“Western experts often describe the Islamic Republic of Iran as ‘conservative.’ The label is superficial, misleading, and fundamentally wrong. The regime in Tehran preserves nothing. It is a revolutionary project, born in blood and ideology, with far more in common with the progressive radicalisms of the twentieth century than with any genuine conservative tradition.”
That is how a commentary yesterday put it in Konzervativní listy. Well said—up to a point. The difficulty is that revolutionary projects have always made up a significant part of conservative activity as well. Conservative revolutionaries prefer to call their efforts “counterrevolution,” in order to distinguish their virtuous upheaval from the other side’s wicked one. But that is largely a matter of terminology.
Which brings us back to an old observation: there are at least two kinds of conservatism.
The first—call it the superficial one—is the conservatism of ordinary people. It defends the world we actually inhabit: the one we are used to, and with which we are broadly content. It is a world where abortions happen (even if we would prefer they did not), where people divorce, where infidelity occurs, where theft exists, and where there is plenty of shallowness and dishonesty. Yet it is not such a terrible world that we cannot live decent and even happy lives in it. And most of us quietly accept that two centuries from now society will probably look so different that we would scarcely recognize it—and might not even like it. None of this means, however, that we are willing to see our present world smashed by ideological progressives.
Then there is a deeper conservatism, rooted firmly in old authors and ancient traditions. These conservatives oppose progressivism just as firmly—often more firmly—than anyone else. But they also feel a profound hostility toward modern society itself. They see it as shallow, irreligious, sinful, materialistic. What they demand is a return to something that supposedly existed long ago—perhaps before the Industrial Revolution. And to achieve that restoration of the lost golden age, they ultimately require many of the same revolutionary tools that Marxists once embraced.
In this sense, one could describe all orthodox Muslims as conservatives. In this sense, Adolf Hitler—with his nostalgic longing for an ancient Germanic community—could also be called a conservative. Elements of this impulse appear, in one form or another, in nearly every large conservative movement. The difference, of course, is that such thinkers insist they are not creating a utopia.
They are merely restoring what they believe to be natural.