It is a mark of moral decay that we must now say aloud what should be instinctively understood: that some acts, though necessary, are nonetheless tragic. One likes to believe we once knew this, but even if we didn’t, we ought to now. To take a man’s freedom, to send him from your country, to take up arms and kill in war, these are solemn undertakings. We should do them only because we have to, never because we want to, and always with a bowed head, a grim resolve, and a sense of sadness and humility.
Instead, we do them with memes.
Consider the recent grotesquerie being passed around social media like so much digital contraband: the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz”, a nightmarish immigration facility in the swamps of Florida where illegal immigrants are allegedly being detained among the gators and the mosquitoes, if not literally, then certainly in spirit. The point is not the veracity of the claims, but the reaction: triumphalism, mockery, and gleeful cruelty dressed up as patriotism. One might almost forget that we are talking about real people, with real families, being shipped off by the hundreds into bureaucratic oblivion.
Deportation is not a comedy sketch. It is not a slogan. It is an act of state power, the same kind of power that, if abused, leads to the very tyrannies we conservatives claim to oppose. If it must be done, and often it must, then let it be done with sobriety, not sadism.
But this is only the most recent symptom of a wider disease: the death of solemnity. War has become a video game, complete with drone footage set to heavy metal music. The jailing of criminals, once a grim civic burden, is now recast as a gladiatorial bloodsport, complete with mugshots, rap sheets, and breathless commentary—most of it in the form of social media taunting. We cut foreign aid to starving families and celebrate it, deliberately oblivious to the consequences. We fire massive amounts of government workers and high five each other, without a care for the workers’ families. Even lethal self-defense—an act which should shake the soul of any decent person—is now treated as a kind of cultural victory dance. One can almost hear the chants of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” or “FAFO,” before the body hits the floor.
There are hard choices to make and we have to make them. We don’t have infinite resources. Borders cannot be open. Government has to be smaller. Charity requires limits. Crime should not be tolerated. I get it. That’s not the problem.
What is most damning about this trend is not that we have to do hard things, but that we take such joy in them. We have forgotten C.S. Lewis’s warning that the worst moral monsters are not the tyrants, but the cheerful bureaucrats who commit evil with a clean conscience and a satisfied smile. And indeed, it is often those most desperate to prove their righteousness who show the least hesitation in exercising power.
I’ve noted before Lewis’s penchant for prescience. This admonition is further evidence, especially apropos as it is for modern America, as we witness in real time a gleeful descent into an unrestrained executive in the name of restoring the nation. And therein lies a troubling paradox—one that sits at the very heart of the modern conservative dilemma.
Things have become so degenerate, so frayed at the seams, so obscenely unserious, that they seem to demand an iron-fisted response. Crime spirals, borders disintegrate, children are indoctrinated by institutions their parents fund but no longer control. The culture, in its aesthetic, moral, and civic sense, is not merely slipping, it is plunging.
And so, in response, even those who once saw government as a necessary evil begin to flirt with the idea that maybe, just maybe, we need our own aggressive state power to restore order. That maybe we need our own purge. Our own strongman. Our own great cleansing fire.
They say the devil is in the details, but he’s more often found in the dilemma.
And here lies the trap: in seeking to save the republic, we may become the very thing we were meant to restrain. We may embrace the same state machinery we once mistrusted — centralized, weaponized, intrusive to the point of invasive, and righteous — not as a last resort but as a first impulse. The left once longed to remake society by seizing the state. We, too, now stand at the edge of that temptation.
Conservatism, properly understood, is not about timidity. But neither is it about conquest. It is about limits: on power, on passion, and yes, on ourselves. To wield the state in defense of civilization is sometimes necessary. But to love its power, to indulge in it, to take pleasure in it, that is the road to tyranny, no matter how noble the pretext.
We should be deeply skeptical of any movement, left or right, that relishes the exercise of coercion. The conservative state, if it is to be a state worth conserving, must carry its sword in trembling hands. Justice without solemnity becomes vengeance. Order without solemnity becomes oppression.
Solemnity is the antidote to power’s intoxicating allure. It is what enables restraint, and with it, ordered liberty. For if we cannot restrain ourselves in the use of power, power will be used to restrain us.
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