If you wanted to boil down conservatism to a single anodyne formula, it might be “reverence for the past.” But reverence, as opposed to respect or understanding, often requires a selective memory: Inspect an image too closely, and flaws that seemed accidental might appear pervasive, even essential. While we usually think of writers and intellectuals as transmitting knowledge, the role of conservative intellectuals is just as often to enable those selective forgettings that make the persistence of their movement possible. From this need comes the birth of something perhaps new in the history of human folly: a knowledge class whose very existence comes from its ability to not-know.
It’s to this kind of return to this haze or amnesia that Ross Douthat almost calls the nation in The New York Times. In one representative column published last fall, “Can the Right Escape Racism?,” Douthat fondly recalls that the conservatism of the second Bush managed to “partially suppress” the “racially polarizing controversies” of the early 1990s and hopes for a return to that better era.
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