There's lots of bracing candor going around these days about the state of conservatism; let's start talking about where we go from here

James Heaney has a piece at The Federalist the title of which lets you know what a bracing bitch-slap you are in for: "Conservatism Is Dead; Long Live Conservatism." His main point is that there are now three very distinct movements (so distinct that they basically hate each other) claiming the conservative mantle: the populists (those who salivate for Squirrel-Hair), the establishment (who put economic growth so front and center that they are perfectly willing to let all other concerns fade into the background), and the grassroots (who understand that politics is downstream from culture and that therefore "social issues" cannot be treated like a third rail).

He says that the movement that has been replaced by these three camps died because the camps got caught up in the issues of the day at the expense of the fealty to timeless principles that had been conservatism's core:

When the modern conservative movement started out under the political leadership of Barry Goldwater and later Reagan, it was built on centuries-old principles handed down by men like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville. In 1953, the great intellectual, Russell Kirk, summarized those central premises of conservatism.

In his “six canons,” Kirk articulated a conservativism that embraces “a transcendant order, or body of natural law,” because “[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” Conservatives, Kirk said, reject “uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims,” even as they recognize “ultimate equality in the judgement of God and… before courts of law.” They maintain the importance of property rights against Leviathan government, and distrust “sophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society on abstract designs.” Finally, a Kirk conservative is prudent, recognizing “that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”

The modern “conservative movement” has lost touch with these essentials. The establishment builds entire fiscal plans out of the “abstract designs” of “calculators and economists,” and the Wall Street Journal editorial board wouldn’t recognize a “body of natural law” if that body hauled back and punched L. Gordon Crovitz in the nose. Even if they did take notice, the Journal and its Acela Corridor buddies would find it gauche in the extreme to actually speak out loud about political problems in fundamentally “religious and moral” terms.

The populists, for their part, often preach about problems in highly charged moral language, but their only common theme is outrage, and their chosen avatar is Trump, the serial adulterer. Moreover, their desire to burn down all our political institutions is the very definition of the “devouring conflagration” Kirk warns of.

Conservatism has failed, then, partly because a large swath of the “movement” has lost touch with its central ideas. The very word “conservative” has been badly damaged. Corrupted and polarized, the label has become little more than a tribal marker, and alienates many voters who would otherwise naturally align with Kirk’s principles.

Okay, so the problem (actually disaster, although, because that term has become a signature utterance of the guy who finished the job of killing the movement (that would be Squirrel-Hair), it has lost all usefulness) has been defined.

At Heaney's blog, he proposes a philosophical basis for gestating and giving birth to a movement amidst the ashes. I'm pretty sure he adheres to the three pillars that comprised the conservative movement that existed from roughly 1955 to the present, but he chooses to delineate the proposed movement's basis according to a model the foundation of which would rest on two broad areas of principle:

1. A commitment to the inherent dignity of the human person: at conception, at birth, in childhood, in college, in poverty, in sickness, in prison, in a refugee camp, in marriage, in the workplace, at church, in parenthood, in our country, in foreign lands, in old age, in natural death. Wherever there are human beings in need, we will support them, and we will protect their lives, their liberty, their property, and their well-being through wise, honest laws and a strong social safety net.
2. Broad opposition to the giant, impersonal, inhuman entities that increasingly rule our modern world: Big Business and Big Government. Businesses would be encouraged to get smaller, to de-emphasize stock prices, and to operate at the local level rather than in gigantic, powerful multi-nationals. Meanwhile, government would also move toward the local level, still providing a social safety net, but with each state figuring out their own way of doing it. (If voters in one state want Scandanavia-style single-payer health care, let them do it. If voters in another state want Singapore-style free-market health care, let them do that instead.)

I could get behind that.

I daresay that a very large swath of the post-American public could get behind it.

Dignity of the individual and wariness of anything centralized.

Makes for an interesting conversation-launcher, at the very least.

And what else do we have to do as we sit around in the rubble?