in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle: “Come farther up, come farther in!”
My grandfather was the best and greatest man I have ever had the pleasure and privilege of knowing. If I could be half the man he was, I would consider my life a success. For my whole life, his life legacy has been goals for me to strive to attain, like a high peak on the horizon to navigate to, to scale and climb, and perhaps one day, to reach the summit. Though dead, he still speaks to me, and I aspire to model him, to steward his legacy, and to hand his legacy down to my children. They never knew him, and yet, I hope their lives are animated by his voice and example so that they may benefit from his generous, wise, and hopeful spirit.
Aspirational conservatism is a standpoint looking up to the eternal, behind to the past, around about in the present, and ahead to the future. Such a standpoint is not merely to enjoy the scenery, although the scenery is breathtaking. We are informed by such a standpoint as we seek for, find, and cultivate the good and the freedom of the human person.
