“Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries?”
Author: Joshua Tait
Year: 2024
Genre: Essay (Substack, Notes Toward a History of the Conservative Movement)
Published: August 24, 2024
URL: joshuatait.substack.com
Core Argument
Tait argues that the American Conservative Movement has always operated under a false banner: calling itself conservative while being functionally counterrevolutionary. The movement claimed the intellectual heritage of Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott — whose genuine conservatism involved accepting the world as it is, preferring the familiar, and distrusting political engineering — but in practice sought to reverse the New Deal, roll back progressive cultural changes, and restore a prior social order.
The key intellectual contradiction: you cannot be a genuine Burkean conservative and simultaneously believe the republic has been lost. Once you accept that a “total revolution” (as National Review called the New Deal) has occurred, the conservative posture becomes impossible and counterrevolution becomes logically necessary. The Conservative Movement made both claims simultaneously, never resolving the tension.
Key Figures Discussed
Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind, 1953): Defined six principles of conservatism rooted in Burkean tradition, prescription, and suspicion of change. Crucially believed the American constitutional order was fundamentally intact. His touchstone phrase: “the permanent things.” His influence waned as he became a citation rather than an active shaper.
Michael Oakeshott (“On Being Conservative,” 1956): Defined conservatism as a disposition rather than a doctrine — “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried.” His conservatism was aestheticized loss aversion; the state’s role was strictly limited. Tait: “I suspect Oakeshott’s influence on the Conservative Movement is largely cosmetic.”
Pat Buchanan: The paleoconservative who made the counterrevolutionary impulse explicit. Recognized that Reagan had not reversed the sexual revolution or the demographic transformation of America, and concluded that counterrevolution was necessary.
Samuel Francis: Buchanan’s intellectual advisor; argued the Conservative Movement had become “Beautiful Losers” — winning political victories while losing the cultural war. His analysis moved from movement conservatism’s implicit restorationism to explicit advocacy for a new kind of nationalist politics.
Donald Trump: Tait’s reading — Trump’s vacuity is his function. He is an “ideological cipher” who encodes all the counterrevolutionary currents (nativism, nostalgia, anti-progressivism, vague Christian nationalism) simultaneously while maintaining deniability. He unifies a coalition that would splinter if any single element were made explicit.
Key Insights
The catastrophism problem: “You can’t be conservative on a moving train.” The Conservative Movement’s catastrophist claims about the New Deal, progressivism, and cultural change made genuine Burkean conservatism logically incoherent. If things are as dire as conservatives claim, Burkean acceptance of the present is moral abdication.
The restorationist fantasy: Movement conservatives assumed a linear theory of time: suspicion of forward change but no corresponding suspicion of backward change. “To go backwards is not really change at all.” This asymmetry conceals the radical nature of what they actually propose — rolling back decades of accumulated law and culture.
The authoritarianism temptation: “Cultural counterrevolution is tremendously difficult short of an exigent cataclysm. The easy way out, so to speak, demands significant and coercive state power. It’s this reason, I think, we see the fetishization of certain authoritarians past and present.” This connects to the New Right’s Viktor Orbán fixation and the postliberal embrace of state power.
Relationship to Other Wiki Pages
- Provides the historical frame for understanding Paleoconservatism as the pivot from implicit to explicit counterrevolution
- Illuminates the intellectual gap between Russell Kirk’s actual conservatism and what The Claremonters claim to inherit
- Connects to Decisionism via the logic of the permanent emergency
- Anticipates the Claremont Review of Books debate between Voegeli and his younger colleagues over “abandon conservatism for counterrevolution”
Contradictions with Other Sources
The Kersch article (Beyond Originalism) argues the conservative movement’s constitutional politics (Declarationism) actually represents a sophisticated positive project — not just reaction — that can appeal to liberals and conservatives alike through its Lincoln framing. Tait’s counterrevolution thesis is more pessimistic: the Lincoln rhetoric is window dressing on a restorationist project that has never honestly confronted its own nature.
Furious Minds largely confirms Tait’s thesis from a different angle: Field shows the MAGA New Right’s intellectual leaders are more interested in “winning” than in conserving, and their talk of the founding functions as legitimizing rhetoric for a power project.