When I first launched ConservativeOpinion.com, a friend suggested I instead call it “Right-Wing Opinion.” I rejected the idea emphatically, understanding, as I did, that there is a world of difference between being conservative and being right-wing. The terms are often used interchangeably, because their desired policy outcomes largely overlap. This is terribly erroneous. Between the two lie critical philosophical, moral, and — in today’s political climate — essential distinctions, that not merely distinguish the two concepts, but in many ways make them opposite.
Conservatism, properly understood, is an act of stewardship over the fragile institutions that sustain a free society. It is the patient labor of preserving what is good while pruning what has decayed. Its great expositors — Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Founders themselves — knew that to conserve is not to resist change but to guide it, and that moderation is not weakness but a discipline necessary to a free society. I therefore reject the term “moderate conservative” not as a contradiction, but rather as a redundancy, much as “cold ice” would be: to be conservative is necessarily to moderate. The very essence of conservatism is temperance, the recognition that civilization is fragile and must be handled with care, that freedom demands restraint, and that to preserve liberty we must moderate not only government but ourselves. To be right-wing, however, is to reject moderation, and therefore conservatism’s core, and liberty’s condition precedent.
A true conservative seeks, in short, to conserve (as the name implies) what is best in our traditions while carefully adapting them to new challenges. Conservatism protects our democracy, our courts, our communities, our values, our rights, our culture, our families, and the supremacy of the individual over the state. It values alliances, unity, and the slow, difficult work of building and maintaining a civilization, and resists authoritarian impulses and cultural lurches when fixes are needed.
Right-wingism, by contrast, is reactionary. It is not a philosophy but a posture. It requires no intellectual groundwork — in fact, it sees that as restraining — only the instinct to stand opposite the Left. To be sure, there are worse ways of finding true north than to observe the Left and run the other direction. But here lies the fatal weakness: if you define yourself only as the opposite of your opponent, then what you are changes as your opponent changes. Your identity is not fixed in principle but in negation. That is not conservatism, it is surrender, even if disguised as defiance, and it is no way to build an enduring nation.
Worse, that impulse rewards extremism. Where conservatives measure progress by durability, right-wingers measure it by distance, and the further to one edge, the better. Extremity is therefore mistaken for conviction. Where conservatives look for consensus and durable majorities, right-wingers demand purity. That rings of righteousness, but it is achieved through exclusion: the more pure you want it to be, the fewer people will qualify, and therefore more who must be excluded. This is not a recipe for sustained democratic success, nor a cohesive civilization.
And consider this irony: right-wingers often complain about immigrants failing to integrate into our civic culture. Yet they too, by barricading themselves against all others, and refusing to find any common ground, divorce themselves from their fellow citizens. That is not conservatism, nor is it patriotism, it is isolation. Conservatism requires, nay embraces engagement.
There is an almost biblical theme here. Christians are called to be in the world but not of it. Likewise, conservatives must engage with their culture without surrendering to it. We share a country with people who see things differently, and conservatism demands that we accept this reality with humility.
And “reality” is a key word here. Conservatism, first and foremost, demands a recognition of reality, and its limits, and therefore understands that persuasion is the lifeblood of democracy. Right-wingism concerns itself not with such things, demanding instead conformity to an ideal even when it defies political reality. In that way, conservatism is designed to lead, right-wingism is designed merely to insist.
Consensus, therefore, is not capitulation; it is the recognition that we share a fate, even if not every opinion.
Conservatism, then, is collaborative. It seeks not merely to win arguments, but to win allies and converts. And because of that, it does not fear progress but domesticates it. Without progress, conservatism decays into anachronism. Without conservatism, progress becomes reckless, untethered, and ultimately self-destructive. All progress requires change, but not all change is progress. Progressivism needs conservatism for a foundation, and conservatism needs progressivism to remain vital and relevant. The two are not opposites but complements — the tension that keeps a civilization upright.
The very language of “wings,” on the other hand, is adversarial. To identify yourself as part of a wing is to separate yourself from the body. But the body of a nation — like the body of a bird — requires integration if it is to fly. A bird cannot soar on wings that work against each other. Yet our politics increasingly treat consensus-building as betrayal, and difference as enmity.
So while right-wingers focus on what divides, conservatives ask what we share. While the right-winger measures success by how far he can lurch from his foe, the conservative measures success by what endures. And understanding that endurance comes from consensus and not from heavy-handedness, that pluralism is not a weakness but the condition of a free society, conservatives recognize that we are better off together; while right-wingers are willing to split the country in half, and even chip away at their own number, if that means doctrinal uniformity on their side.
More perilous still, right-wingism is willing to abandon the very principles conservatism was born to defend — limited government, due process, and the rule of law — in the pursuit of its desired outcomes. “As long as we get what we want,” it seems to say, “we don’t care how we get it.” This is consequential: when politics becomes a contest of purity and division, the natural tool is force, which is the enemy of liberty. The woke Left and the radical Right differ in rhetoric but not in tendency. They both reject thoughtfulness in favor of intellectual lassitude and grievances, and both bend toward the belief that the ends justify the means, even if that means empowering the state at the expense of individual rights and liberties.
Conservatives want to restrain government to maximize freedom; right-wingers want to empower government to restrain what is repellent to them in order to maximize their gains. But a government so unshackled will not restrain itself for long. Power seized in righteous anger rarely stops at the borders of its original justification. The same state that crushes your enemies today will crush you tomorrow, and with your own applause still echoing in its ears.
Conservatism resists that temptation. It holds that means and ends are inseparable. It defends institutions precisely because they restrain the passions of the mob, whether shouting “equality” or “liberty.” It cherishes freedom because freedom forbids compulsion. To preserve liberty, one must restrain power — even when that power tempts you with victory. That is why conservatism builds institutions, while right-wingism burns them in the name of expedience. Conservatism accepts that safeguards impede speed, but knows they alone prevent tyranny — the separation of powers, checks and balances, due process, judicial review, and the hard labor of building majorities. Right-wingism would scrap them all for the sake of immediacy and expediency.
And therein lies the allure of right-wingism: it’s easy. Governing is hard. Building and conserving is hard. Much easier to forever demand and complain that the world does not meet your expectations, and when power is achieved, to tear down the very safeguards that created the freedom you demand.
In our polarized democracy, the reflexive right-wing instinct — like its mirror image on the left — deepens division and corrodes trust. Conservatism, properly understood, offers something far more difficult but far more necessary: unity, prudence, humility, and the hard work of compromise, not of our principles, but for our principles.
If conservatism is a thesis — a balance of Jefferson’s creed that government is best which governs least, with Madison’s prudence that if men were angels no government would be necessary — then right-wingism is a tantrum, a threat in lieu of argument, a power play dressed as principle. Conservatism is wary of power and seeks only as much as necessary; right-wingism is intoxicated by power and blind to its pernicious effects.
Conservatives and right-wingers may start from the same place and share many of the same beliefs and goals. But conservatives conserve; right-wingers react. Conservatives welcome progress as the lifeblood of what they preserve; right-wingers treat it as a threat. Conservatives persuade; right-wingers debate. Conservatives build consensus; right-wingers see it as betrayal. Conservatives temper principle with pragmatism; right-wingers equate extremism with authenticity. Conservatives stand opposed to authoritarianism as a threat to the very things we stand for; right-wingers see it as necessary to achieve their ends.
If America is to endure — and that is by no means certain — it will not be by the furious beating of wings, but by the steady flight of a body united in purpose, conserving what is good, reforming what is not, and remembering that civilization is not won by shouting, and not by demanding, but by persuading, by building, and by conserving.
