I'm thinking maybe we should just let the Trumpists have the term "conservative" since they've defiled it so badly

What to call the champions of freedom, dignity, clarity, tradition and hierarchy?

There was a one-sentence paragraph toward the end of my last piece:

It’s impossible to promote the higher things of human existence - beauty, nobility, loyalty, humility, wisdom, transcendence, immutability - without a language the words of which mean the same things for all of us.

And we have no such language anymore. We can’t even agree on the meanings of our words for tangible, objectively verifiable things, things we’d always assumed to be very basic. Witness Ketanji Brown Jackson’s less-than-straightforward answer to the question about the definition of the term “woman” at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Ideological labels don’t tell us much anymore. For a while, in the middle of the twentieth century, juxtaposing “liberal” and “conservative” served us well in establishing a spectrum one side of which was instinctively drawn to collectivist approaches to societal problem-solving, and the other emphasizing individual sovereignty. But even those applications of those terms was a distortion.

A classical liberal, in the nineteenth century, was someone who took to heart what Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat had had to say about how the free market was organic and spontaneous - that is, unplanned - and therefore the economic arrangement most conducive to freedom in human life’s other realms. As the twentieth century got underway, and Austrian-School thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek refined that strain of inquiry, they were deemed classical liberals as well.

Twentieth-century conservatism embraced the classical liberals, but also looked to the eighteenth century’s Edmund Burke as the father of a strain that upheld hierarchy and tradition. He hoped against hope that the king would act like a wise monarch and not an impulsive tyrant. He hated slavery and wanted to see it ended, and thought the way to assimilate freed slaves into the Western societies in which they found themselves was to make sure they got a good grounding in Christianity. This strain was developed by thinkers such as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk.

These two strains were joined by a concern about totalitarian collectivism as that became a threat to both tradition and freedom unique to the modern era.

All of this was converging, and Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review, proposed what he called fusionism as a way for adherents of these strains to not only work together, but do so guided by a coherent view of what made human life valuable.

It’s not as if the conservatism that has come to serve as shorthand for opposition to the collectivism and the disdain for tradition on the left popped onto the scene fully formed. All this took a great deal of hammering out, and ill-fitting movements that wanted in on the action, such as Ayn Rand and the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, had to be shown the door.

Conservatism enjoyed a swelling of the ranks as formerly left-leaning figures at journals such as Commentary and Partisan Review crossed the spectrum’s center line. This roughly coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan on the political level.

I used to try to reduce conservatism to the three pillars of fusionism / Reaganism - free-market economics, an understanding of why Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind, and resolute resistance to world-stage forces unfriendly to the first two - but now I don’t know that such bullet-point framing does it justice.

How’s this for a workable foundation on which to build a definition? Conservatism is concerned with that which is immutable and transcendent. It is preoccupied with the higher things enumerated in the excerpt above - beauty, nobility, loyalty, humility, wisdom - but also things that the Left has claimed it champions as well: fairness, connectedness, deliverance of society’s lower rungs from lives of drudgery and discomfort.

But conservatism - at least as it was defined until eight or nine years ago - asks a question that leftism has never really bothered with: on what basis do we call these things good? Why are they preferable to their opposites? To say that an answer to that is self-evident won’t cut it. That basically relies on feelings as a sufficient explanation. It’s the old atheists-can-have-moral-codes argument. It evades the fundamental philosophical question: What’s wrong with evil?

I’ve gone down this road about as far as I want to at present.

I’d like to suggest that the co-opting of the term “conservative” by Trumpists and Neo-Trumpists has been so complete that it probably can’t be applied to those who so considered themselves pre-2015. Not only do the Matt Gaetzes, the Marjorie Taylor-Greens, the Tucker Carlsons, Charlie Kirks and Mike Lindells of the world proclaim themselves to be conservative, left-leaning mainstream journalism is all too happy to apply the label to them as well. And we all know why that is so: it reinforces an image in the public’s mind of conservatives as being spiritually ugly, economically protectionist, and combative because that is exhilarating (“I like Trump because he fights!”).

There’s a lot of discussion about just when the term “liberal” came to be shorthand for the collectivist orientation, pretty much the opposite of what Adam Smith et al were all about. I guess the publication of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination in 1950 would serve pretty well as a demarcation.

What’s pretty obvious at this point is that the two terms have outlived their usefulness. We are no longer talking about what they meant fifty years ago.

This is not a matter of getting in the semantical weeds. Whether we as a civilization can retrieve freedom from the maws of progressivism and restore some kind of coherent vision of what makes human life worthwhile depends on it.

So let’s be thinking about what the inhabitants of the precariously narrow sliver of terrain that we occupy should call ourselves.

As Weaver said, ideas have consequences.