We Need Conservatism More Than Ever

Just not the version we've got.

Here's a position that doesn't fit neatly on anyone's team: we need conservatism right now more than we have in a long time.

Not the version on cable news. The real thing.

It seems clear that the world is changing faster than at any point in human history. AI tools that didn't exist four years ago are now used by close to a billion people a week. They're reshaping how we work, learn, and get our information, and nobody, including the people building them, fully understands where this goes. When the car is going this fast, the brakes matter more, not less. This is especially true if the highway ahead of us hasn't been completed yet.

The problem is that the people holding the conservative label have stopped doing the job. They've welded the brakes to two other things: an economic theory and a religious agenda. Both pull in a different direction than the brakes do. And somewhere along the way, they started mistaking going backwards for slowing down.

If conservatism is going to be useful in this moment, it has to be cut loose from both. What's left is something this country badly needs: a philosophy of careful, planned progress.

What Conservatism Means to Me

Strip away the party branding and conservatism is a temperament, not a platform. It traces back to Edmund Burke. In 1790, with the French Revolution barely underway, Burke warned that tearing a society up by the roots would end in blood. Within a few years, the Terror proved him right.

Burke's core insight was that institutions carry wisdom. Laws, customs, courts, and communities are the product of generations of trial and error, and they often know things we've forgotten. G.K. Chesterton made the same point with a fence across a road: before you tear it down, find out why someone put it up.

But here's the part that usually gets left out. Burke wasn't against change. He wrote that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." An institution that can't adapt eventually breaks. The conservative question was never whether to change. It was how: gradually, deliberately, building on what already works, and testing each step before taking the next.

The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott described the conservative disposition as a preference for "the tried to the untried." He also made a point that matters for everything that follows. Being conservative in politics, he argued, didn't depend on any particular religious belief or any grand theory of how the world works. It was a way of approaching change, not a creed.

That's the conservatism I'm talking about. Not a set of answers, but a method. Careful, planned progress. Change at the speed of understanding.

Its opposite isn't liberalism. Its opposite is recklessness, whether that recklessness comes from the left, from the market, or from people trying to rewind the clock.

How Conservatism Got Bundled

American conservatism didn't stay a temperament. In the 1950s and '60s, writers at William F. Buckley's National Review, Frank Meyer chief among them, stitched it together with free-market libertarianism. The project came to be known as fusionism, and the glue holding it together was opposition to communism.

In the late 1970s, a third strand joined. The religious right organized into a political force, with groups like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, founded in 1979, bringing millions of evangelical voters and a moral agenda into the coalition.

As an electoral strategy, it worked. It put Ronald Reagan in the White House and shaped the Republican Party for the next 40 years. But a winning coalition isn't the same thing as a coherent philosophy. Look at what got bundled together:

• A disposition that says slow down, test, and protect what works.
• An economic theory that says get out of the way and let the market move as fast as it wants.
• A religious agenda that says restore a moral order many believe we've lost.

Those three don't point in the same direction.

The economic piece is the biggest contradiction. The economist Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of "creative destruction," with new industries constantly tearing down old ones. That isn't a criticism. It's what makes markets so productive. But it means the free market is the most powerful engine of change humans have ever built. A movement that treats it as sacred can't credibly claim to be the party of slowing down.

The religious piece creates a different problem, which I'll get to. For now the point is simple: conservatism got married to two partners that don't share its core value. For a long time, the differences didn't matter much. Now they do.

AI Is the Perfect Example

If any issue calls for a Burkean approach, it's artificial intelligence. It's moving fast, it's poorly understood even by the people building it, and it's already reaching into work, schools, relationships, and the information we use to make decisions. Chesterton warned against tearing down a fence before you understand it. AI is the reverse problem: we're building something across the entire society before anyone understands what it will do.

That's exactly the moment for brakes. Not a ban. Brakes. Test powerful systems before they're released to the public. Hold companies liable for the harms their products cause. Roll AI into high-stakes areas like hiring, medicine, and kids' apps in stages, and check the results before going further.

Most Americans already get this. A Gallup survey found that 80% of U.S. adults want the government to keep rules for AI safety and data security even if it means slower development. Only 9% said speed should come first.

Now look at what the right has actually done. In 2025, Republican leaders tried to slip a provision into the budget bill that would have blocked states from enforcing their own AI laws for up to a decade. It was stripped out, and the Senate vote to remove it was 99 to 1. Plenty of Republicans balked. That's the conservative instinct still working.

But the economic theory won anyway. In December 2025, the president signed an executive order creating a Justice Department task force whose job is to challenge state AI laws in court. It tied roughly $20 billion in leftover federal broadband money to states backing off AI rules the administration considers too burdensome, and told agencies to look at doing the same with other grants. (It does carve out state child-safety laws.)

Think about how strange that is. Federalism, the idea that states are laboratories of democracy that can try things and learn from each other, is supposed to be a core conservative principle. It's exactly the kind of careful, small-scale experimentation a Burkean would want. And it's being overridden on behalf of an industry, because the economic theory says business should be left alone.

That's what happens when conservatism is chained to market ideology. It doesn't matter how good your brakes are if your economic theory says never touch them.

Closer to Home: Flock Cameras

If AI feels abstract, look up at the next traffic light.

Flock Safety is one of a number of companies that sells solar-powered cameras that photograph every passing car, read its plate, and log details like make, color, and even bumper stickers. Its cameras are in more than 4,000 cities. Here in Louisville, LMPD has been installing them since 2022, Metro Council keeps funding more, and council members won't say where the new ones go. Flock says it doesn't use facial recognition and deletes data after 30 days by default.

To be fair, the cameras do real good. LMPD has used Flock to recover stolen cars and to find an 84-year-old man with memory loss who had driven to Lexington. I teach self-defense and active killer response. I'm not against tools that help police keep people safe.

But look at how this technology arrived. Not through a public debate about what we're willing to trade for safety. Through a vendor contract, a budget line, and a software subscription. And the uses kept growing after the cameras went up:

• In 2025, a Texas sheriff's office searched more than 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide looking for a woman who had self-administered an abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal.
• Federal border agents were able to query more than 80,000 Flock cameras on their own, until the company paused its federal work under pressure.
• Here in Louisville, an LMPD detective and his superiors were disciplined after he shared his Flock login with a federal agent, who used it for immigration searches.

Meanwhile, Vine Grove, a Hardin County town of about 7,000 people, just signed a ten-year, $360,000 deal that includes live-streaming cameras pointed at its intersections. Flock pitches that kind of contract as "automatic access to every new Flock solution." In other words, the next capability shows up by software update. Nobody votes on it.

That's the speed problem in miniature. And notice who's been reaching for the brakes. More than a dozen Massachusetts towns have shut their cameras off or ended their contracts. Kentucky's own Thomas Massie, a Republican, has proposed cutting federal funds to agencies that use them. That's the real conservative instinct. A government that can trace where every law-abiding citizen drives is exactly what limited-government conservatives used to warn us about.

The conservative answer isn't necessarily to tear every camera down. It's to put on the brakes and write the rules first:

1. Let the public weigh in before cameras go up, and publish where they are.
2. Require a warrant for searches beyond stolen cars and active alerts.
3. Keep data for days, not months, and make the search logs public.
4. No sharing with outside or federal agencies without a judge signing off.
5. Pilot it, measure it, and only then decide whether to expand.

Slow down. Understand it. Then decide. That's what conservatism is for.

From Conservative to Regressive

Now the religious piece.

I don't think religion is an essential institution, and I'm skeptical that its doctrines do much good on their own. But I'll give it this: for most of human history, religion has been the strongest community glue we've had. A place to show up every week. People who know your name. Someone at the door with a casserole when your father dies.

We still haven't found a good replacement for that. Some people find it on the mats in gyms like mine. A lot of people haven't found it anywhere. Anyone who cares about a healthy society should take that loss seriously.

So here's the line I'd draw. Community cohesion is worth conserving. Religious doctrine as a basis for governing is not. Whatever role faith plays in someone's private life, it has no place in deciding how the rest of us are governed.

When conservatism becomes a vehicle for one religious vision of how everyone should live, its goal quietly shifts. It stops being about protecting what works and changing carefully. It becomes about restoring what used to be, or what people imagine used to be.

That isn't conservatism. That's regression. A conservative takes the present as the starting point and asks how to improve it without breaking it. A reactionary rejects the present and wants to rewind. The current movement's slogan tells you which one it is. "Make America Great Again" points backward by design.

Here's what reactionaries miss: going backward is still change, and it's usually reckless change. The movement's most famous image of government reform was a man waving a chainsaw on stage. The Government Accountability Office later found that many of DOGE's savings claims were unsupported or wrong, and federal spending rose about 6% anyway. Burke would have recognized that impulse immediately. It's the one he spent his life warning against.

Rebuild the Wall Between Church and State

That backward pull shows up most clearly where religion meets government, and the line between the two is eroding fast.

In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Today, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas have passed nearly identical laws, and Alabama followed this spring. In April, the federal appeals court covering Texas and Louisiana ruled 9 to 8 that Texas can enforce its version, setting up a likely fight at the Supreme Court.

It doesn't stop at classroom walls. Oklahoma tried to launch the country's first religious public charter school, and the Supreme Court blocked it only on a 4 to 4 tie. In 2025, the IRS told a federal court that pastors should be free to endorse candidates from the pulpit without losing their tax exemption, and the administration is still fighting in court to make that stick.

The Founders saw this coming. The first words of the Bill of Rights bar Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion." Thomas Jefferson described the result as a "wall of separation between church and state."

That wall isn't hostility toward anyone's faith. It may be the most conservative idea in the Constitution. It keeps government out of questions people will never agree on, so they can share a country anyway. It protects religion from the state, and the state from religion.

It also brings us back to Oakeshott. A conservative disposition doesn't require any faith at all. People of every religion, and of none, can share it, and that's what makes it capable of holding together a country as diverse as this one. A government built on one faith ends up at war with everyone outside it. A government built on careful change can bring almost anyone along.

The wall needs to be rebuilt. Real conservatives should be the ones laying the bricks.

Healthcare, Done Conservatively

Here's where I'll put my own cards on the table. I believe universal healthcare should be a goal in the US. Every American should be able to see a doctor without risking financial ruin.

I also believe the way to get there is conservative: step by step, with each step tested before the next.

That isn't a contradiction. It has a long history. The world's first national health insurance program was created in 1883 by Otto von Bismarck, the conservative chancellor of Germany. He did it to stabilize his country, not to overturn it.

America's coverage has grown the same way, one layer at a time, often with Republican hands on it. Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, passed by a Republican Congress. The Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, signed by George W. Bush. Massachusetts' near-universal coverage law in 2006, signed by Mitt Romney and built around an individual mandate idea that came out of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Then the Affordable Care Act, modeled on Massachusetts.

Each step built on the one before it. That's what careful, planned progress looks like.

Now compare that to what happens when policy changes all at once. The enhanced ACA subsidies passed during the pandemic were written to expire, and at the end of 2025, Congress let them. Overnight, premiums for some people doubled or more. Marketplace sign-ups dropped by about 1.2 million, and the Congressional Budget Office had projected 2.2 million more Americans would lose insurance this year. Democrats built the cliff. Republicans let people go over it. Either way, a cliff is the opposite of conservative policy.

The same logic cuts the other way. Moving roughly half the country off employer coverage and onto a single government plan in one shot would be just as reckless. That's revolution, not reform.

A conservative path to universal coverage might look something like this:

1. Cover every child first, building on a program that already exists.
2. Lower the Medicare eligibility age in stages, a few years at a time.
3. Automatically enroll people who fall through the cracks in a basic default plan.
4. After every step, measure cost, access, and wait times before taking the next one.

You can argue about the specific steps. The method is the point. Clear goal. Planned path. Check your work as you go.

The Conservatism Worth Wanting

Edmund Burke never argued that a society should stand still. His case was for change that respects what came before: gradual, deliberate, and built on what already works. That idea has never been more useful than it is right now.

Look at what's in front of us. Artificial intelligence is reshaping work and information faster than any law can keep up. Surveillance cameras are going up on street corners before anyone has written the rules. Millions of Americans are one diagnosis away from financial ruin. And the wall between church and state is being chipped away one classroom at a time. Every one of these calls for the same thing: a clear goal, a careful plan, and the willingness to check our work as we go.

For too long, the conservative movement has been asking the wrong question: how do we get back to the way things were? The right question is how we move forward without breaking what works.

Answering that honestly means cutting conservatism loose from the two partners holding it back. Untie it from economic dogma, and it can put the brakes on AI without apologizing to Silicon Valley. Get religion back out of governance, and it can speak to the whole country instead of a slice of it. Do both, and you get a philosophy most Americans might actually share.

The car is moving faster than it ever has. We don't need someone yanking the wheel toward the past, and we don't need someone flooring the gas because the market says so. We need a steady hand on the brakes and eyes on the road ahead.

We don't need less conservatism right now. We need the real thing.