Jeremy Boreing

It's conserved the greatest exercise in human flourishing and human prosperity and human freedom that's ever existed anywhere on the earth.

It's done so deeply imperfectly.

Of course it has.

We're imperfect.

It's often done so almost with catastrophic failures.

Of course, we're human beings.

We're fallen and we're flawed.

The idea that some philosophy was going to perfectly conserve anything—

And in a sort of ultimate sense, like, if you could perfectly conserve, what would you perfectly conserve?

What moment in history has perfectly articulated our values?

What moment in history have people participated perfectly in life the way that we think they should?

Like, what is it that we're glorifying?

Are we...

glorifying the 1950s when you know yes women stayed home and raised the kids uh and black people had to drink out of separate water faucets like of course that's not a perfect representation of what we want to conserve is it the like the founding era you know when you probably half of children died in childbirth well no i mean there were some great things happening in the founding era but that's not you don't want to just stick a pen in some moment in history and say conserve this

That's a bad view of conservatism.

You know, Michael Knowles might say that there was something like in the 12th century when Catholicism was in its primacy that is the perfect moment.

But we all know Michael Knowles wouldn't be able to survive five minutes in the 12th century either.

I just think that the idea of like conserving a moment in time

Unless that moment in time is the 1990s.

Trying to conserve a moment in time is obviously not the purpose of conservatism.