Short answer: I was an American conservative writing for The American Conservative, and now I’m a European-American conservative writing for The European Conservative.
How did that happen? Well, there’s a story.
First, some background about me, for EuroCon readers to whom I’m a stranger. I’m a 56-year-old American writer living in Budapest. I’ve written a number of books, but am best known as the author of The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies (2020), both of which have been published in translation throughout Europe. I’ve lived and worked in journalism in Washington, D.C., South Florida, New York City, and Dallas, though thanks to the magic of the internet, I spent the last dozen years laboring out of deepest southern Louisiana as a senior editor for The American Conservative.
Louisiana is where I was born and raised, and, well, you can tell. I love the American South—its people, its culture, and everything about it except its weather (summer is miserable—visit New Orleans in August if you doubt me). Even within the South, though, southern Louisiana is special. It’s no doubt because of our French and Spanish colonial heritage, but compared to other Americans, we have a high degree of tolerance for eccentricity and loucheness. I was raised as a non-churchgoing Protestant there, but my late father always warned us to beware of those Protestants from north Louisiana, because they didn’t drink. In Cajun country, even our Protestants are culturally Catholic.
One of our political giants, the late Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, was a Cajun who didn’t drink or smoke, but who dearly loved gambling and womanizing. Everybody knew that he was a crook, but when he ran against former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, many of us put on our cars a bumper sticker that said: VOTE FOR THE CROOK—IT’S IMPORTANT. Edwin joked that the only way he could lose that election was “if I am found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.” We all laughed, because we knew it was true. He won, too.
My point is this—and it’s helpful to your readers to understand your new columnist’s point of view: If you want good government, go to New England (where direct democracy thrives in the form of representative town meetings). If you want good food, great stories, joie de vivre, and an approach to life that sees it more as a poem than a syllogism—well, come sit by me and let me tell you about south Louisiana.
This is actually an important point about my sort of conservatism. I am not particularly ideological. Mine is more a conservatism of the heart, to use the phrase of the U.S. conservative writer and sometime-politician Patrick Buchanan. But that phrase is misleading, suggesting perhaps a conservatism of sentimentality, even an anti-intellectual one. That’s not me. I mean it in the sense that Sir Roger Scruton would have understood: a non-ideological conservatism that prizes old loyalties, small things, ancient prescription, and tradition. And by ‘tradition,’ I don’t mean veneration of fossils, but something more like what the late Jaroslav Pelikan meant when he said that “traditionalism” is the dead faith of the living, while “tradition” is the living faith handed down to us by the dead. Or, as Mahler famously said, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
I suppose this makes me more or less ‘post-liberal,’ though the term makes me uncomfortable. What do I mean? The term ‘post-liberal’ generally refers to people of the Right who no longer have faith in liberal democracy, and who are focused instead on finding a successor. The term can cover people as disparate as Catholic integralists to neopagan reactionaries, and many others. What unites them is the shared conviction that the governing philosophy of the West for the past two centuries or so no longer works. Most days, I agree with them—but not because I want to. To the extent that I agree with them, it’s because I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that without being rooted in a common Christian religion (or, more inclusively, the religion of the Bible), classical liberalism cannot conserve anything necessary for our civilization to continue.
That is, without the inner restraints and limits set by a shared religion, classical liberalism becomes a doctrine of no limits; as the U.S. political theorist Patrick Deneen has argued, liberalism has failed because it has succeeded so well in liberating the choosing individual from any unchosen limits. Look around you: is this working? We cannot even conserve the institution most necessary to the continuation of civilization: the family. We cannot even conserve a meaningful connection to the fundamental reality of human biology. The English novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth is not a political conservative, but many, many of us who are can relate to the radical implications of his recent question: What do you do when there is nothing left to conserve?
I would not go so far as to say that I no longer believe in liberal democracy. If there is a better system of government for Western peoples, I don’t know what it is. But it is accurate to say that I am struggling to hold onto faith in it, simply because we appear to be losing the cultural foundations for a healthy liberal democracy. Much of what you will read on this blog going forward will have to do with trying to figure out how to live politically in a post-Christian civilization. Fair warning: I am a practicing Christian (Orthodox) who firmly believes that politics is downstream from culture. This is why so much of my writing about politics is inextricable from my writing about culture.
In a less apocalyptic vein, perhaps this introduction to your new European Conservative blogger can conclude with a manifesto that appeared in my first book, Crunchy Cons (2006). The book grew out of my realization in my 30s, working for National Review magazine, that I was a different kind of conservative than many of my colleagues on the American Right. Here, from that book, is the manifesto:
A Crunchy–Con Manifesto
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the contemporary conservative mainstream. We like it here; the view is better, for we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. We believe that modern conservatism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper.
3. We affirm the superiority of the free market as an economic organizing principle, but believe the economy must be made to serve humanity’s best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America’s wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as “The Permanent Things”—those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world’s great wisdom traditions.
5. A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world.
6. A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.
7. Appreciation of aesthetic quality—that is, beauty—is not a luxury, but key to the good life.
8. The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.
9. We share Kirk’s conviction that “the best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o’ evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. … The institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve it create anew.
Crunchy Cons was much discussed, and fiercely panned by some on the U.S. Right as being secretly liberal. There is a certain kind of American conservative who equates criticism of the unrestrained free market as left-wing. However, a French Catholic conservative friend, having read the book, told me back then, “You would fit right in as a European conservative.”
Well, here I am. It has been a long time coming, but I am pleased to be here.
What Kind of Conservative Am I?
Short answer: I was an American conservative writing for The American Conservative, and now I’m a European-American conservative writing for The European Conservative.
How did that happen? Well, there’s a story.
First, some background about me, for EuroCon readers to whom I’m a stranger. I’m a 56-year-old American writer living in Budapest. I’ve written a number of books, but am best known as the author of The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies (2020), both of which have been published in translation throughout Europe. I’ve lived and worked in journalism in Washington, D.C., South Florida, New York City, and Dallas, though thanks to the magic of the internet, I spent the last dozen years laboring out of deepest southern Louisiana as a senior editor for The American Conservative.
Louisiana is where I was born and raised, and, well, you can tell. I love the American South—its people, its culture, and everything about it except its weather (summer is miserable—visit New Orleans in August if you doubt me). Even within the South, though, southern Louisiana is special. It’s no doubt because of our French and Spanish colonial heritage, but compared to other Americans, we have a high degree of tolerance for eccentricity and loucheness. I was raised as a non-churchgoing Protestant there, but my late father always warned us to beware of those Protestants from north Louisiana, because they didn’t drink. In Cajun country, even our Protestants are culturally Catholic.
One of our political giants, the late Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, was a Cajun who didn’t drink or smoke, but who dearly loved gambling and womanizing. Everybody knew that he was a crook, but when he ran against former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, many of us put on our cars a bumper sticker that said: VOTE FOR THE CROOK—IT’S IMPORTANT. Edwin joked that the only way he could lose that election was “if I am found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.” We all laughed, because we knew it was true. He won, too.
My point is this—and it’s helpful to your readers to understand your new columnist’s point of view: If you want good government, go to New England (where direct democracy thrives in the form of representative town meetings). If you want good food, great stories, joie de vivre, and an approach to life that sees it more as a poem than a syllogism—well, come sit by me and let me tell you about south Louisiana.
This is actually an important point about my sort of conservatism. I am not particularly ideological. Mine is more a conservatism of the heart, to use the phrase of the U.S. conservative writer and sometime-politician Patrick Buchanan. But that phrase is misleading, suggesting perhaps a conservatism of sentimentality, even an anti-intellectual one. That’s not me. I mean it in the sense that Sir Roger Scruton would have understood: a non-ideological conservatism that prizes old loyalties, small things, ancient prescription, and tradition. And by ‘tradition,’ I don’t mean veneration of fossils, but something more like what the late Jaroslav Pelikan meant when he said that “traditionalism” is the dead faith of the living, while “tradition” is the living faith handed down to us by the dead. Or, as Mahler famously said, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
I suppose this makes me more or less ‘post-liberal,’ though the term makes me uncomfortable. What do I mean? The term ‘post-liberal’ generally refers to people of the Right who no longer have faith in liberal democracy, and who are focused instead on finding a successor. The term can cover people as disparate as Catholic integralists to neopagan reactionaries, and many others. What unites them is the shared conviction that the governing philosophy of the West for the past two centuries or so no longer works. Most days, I agree with them—but not because I want to. To the extent that I agree with them, it’s because I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that without being rooted in a common Christian religion (or, more inclusively, the religion of the Bible), classical liberalism cannot conserve anything necessary for our civilization to continue.
That is, without the inner restraints and limits set by a shared religion, classical liberalism becomes a doctrine of no limits; as the U.S. political theorist Patrick Deneen has argued, liberalism has failed because it has succeeded so well in liberating the choosing individual from any unchosen limits. Look around you: is this working? We cannot even conserve the institution most necessary to the continuation of civilization: the family. We cannot even conserve a meaningful connection to the fundamental reality of human biology. The English novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth is not a political conservative, but many, many of us who are can relate to the radical implications of his recent question: What do you do when there is nothing left to conserve?
I would not go so far as to say that I no longer believe in liberal democracy. If there is a better system of government for Western peoples, I don’t know what it is. But it is accurate to say that I am struggling to hold onto faith in it, simply because we appear to be losing the cultural foundations for a healthy liberal democracy. Much of what you will read on this blog going forward will have to do with trying to figure out how to live politically in a post-Christian civilization. Fair warning: I am a practicing Christian (Orthodox) who firmly believes that politics is downstream from culture. This is why so much of my writing about politics is inextricable from my writing about culture.
In a less apocalyptic vein, perhaps this introduction to your new European Conservative blogger can conclude with a manifesto that appeared in my first book, Crunchy Cons (2006). The book grew out of my realization in my 30s, working for National Review magazine, that I was a different kind of conservative than many of my colleagues on the American Right. Here, from that book, is the manifesto:
Crunchy Cons was much discussed, and fiercely panned by some on the U.S. Right as being secretly liberal. There is a certain kind of American conservative who equates criticism of the unrestrained free market as left-wing. However, a French Catholic conservative friend, having read the book, told me back then, “You would fit right in as a European conservative.”
Well, here I am. It has been a long time coming, but I am pleased to be here.
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