Yuval Levin offers National Review Online readers his thoughts about Charles Cooke’s new book outlining a “conservatarian” manifesto.
I’m not a “conservatarian” — I’m a conservative, and there are certainly places in the book where I didn’t agree with Cooke on one or another particular issue. But it is, throughout, both superbly well written and argued and deeply insightful. I found it particularly so on what I take to be the overarching policy implication of Cooke’s argument: the need for localism and decentralization to serve as core principles of the Right’s approach to the role of government and its case for limits on that role. This is a timeless truth that is nonetheless especially timely in 21st-century America.
Conservatism inherently points in this direction for reasons that are anthropological, sociological, and epistemological (if you’ll pardon my street slang). We conservatives tend to see the human person as an incorrigible mass of contradictions: a fallen and imperfect being created in a divine image, a creature possessed of fundamental dignity and inalienable rights but always prone to excess and to sin and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation. This gives us high standards but low expectations of human affairs and makes us wary of utopianisms of all stripes. It also causes us to be more impressed with successful human institutions than we are outraged at failed ones, and so to be protective of our inheritance and eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society (rather than engineer new ones) to improve things because they are likely to possess more knowledge than we can readily perceive — and more than any collection of technical experts, however capable, is ever likely to have.
