We Are All Conservatives Now

Carlo Rimbotti

Oct 28, 2026

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I speak here of conservatism in an idealized sense. The particularities of any putatively conservative party—whether in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere—do not concern me. Conservatism is, fundamentally, the desire to conserve: to halt, retard, or reverse societal change. It is more sentiment than political platform, more inclination than philosophy.

Conservatives recognize that human beings must control the bounds of their own lives. They do not ask that success be promised to everyone, but instead that the hopes and dreams of individuals remain achievable. The difference is between a man who fails to get his dream job because of the typical tragedies of life—economic recession, family obligations, his own laziness—and a man who fails to get his dream job because that job no longer exists. Conservatives, that is to say, insist that society not change so much that it renders human dreams moot.

It is this desire which is fundamentally democratic. In order for societies to govern themselves, their decisions must be sticky: they cannot immediately be rendered obsolete by economic or technological progress. The desire to conserve, to slow down human progress, is also the desire to ensure that democratic governments have the ability to govern. Political processes, after all, are time-intensive. Politicians must deliberate, must consult their constituents, must negotiate political compromises. If progress becomes too fast, then democracy as a practice becomes impossible. Policies are rendered obsolete before they’re passed.1

In this case, the people are no longer in charge. Instead, the individuals who push for progress—the inventors of technology, the financiers of multinational deals, the advocates for dramatic changes to the social order—dictate the conditions of human life. There are perhaps times when societies wish to delegate control to these sorts of people (I, for example, do not necessarily want too much political control over the manufacturers of drugs) but these delegations must necessarily be temporary. Democratic societies must be able to regain control.

Bureaucracy is the sine qua non of this sort of delegation. We think of bureaucracy as slow (All that paperwork! All those signatures and countersignatures!) but it is actually an attempt to address the quick pace of progress. The representatives of the people do not have the expertise (which is another way of saying the time) to make a decision, so they delegate it to a body of experts.2

In the past, human societies have found ways to balance progress with democratic control. A man might begin his career working on horse-drawn carriages and end it driving automobiles. Progress was slow, and society had the time to adapt gradually. Dramatic breakdowns took place—the violence of the Luddite rebellions comes to mind—but they were eventually settled. Even the horrors of the Industrial Revolution were mollified by democratic restrictions on working conditions.

It is important to note that this particular type of conservatism—a conservatism which is about a society’s control of itself, a conservatism fundamentally concerned with democracy—was only realized in the twentieth century. In the past, the conservative impulse was employed to defend regimes (oftentimes aristocratic) which were undemocratic. Traces of these older forms persist, but they are misaligned with a coherent vision of the philosophy. Insofar as conservatism is the desire to ensure that individuals retain control over their own lives, such control must extend to all people. If only a coterie of aristocrats decides how society progresses, most people ipso facto lack control over their own lives. The expansion of democratic participation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the natural development of conservatism, not a decisive break from it.

There is an obvious way in which this theory of conservatism resembles Marx. The German philosopher would insist that human beings control the nature of progress, writing that “The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.” Though marred by Marx’s obscurantism, the sentiment carried by this defense of conservatism is similar.

The difference lies in Marx’s insistence on the inevitability of progress. He would write that capitalist production (i.e., the technological progress we’re familiar with today) works “with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” Later, he would insist that “There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas.” This sentiment is fundamentally undemocratic, for it assumes that progress moves society wherever it wants: human beings are only in control of who does what sort of task, not whether and how the tasks change.

The type of democracy proposed by conservatives, in contrast, is much more radical. They insist that human beings decide where and whether we progress—not that progress itself (in Marxist theory) or powerful oligarchs (in Marxist practice) determine our course for us. And it is this type of conservatism which makes the most sense in the years to come. Artificial intelligence has yet to replace most jobs, but the coming storm is, indeed, coming. It is true that human life necessarily escapes the bounds of our intentions—any man over the age of fifty could attest to this fact—but to equate modern technological progress with the kind we’ve seen in the past, much less to the vagaries of our own lives, is to make a very dangerous category error.

In 1955, William F. Buckley famously described conservatives as those who “stand athwart history, yelling stop.” The most notable political development of the 2020s has been the emergence of a great number of people, many of them ostensibly progressive, who agree with his sentiment. We are all conservatives now.

As my friend put it: “Conservation of social practices and conventions is a basic precondition of democratic deliberation. Progress changes our thoughts, actions... even our words. When we lose a common register of mores and terms, public reason becomes impossible.”

Expertise comes from time. Some carpenters might be more gifted than others, but all of them spent years learning their craft.