The only thing about American conservatism that all self-described conservatives seem to agree on these days is that it is changing. A series of phenomena have jarred the West in quick succession since the last time American conservatives were enduringly unified—the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalism and the Internet, 9/11 and its subsequent wars, the financial collapse and the Great Recession, the Great Awokening among the global elite, the emergence of nationalism on the global Right, and, finally, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, people whose politics are grounded in “the permanent things” will disagree about how to apply time-tested principles to such roiling times. But for all those disagreements, it is only in those permanent principles that conservatives can seek and produce an answer to the question: what is conservatism today?
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