Here it is! perhaps the best distillation of what LITD exists to defend I've ever come across

It's a phrase found many paragraphs into a New Criterion essay by Daniel J. Mahoney on Russell Kirk's veneration of Edmund Burke. The whole thing is worth your while, but this nails it.

Longtime readers are familiar with this site's formulation of the three pillars of conservatism, distilled elsewhere over the years, sometimes effectively, sometimes boneheadedly.

Let's review how LITD puts it, since that is all this blog is ever on record as defending:

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world (such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

But did Mahoney ever nail it with a succinctness I could have only dreamed of.

This, this, is what an actual conservative goes into 2019 fiercely determined to defend:

. . . respect for tradition and inherited morality, support for equality under God but only under God, and fierce opposition to “doctrinaire alteration” of the rules of civilized existence.

And from whence do we glean these basic principles?

Aristotle, Cicero, the Fathers of the Church, and Hooker and Milton.

Who knows how these rules will fare in the short term against both contemporary post-American Leftism and the Very Stable Genius phenomenon, but there can be no wavering from it if one is serious about the stakes at the present juncture.

Anything else - that is to say less - is a shiny object not worth fooling with.