Conservatism may have given up too much when it became an -ism. “A disposition to preserve,” wrote Edmund Burke, “and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.” He never called himself conservative. The adjective and the noun both came into English too late for that. Yet synonyms were available, and Burke did not make use of those, either.

Ability, as he saw it, was an expression of active energy—not always a good thing. Disposition, on the other hand, is fixed. It never goes anywhere. So Burke distrusted energy in politics—distrusted (you might say) people and countries that want to be on the move. The last sentence of Reflections on the Revolution in France turns from its ostensible subject and alludes to the British Empire and its crimes. This book, he tells the French politician for whom he has written it, is the work of one “who snatches from his share in the endeavours which are used by good men to discredit opulent oppression, the hours he has employed on your affairs; and who in doing so persuades himself he has not departed from his usual office.” Opulent oppression: as if riches sometimes did things other than buoy up a well-earned mass of property.

“A disposition to preserve” is the central intuition of many Americans who call themselves libertarians. Some of them also call themselves conservatives, but if they say that word, they know they will spend the afternoon in explanation. Their perception is that you should not have to earn the right to live unmolested. The main harm of property would seem to be its encouragement of self-conceit, but though wary of the danger, the creed of liberty is to live and let live without resentment. The broadness of so simple an appeal is a tremendous political resource, and it makes the libertarian the natural antagonist of people who like to be up and doing things—for themselves, for others. The distinction of person is immaterial, the point is to keep going. But it is shallow to think of such people as liberals. They descend from a timeless party of improvers, and there is goodwill in their energy. Even virtue, however, needs some check.

“I do not like to see,” said Burke, “any thing destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the face of the land.” Might there be some link between the cause of constitutional liberty and the defense of an environment without which all creation would shrink to a man-made scale? This seems at least a possible convergence of motives between people of diverse beliefs whose largest concern is the protection of a restrained liberty.

It is an odd fact of American society in the past 60 years that a section of the party of improvers—the improvers of wars—have so often called themselves conservatives. There are family dynasties of warriors, of course, especially in the South, who form an undeclared aristocratic class in America. Their authority and coherence may give them a title to the name, but their beliefs do not. It is no less strange—except that one saw it also in the 1950s—that property libertarians have so often failed to live up to their duties as civil libertarians.

It would be hard to say whether statist liberals or statist conservatives are more seduced by love of the state. The most acute recent critics of the American empire have been writers like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich who in the decade of Truman and Eisenhower would surely have been called conservatives. Both served in the military. Both came late to their stand against imperialism. If critics such as these ever joined forces with a statesman like Chuck Hagel, we might see a change in the things that are speakable in our politics.

It has been invigorating in the past few years to notice the first signs of a conservatism that is libertarian about civil rights as much as property rights; distrustful of the liberal state but not itself illiberal or the tool of bigotry; willing to speak of morals and religion but distrustful of compelled displays of piety; and hostile to any proselytism that claims a higher sanction than honest argument. Will the experiment succeed? The answer may depend in some part on its relationship to the remnant of liberalism that values liberty.

The antiwar element of this conservatism is its most rigorous and honorable feature. Wars are the destructive force that in the 20th century did most to level the world to obey a single will. Wars are the largest machine for the production of the totalitarian state and the totalitarian mind. It should trouble us to consider which country in the world today most serves the cause of “homicide philanthropy.” That phrase, again, is Burke’s; its exact synonym, “humanitarian wars,” is a favorite pretext of the war improvers. What do humanitarian wars signify if not the rightness of killing 3 million Vietnamese or a million Iraqis for the sake of turning a mass of oppressed creatures into properly certified human beings?

Government has a better function than war. “The legitimate object of government,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.” The people, in their separate and individual capacities, realize the need for government, and make the choice to use it, to help them do what they would want done if they could do it themselves. Lincoln took government as a matter-of-fact necessity. For there are things such as posts and roads, the management of places of public gathering, the rational regulation of commerce, which we cannot sanely think of doing neighbor-by-neighbor. We cannot decline all use of government unless we cherish an abstract distrust of convenience. Government multiplies rather than adds; the advantage is plain and so is the hazard. But how many today who rail against government do not think it reflexively right to put offending Americans in larger numbers into bigger prisons and to subsidize more and faster wars?

The expansive ethic of modern war, or “force projection,” is justified by the imperatives of security and safety. But how safe do you want to be, and what makes you call it safety? The state lives for itself and will not let you live two moments together unwatched and unsecured.

“Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.” Burke wrote that in 1777, when he denounced the suspension of habeas corpus. Power in whatever hands. Not only the power that forms a government by popular mandate that can be used to authorize “new laws” but equally the power of those with money to buy an exemption for themselves from sufferings they caused; the power of tribunals to render judgment without oversight; the power of those who deploy an army on the ground and drones in the sky to watch and kill a thousand miles away from the man who presses send. 
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