Coming to Conservatism

My unique but predictable journey from radicalism to conservatism

Written by Bo Winegard.

I’m pretty sure I was wearing my Rage Against the Machine hat when I bought The Portable Edmund Burke. I was young and radical. Reading Chomsky, Zinn, Marx, Fanon. In a charitable mood, I thought conservatism was solace for the old. In a cynical mood, I thought it was a cover for greed and plunder. But I had read about Burke’s eloquence and, fancying some well-written prose, I decided to give him a try. Besides, I delighted in gainsaying bad political arguments. And being intellectually arrogant, I was certain I would find plenty to mock in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I was not converted overnight. I was not even converted ten years later. But I look back fondly on my first reading of Burke. I was not surprised by the force and beauty of his rhetoric. Even his critics conceded his brilliance as a stylist. But I was surprised by the force of his arguments—or rather, by their moral seriousness. For Reflections is not written like a tight philosophical treatise; it depends as much on the moral imagination as it does on formal reason. And the moral imagination is moved more by poetry than by axioms and deductions.

What I found in Burke was a reverence for tradition, an understanding that institutions are often wiser than individuals, and a recognition that stubborn problems are stubborn precisely because they admit no easy solutions. At the time, I believed that poverty was less a puzzle than a condition created by design. In principle, it seemed no more difficult to solve than elementary algebra. A better society was only a few radical changes away. Of all my early leftist beliefs, this optimism was the first to go.