My Kind of Conservatism

“L’orgueil de la victoire m’est insupportable.” —Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848-50)

1.

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.

Well, those kids aren’t kids anymore. It was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics. In effect, however our tight-focused presidential historians chronologize things, what we have seen over the past decade is a Tumblr regime (c. 2015 - c. 2022) followed by a 4chan regime (c. 2022 - present). The noise of global politics today is really just the much-deepened echo in a great canyon of the squeaking of rambunctious tweeners in the narrow channels of 2010s social media.

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Portrait de Chateaubriand (1809), Musée d’Histoire, Saint-Malo

Perhaps a better way of putting this would be to say that politics at this point just is online adolescent jouissance. The other day Elon Musk —now some kind of Cardinal Richelieu, but of the pagan Temple of Tech, to Trump’s Louis XIV— changed his handle on X, at least for a while, to Harry Bōlz. Can you measure how immense the cultural shift that has brought us to this point is? Do you remember when, just hours before his inauguration in 2001, George W. Bush grumblingly relinquished his Blackberry at the request of the intelligence services? He said he was going to miss being able to connect with friends so easily, but understood that to do so conflicted with the demands of his office. Now you might say that, well, sometimes norms change; but you might also say that sometimes offices cease to exist, even if there may still be a descendant office that retains the old name.

What we are witnessing, with Harry Bōlz, is to some extent the same cultural shift that now has John Fetterman lumbering into the US Senate in exactly the same attire and attitude in which he might lumber from his gaming chair to his fridge, and that has AOC serving the tea on Instagram as if she were there to address rumors that Tay-Tay is pray-gay, rather than to summarize the minutes of some congressional committee meeting. Musk really just completes the conversion of our polity into an extension of our feeds. His Department of Government Efficiency, itself an outgrowth of a ridiculous namesake meme, has now unleashed shitposting adolescents to “audit” career civil-servants and to determine, in 15-minute interviews, whether these careers are justified. His team of twenty-somethings looks to me like nothing so much as those TikTokers you might find accosting people in malls and asking them, e.g., if they’re sooner breast men than ass men, or playing pranks on greengrocers by spraying roach poison on their bananas.

In 2021 I was myself audited by another sort of youth brigade. At the time I was looking to return to the US, and was, low-key, on the academic job market. Thank God that didn’t work out! I had a few interviews, all by Zoom from Europe, and some of these involved “informal discussions with students”. What these in fact were was something much closer to struggle sessions. Of particular issue was my 2015 book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, which, when I was writing it in, say, 2012-14, was really just standard-fare bien-pensant liberal anti-racist academic stuff, objectionable to nobody except, perhaps, the forum-posters at Stormfront.org. But by 2021, from the students’ point of view, my book was itself racist, an apologia for imperialism and other evils, to the extent that it (1) did not mess around with any prefatory language of “Speaking as a cis-het white man…”,¹ but just got right down to an analysis of the primary sources as if my “positionality” were not a factor in what I had to say; and (2) did not roundly condemn, as racist, the dead white men who were the primary focus of my research, but rather portrayed them, like I continue to believe all human beings deserve to be portrayed, as complex, flawed, full of contradictions, often brilliant, often disappointing.

I won’t say much more, as I don’t want to give away any identifying details, but in one case it was painfully clear to me that the students really were trying to squeeze a recantation out of me. They didn’t get one. Perhaps relatedly, I didn’t get the job.² I do remember thinking, however: this can’t go on; there is going to be a reaction, and it is going to be much, much worse. And it is much worse. The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government. I am not at all trying to equate the two. I am only saying that both of these cultural moments bubbled up out of the online preoccupations of children roughly 10-15 years ago, and the one, from an appropriately zoomed-out view of history, can only be seen as a prodrome of the other.

2.

Throughout the Tumblr regime, one could remain reasonably optimistic that there might be a return to normalcy, that the language of power might again be something shaped by adults rather than children. The Tumblr regime was coded feminine, and its primary means of exercising social coercion was the work of the corbeau — the denunciation of others, often carried out anonymously, for their past transgressions against what were often only recently confected social norms. The power of such denunciations is by now virtually exhausted, as shown most recently in J. D. Vance’s dismissive reaction to the suggestion that one of Musk’s lads might deserve to be fired for his anti-Indian racism online. Unsurprisingly, the new youth brigades of the now-masculine-coded regime have mutated, and are able to absorb the toxic ink of the poison pen, and to draw still more strength from it.

Their strength is made all the greater by the dawning, or sinking, awareness that we’re never going to get our polity back. The unfolding coup is a coup for Big Tech against liberal democracy, with Trump as figurehead. Those who have lost out are, obviously, the progressive left, but also, tragically, Trump’s own electoral base of disaffected Americans with at least some reasonable grounds for complaint that they had been blocked from full participation in the bounty of post-industrial globalization. We still reflexively speak of “populism”, but that’s just a habit we learned from Trump 1. Trump 2 is not populist. There might have been some survivals of populist rhetoric in the campaign rallies of just a few months ago. But that was a different era. We are now in the era of conversion, the “Upgrade”, if you like, of all the functions of state —policing, finance, war— to a properly 21st-century tech platform.

Meanwhile the old-guard Democrats are holding solemn press conferences, still wearing suits and pantsuits, standing behind podiums to speak to the rolling cameras of television networks. They are ghosts addressing ghosts. “Sure, it’s not 1985 now,” Homer Simpson once said, when Marge tried to throw out his old calendars, “but you never know what the future might bring.” This is the message we are currently getting from Chuck Schumer and the others. As if, come 2028, there will be any glimmer of hope for a return to the old norms, the old “respect for the office”. If a Democrat miraculously comes into power the next time around, you can be sure this will be a decidedly new-model Democrat, who sits cross-legged and barefoot on the Oval Office couch, live-hologramming her emotional-support pig as it circles around her and shits.

There is, I mean, in the new way of doing things, a shared culture extending across the apparent divide between the descendants of Tumblr and the descendants of 4chan. For one thing, they are both revolutionary movements, and both love a good reign of terror. They both have their most zealous partisans expressing some version of the conviction that great social change sometimes requires abandonment of due process, both guided by that same certainty of mission that animated Georges Danton when he declared: “We will not judge the king, we will kill him.”³ And just as woke was never truly progressive, but only a strange tech-driven neoliberal deviation, anti-woke is not at all conservative — on the contrary it wants nothing less than to faire table rase with the entirety of the human past! The unifying force behind both of these tendencies is social media, and it was in the 2024 US presidential elections that social media were finally acknowledged as what they had already become: the center of gravity and authority in society, which had already swallowed up nearly every other institution — journalism, education, entertainment, and on and on. In the first month and a half of 2025, social media, now supercharged by AI, finally swallowed up government as well.

It’s clear where we’re going with this: from slow and inefficient and expensive bureaucracy, with various nodes occupied by human beings occasionally capable of correcting mistakes; to fast and efficient and cheap bureaucracy, maintained by AI, with no possibility for human override — a fully automated surveillance regime, a justice system right out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), and constant harassment of ordinary citizens by entities that clunkily simulate human agency but in fact have no qualia or vibes or souls or moral status at all. This is the system all of the world’s states have been converging on for a while now. For some years China seemed much further ahead, for the obvious reason that there were no obstacles placed in its path towards such a regime by democratic procedure or tradition. The coup that has just taken place in the US ensures that that country will indeed be able to go on competing with its greatest rival, and that it will do so by switching over to its rival’s own playbook in matters of domestic governance. Europe will join eventually, late as ever, after a few years of futile resistance, and when it does we will have, here, the additional humiliation of not only living in a fully automated surveillance regime, but a shabby knock-off one at that: the same Brave New World, basically, but running on Minitel.

“The vanity of frustrated mediocrity”: Portrait de Georges Danton (c. 1790), Artist Unknown, Musée de Carnavalet, Paris

3.

Throughout the Tumblr regime, it often seemed to me that I was in some sort of real if only partial alliance with the dissident right, who appeared to represent a radical alternative to the prevailing cultural values, who rejected the smug moral self-certainty of those who identified with the then-hegemonic faction of the culture, and who, often, seemed to carry the only living breathing trace of an artistic avant-garde into our philistine times. For example, I confess I enjoyed their frequent skewering of “artist’s statements” that were in fact a mere tabulation of the various intersectional obstacles to becoming successful artists, even as these obstacles were the very things the artists were in the course of marshaling to secure their own success. There was a good deal of absolutely absurd stuff going on in those years, and if you will not acknowledge that —and many of my self-styled progressive peers never have— then you are either dishonest or a woefully poor reader of culture. It was a period when those who had any hope of extracting prestige for themselves from proximity to elite cultural institutions were constrained to speak in an extremely reduced and cautious way, either to practice the art of remaining silent, as Isaak Babel once put it, or, alternatively, to practice the art of bullshitting, on which we may in turn quote our Chateaubriand: “A courtier reduced to living on truths is very close to dying of hunger.”⁴

But then Trump won, and I found that in all I was able to sustain no more than thirty seconds or so of gloating about the end of all that bullshit before becoming aware of a dawning feeling of shame that has held me back ever since, and compelled me to shift my focus to new threats and to new, or to “new old”, species of bullshit. I have been deeply disheartened to see so many of the opposition voices from the Tumblr regime happily embracing Trump 2. What weaklings, I think to myself. What empty windsocks. I certainly didn’t hate the Tumblr regime because I was yearning for a Godelierian “Big Man” to come with his belt — to cite one of Tucker Carlson’s more openly Freudian fantasies (if you believe Godelier, the social production of Big Men is a process that tends to culminate in ritualized intergenerational same-sex fellatio, but let’s leave that for another day). I hated it because I hate the irresponsible exercise of power. I hate wanton vandalism.

And man do I ever hate what we’ve got now. In spite of appearances, we don’t even really have a Big Man in power — we have a bunch of little men, a regime of incels and gooners and other species of maladapted male misfires, duds, abortions, driven by nothing but unprincipled ressentiment. There is no maximum life span on such moral retardation, as Musk himself continually reminds us. But whatever the age of its individual members, there can be no question but that we are now living under the dominion of a pack of giddy whelps, most of whom were born yesterday, and all of whom believe that the world, our world, the totality of everything that is worthy of attention or care or stewardship into the future, was born along with them.

I hear echoing in my head that great line from Chateaubriand, which I have selected as my epigraph: “I can’t stand the pride of victory”. Anyone who does not share this same sentiment, I contend, shares in no real spirit of conservatism. They might support particular policies that are conservative-coded in a particular place and time, policies I myself generally do not support. But the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime.

What, I find myself wondering these days, could it even mean to be a conservative in a world that tech is transforming so thoroughly, rapidly, and mercilessly?

It would mean, at a minimum, rejecting, and rejecting naturally, like a body rejects a transplanted organ, the ideology of Trump 2. The 4chan regime, like the Tumblr regime, illustrates once again the harsh truth of Chateaubriand’s account of how one becomes a political zealot: “The vanity of frustrated mediocrities,” he writes, “produced as many revolutionaries as the wounded pride of cripples and weaklings — an analogous revolt of the infirmities of the mind and of the body.”⁵ His language is offensive, but it is noteworthy that it combines both the transgressive ableism you might hear on some raucous MAGA Youth podcast, and the familiar complaint against those same podcasters that you might hear from the likes of Ijeoma Oluo in her campaign against such “mediocre white men”. Perhaps a more gentle variant on Chateaubriand’s observation, rather than saying that revolutionaries are deformed cretins, would be simply to say that they are, for the most part, ressentiment-driven opportunists.

To be a conservative would mean, also, understanding the real semantic and conceptual link between conservatism and conservationism — as regards both nature and culture. As to nature, the original Romantic comportment towards it was not one of solemn stewardship, but of an almost pagan love, as when Chateaubriand allows a bit of the Druid in him to come out in his acknowledgment of kinship with the trees: “I know them all by name, like my children: they are my family, I have no other, and I hope to die among them.”⁶ As late as 1900 or so, even a US president as bellicose and expansionist as Teddy Roosevelt could find himself persuaded by the Californianized Romanticism of John Muir to establish “preserves” for America’s most sublime natural monuments. In Europe even today, right-wing environmentalism remains a real thing, for better or worse, and not the oxymoron it has become for that great bulk of MAGA voters who see nature at best as a source of yet-to-be-extracted wealth.

When that is your stance towards nature, it makes sense to say, as Trump has, that the endangered California Delta smelt is “a totally unimportant little fish”. And this is the same attitude, mutatis mutandis, that enables him to see another human polity’s home within the reductive ontological frame of “real estate” — entirely unaware, of course, that there is a direct historical line from a certain strain of conservatism to the project of preserving and promoting the unassailable dignity of local traditions and Lebensformen. Indeed Chateaubriand, when he bemoans the extinction of local cultures under the pressure of what we might describe as Enlightenment-era proto-globalization, calls to mind nothing so much as a 20th-century figure like Alan Lomax, who regularly telephoned the chair of the French Department at Louisiana State University to implore him not to drop Introductory Cajun from the course offerings — lest a whole world vanish. Thus Chateaubriand describes the analogous processes of disappearance that modernization and colonialism have wrought among the Indigenous peoples of both Europe and America:

Seek no longer in America the artfully constructed political constitutions whose history Charlevoix wrote: the monarchy of the Hurons, the republic of the Iroquois. Something of this destruction has been accomplished and is still being accomplished in Europe, even before our eyes. A Prussian poet, at the banquet of the Teutonic Order, sang, in Old Prussian, around the year 1400, of the heroic deeds of the ancient warriors of his country: no one understood him, and for his reward, he was given a hundred empty nuts. Today, Breton, Basque, and Gaelic die from hut to hut, like goatherds and plowmen.⁷

And finally, to be a conservative today would mean to cultivate —or, if you’re lucky, to be born with— a melancholy spirit, a feeling of irreparable existential regret that is entirely incompatible with any sustained experience of glee or of gloating. For me the most poignant moment in Chateaubriand’s memoirs comes when he has just arrived in Philadelphia, in 1791, and goes to meet the new American president, George Washington, at his official residence. He walks up and knocks right at the door of a house just like all the others on a typical Philadelphia street. A servant opens for him, and eventually Washington comes; Chateaubriand gives him a letter of introduction from some French general who had fought in the American Revolution. They sit and make small-talk for a few minutes, and our memoirist gives every indication that the air in that room was heavy with mutual boredom — not that he did not consider Washington a man of destiny and of epoch-making importance, just that neither really had anything to say.

Chateaubriand had come to the US to escape the imminent Terror at home — in which several of his family members were slaughtered. His entire journey was a series of non-starters, not unlike his meeting with the American president. He had purportedly come to look for the elusive Northwest Passage to the Pacific, and from Philadelphia he did head roughly in the right direction. Several people along the way told him that an expedition of the sort he had in mind could only be conducted with state backing, with massive funds, and a significant team of veteran explorers. By the time he arrived at Niagara Falls, he was behaving more or less as a tourist. For some reason he turned south from there, down to the Ohio River, and eventually to “the Floridas”, without ever explicitly abandoning his stated purpose. In his memoir he makes up several impossible stories about the voyage — the footnotes to my edition offer such explanations as that the parts of it he claims to have made on this or that river could not have occurred, since the water flows opposite to the direction he claims to have travelled. He stops in Native encampments and falls in love with young women, who will eventually serve as inspiration to characters in his fictions, but with whom he never exchanges more than a chaste smile. He is somewhere in rural New York again when, in 1792, he happens to see a broadside with news of the revolution unfolding in Paris, and decides on the spot to return and join the royalists. His entire American sojourn was a dalliance, and he is at least honest enough to cast his foray into “exploration” in a light that suggests either the picaresque anti-heroes of baroque literature, or, somewhat more negatively, the “superfluous men” of a Russian contemporary such as Lermontov. This is the only sort of honesty any serious reader has any right to expect from an author — not regarding facts, but regarding the author’s truest nature.

Some of the most moving passage of the Mémoires describe the “Princes’ Army” that had been formed in Prussia, under Prussian command, composed entirely of exiled nobles set on restoring the French king to his full power. While Chateaubriand did see serious combat, and was even wounded in battle, these scenes too have a picaresque quality — one thinks above all of Stendhal’s depiction of the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), and of Fabrice del Dongo, the foolhardy young Italian who is eager to see combat, but uncertain whether the panicked rider-less horse that rushes past him in the forest, or the single gunshot he hears, or such other minor signs as these can count as “combat” or not. With Chateaubriand, even when our hero unambiguously sees combat, there is something disappointing about it, just as when he meets George Washington. Any true conservative cannot fail to be disappointed by reality as such, whatever it may deliver.

One of the particular disappointments of the royalist resistance for Chateaubriand is that he knows it is bound to fail. Unlike his fellow nobles in the Army of Princes, he understands that even if they manage to put the king back on his throne, nothing is going to be the same again. The world has simply changed too much. 1789 announced that change, and the announcement was irrevocable, even if the particular details of how it will all unfold remain, in 1792, when Chateaubriand is fighting to take back Thionville, objectively undecided. But still, for him, this fight offers a sort of “closure”, as we love to say today, for the long history of the European nobility. Of course that same closure was still dragging on as late as World War I, as we see in such representations as Erich von Stroheim’s character, the Rittmeister von Rauffenstein, in Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion (1937), and this long delay has something to do with the Restoration that begins in 1815 and that is at least in part the result of the efforts some years earlier of royalists such as Chateaubriand.

So, I mean, our memoirist knew a whole world was on its way out, even if he could not predict the exact chronology of the decline. He writes of his military experience, in romantic evocation of the deep origins of the European nobility in tribal warlordism:

The Army of Princes was made up of gentlemen, grouped by province and serving as simple soldiers: the nobility returned to its origins and to the origins of the monarchy, at the very moment when that nobility and that monarchy were ending, as an old man returns to childhood.⁸

Old men returning to childhood: this is a fairly good characterization of the species of conservatism I am attempting here to draw into relief — not the later childhood we call “adolescence”, where the passions grow focused on acquisition of power and status, but the first childhood, of kinship with trees, when one still has a choice of standing outside the narrowly human conflicts that serves as the motor of history and that also keeps most of us busy, with our own minuscule struggles, for the greater part of our lives. Chateaubriand spent that greater part of his life bemused, perplexed, disappointed, in love with a past of which he was never really sure whether it was his own, or humanity’s own. He was certain, anyhow, that no human effort was ever going to deliver us into a happier earthly condition — for the only real happiness is blessedness, which, in any composition with the modifier “earthly”, really does produce an oxymoron.

Our friend Agnes Callard will no doubt hate Chateaubriand’s inversion of the Socratic position on the well-lived life: “Aside from religion,” he writes, “happiness is not to know oneself, and to arrive at one’s death without having experienced life.”⁹ I admit this is a rather bleak thing to say, and that it only resonates with 49% or so of my soul. But I’m only about 49% conservative, and even this conservative part of me would probably more properly be described as conservationist in the sense we’ve already discussed. But I do wish there were still some proper conservatives out there, with the learning and wisdom to recognize Chateaubriand’s outlook as a significant part of their venerable lineage, to acknowledge and to embrace the melancholy and the tragedy, to be able to regret all that is lost even as one faces up honestly to the inevitability of loss.

4.

For the moment all we have is a Terror, of men and boys calling for heads on pikes, with all the same “cannibalistic” zeal of the teenagers Chateaubriand encountered in 1792, parading the head of his old associate Louis Collenot d’Angremont. For now the calls are usually only symbolic, though sometimes they are also literal. It is not that we are any less cannibalistic today, but only that our new technologies have made virtual punishment vastly more scalable than putting singular blades to singular necks. Within a few years, of course, the French Terror died down, but the coerciveness and surveillance remained well into the imperial and expansionist phase of the Revolution. By 1795 it was obligatory for every citizen to wear one of those stupid tricolor cockades — just as I recall it being almost obligatory to wear an American-flag lapel pin at the Midwestern university where I was teaching in the build-up to the Iraq War, and just as it was until some months ago practically obligatory in the circles I move in to put your pronouns in your e-mail signature. “For with the sovereign people everywhere, when that people becomes tyrannical, the tyrant is everywhere.”¹⁰

Today, of course, it is a huge stretch to say that the people are sovereign (RIP Popular Sovereignty, c. 1789 - c. 2025). But the transfer of the activity of surveillance and control from nosy neighbors and “concerned citizens” to artificial intelligence and ubiquitous security cameras is hardly going to constitute a blow to tyranny. And this new arrangement is certainly not going to be a victory for conservatism either, no matter how messily that term continues to be employed. Any conservatism that is worth the name is a conservatism of spirit and of temperament. Wistful, melancholic, and utterly resistant to interpretation by anyone who is a zealot for anything, it is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of any reign of terror, today no less than in 1792.

No true conservative could stand the shame and indignity of being affiliated with the Trump 2 regime, and with all that it represents. Any true conservative would do better to withdraw from history, to the extent possible, to retreat into his wooded grove and to rediscover his kinship with the trees, or perhaps to set off in vain pursuit of an elusive Northwest Passage — and to acknowledge that even if this is undeniably a revolutionary time, it really is just too much to ask of us, in view of our inborn temperament, to be of our time.

—JSR, Paris

1. My considered view is that only one out of the four terms in this intersectional log-jam has any stable transhistorical meaning at all. I won’t tell you which one.

2. Likely not — student input usually doesn’t count for much in hiring decisions, however much the faculty pretends otherwise.

3. « Nous ne jugerons pas le roi, nous le tuerons. »

4. « [U]n courtisan réduit à se nourrir de vérités est bien près de mourir de faim. »

5. « [L]a vanité des médiocrités en souffrance produisit autant de révolutionnaires que l'orgueil blessé des cul-de-jatte et des avortons : révolte analogue des infirmités de l'esprit et de celles du corps. »

6. « [J]e les connais tous par leurs noms comme mes enfants : c’est ma famille, je n’en ai pas d’autre, j’espère mourir au milieu d’elle. »

7. « Ne cherchez plus en Amérique les constitutions politiques artistement construites dont Charlevoix a fait l’histoire : la monarchie des Hurons, la république des Iroquois. Quelque chose de cette destruction s’est accompli et s’accomplit encore en Europe, même sous nos yeux ; un poète prussien, au banquet de l’ordre Teutonique, chanta, en vieux prussien, vers l’an 1400, les faits héroïques des anciens guerriers de son pays : personne ne le comprit, et on lui donna, pour récompense, cent noix vides. Aujourd’hui, le bas breton, le basque, le gaëlique, meurent de cabane en cabane, à mesure que meurent les chevriers et les laboureurs. »

8. « L’armée des princes était composée de gentilshommes, classés par provinces et servant en qualité de simples soldats : la noblesse remontait à son origine et à l’origine de la monarchie, au moment même où cette noblesse et cette monarchie finissaient, comme un vieillard retourne à l’enfance. »

9. « Religion à part, le bonheur est de s’ignorer et d’arriver à la mort sans avoir senti la vie. »

10. « Car le peuple souverain étant partout, quand il devient tyran le tyran est partout. »

All citations are from:

François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Livres I-XII, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2001. I’m sorry I left out the page numbers!