There’s something right-wingers, conservatives, and traditionalists all need to hear: You are
not a conservative.
You are a
liberal. If you don’t possess noble aristocratic ancestry that you can trace back to before the French Revolution, then you are merely a peasant in denial who’s engaged in a centuries-long peasant revolt against your rightful monarch. Because that’s what conservatism really is — the model of society based on the idea that the old and traditional order, the ancien régime, is what worked best and most righteously.
The ideologies driving causes such as racial equity, mass immigration, and LGBT rights are all based on the same fundamental paradigm that empowered the peasant just a few centuries ago.
And by the old order, we mean the hierarchy of governance that was structured with the monarch at the top and the third estate, the peasants, at the bottom. All of conservatism hinges on the monarchic hierarchical model. All forms of departure from the conservative model are an arrival at liberalism.
Make no mistake, we’ve moved in a straight line to the political left for centuries now. And the source of this departure from monarchy begins and ends with the empowerment and idolization of the individual, as opposed to the individual’s deference to
rank.
The historical context
Let’s get into some history to put this into context. Historically, this departure began in the West with the development and emergence of the Protestant Reformation, which directly challenged the power of the Catholic Church by de-monopolizing its access to the Bible, planting the seeds for what would turn out to be massive division within the Holy Roman Empire.
The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 attempted to settle the growing religious rift by allowing rulers to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism in their respective territories. Tensions only grew as many states formed alliances along religious lines. The religious tolerance granted to Protestants was short-lived, as it was soon revoked after the Catholic Ferdinand II took power as king of Bohemia. Thus began the Thirty Years’ War, which ultimately culminated with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
These events sparked the fundamental change in society that led us to where we are now, beginning with the replacement of the holy Roman emperor and the pope as the ultimate authority of the land — with the
nation-state.
The constant state of conflict that was brought about by the differences in religion inspired the pursuit of a more effective system of governance. The Westphalian model denounced the rule of one centralized authority having universal control by recognizing the sovereignty of each nation-state. Essentially, the era of separation of church and state had begun, with the state rather than religion having dominion over governance. Secular governance was born.
A double-edged sword
Now you, being a spiritual liberal, may be thinking, “How is any of this bad? This sounds great!” Well, lib, the post-Westphalian order is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it opened the door to the development of the modern nation-state. It was the first step taken toward the prospect of the people having sovereignty as a nation rather than sovereignty belonging to the court of a kingdom.
On the other hand, one of the main issues with this model was that it opened the door to the expansion, imperialism, and eventual military clash of all these sovereign nation-states. But we’ll get into that a little later.
However, another major effect of the Peace of Westphalia was that it ushered in a new era of knowledge. Enter the Enlightenment. As nations crept farther away from the hold of religiosity, a commitment to science over superstition as well as the development of liberal ideas began to take root. The Enlightenment was a time that spawned ideas we’re all familiar with: freedom, democracy, free-market capitalism.
Thinkers like John Locke pushed the idea that the government needed limits, that it needed to be held accountable to the people. These were ideas that directly challenged the notion that only a king and the noble class were able to govern the land and its inhabitants. It marks the first time in modern history that people started to think to themselves that maybe they were more than mere serfs and peasants.
On top of that, it was the era of scientific discovery, which further liberated man in a twofold manner: first from traditionally held ideas of religious superstition, and second, tangibly, through the dramatic increase in economic production via the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was basically the ideas of the Enlightenment put to work in the realm of mechanics and machinery. People got smarter and, as a result, made major advances in the realm of technology. People were able to transition out of the world of physical hand-drawn labor and into the new world of automated labor.
And so the production of food and nonessential luxury items exploded. The steam engine. The automobile. The light bulb. All these inventions can be attributed to the liberation of man from his shackles as a peasant under the rule of the king, and all of them contributed to the further empowerment of the common man.
The king is dead
As a result of the common man’s political, economic, and educational liberation, what began to happen in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries was the massive political restructuring of the modern nations. As people got smarter (because they had easier access to education) and had more free time (because they were more readily and effectively fed), they began developing organized grassroots political movements.
The rise of nationalist movements around the world (democracy, constitutional republicanism, fascism, communism, Nazism, etc.) sought to topple and replace the age of kings. But what happens when masses of people who were mere peasants just generations earlier are able to form political ideologies, form their own governments, and rely on their own modes of production? What happens when the powerless are given incredible power?
Well, like any normal living creatures, they like to test the limits of their power. They feel the need to get up out of their slumber and stretch their legs. That’s how we got two world wars. The world simply isn’t big enough for a bunch of empowered individuals. People want to go out into the world and
use their power. These maturing yet still young nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries wanted to expand and pursue their destinies. As a result, they bumped into each other. Conflict. Global, industrialized conflict.
The individual above all
Today, we live in the post-World War II era, and the pursuit of individual empowerment has only become more intense and widespread. The ideologies driving causes such as racial equity, mass immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights are all based on the same fundamental paradigm that empowered the peasant just a few centuries ago. And that paradigm is that the individual should be
liberated from the “shackles” given to him by his oppressor.
If it took the belief that the lowly peasant was oppressed by a tyrannical monarch in order to compel him to seek education, science, technology, and anti-religion, then in the same manner, women, homosexuals, and transgenders are all seeking the same liberation. It’s all one and the same movement because ultimately what we’re seeing within the context of this historical review is the gradual progression from monarchism (conservatism) to individualism (liberalism).
From the Peace of Westphalia’s dismantling of supreme religious authority and the Enlightenment’s promotion of the individual’s rights over the state to the Industrial Revolution’s dramatic increase in quality of life and feminism’s liberation of women from traditional gender roles, the
individual has gone through this transformation from being a tiny insignificant speck of dust to the destroyer of kings and empires and the master of his universe.
Return … but to what?
It’s all spawned by liberalism. Ultimately, humanity as a whole opened Pandora’s box when it began to depart from monarchism. People used to be stupid and poor. They used to work in fields their entire lives until they died. But as people become smarter, more educated, more well fed, more pampered, their power levels rise. They become more empowered. And with power comes the desire to use it.
You are not a conservative
precisely because the people who came before you won you the right, for example, to read the Bible in your native language. You may bypass the priest and interpret it yourself. That is in itself liberal activity. To be conservative means to defer all powers and responsibilities to someone or something of higher rank.
And this is why I say conservative ideals in the modern age are so arbitrary. If you call yourself conservative, to what point in history do you want to return, exactly? The 1950s? Does that mean you’re OK with women’s suffrage? Or maybe you do want to go back to a monarchy. How, then, do you suggest we resolve the question of you being able to read, think for yourself, and ultimately challenge the decisions of the king whenever you see fit?
That’s my point. You and millions of other people are way too empowered now. You know too much ever to go back. Drop the LARP of thinking it is possible to “return.” Start thinking about what it means to be an empowered individual who transcends both conservatism and liberalism. If you want to secure a future for yourself and your descendants, you need to think about it in a new and completely original way.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally on X (formerly Twitter).
Culture, Liberalism, The enlightenment, Politics, Conservatism, Protestant revolution
