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When John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate during die 2008 presidential campaign, voices in die conservative movement expressed surprise, even shock. It wasn't just diat McCain had chosen a political novice, an ingénue and outsider to the ways and means of governance in die lower forty-eight states. It was how he had chosen her: with little to no vetting, and with a great deal of faitii in the superiority of intuition and impulse (his and hers) over reason and reflection. It was, it seemed, a most unconservative decision: impetuous, ill considered, imprudent.
This was hardly die first time diat die standard bearer of conservatism had failed to five up to die self-image of the conservative. In die spring of 2003, several conservatives voiced concern over die audacity of George W. Bush's decision to fight what was essentially a war of choice. They also noted die liberal pedigree of one of die Iraq War's justifications: spreading democracy and human rights. Here was a conservative leader, again it seemed, acting in die most unconservative of ways: jettisoning the realism of his fatiier and his party for an internationalism long considered die exclusive property of die Left, pressing die forward march of history against die status quo of die Middle East.
Ever since Edmund Burke invented conservatism as an idea, the conservative has styled himself a man of prudence and moderation, his cause a sober - and sobering - recognition of limits. "To be conservative," writes Michael Oakeshott, "is to prefer die familiar to die unknown. . .the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to die possible, die limited to die unbounded, die near to die distant." Yet the political efforts that have roused the conservative to his most profound reflections- die reactions against the French and Bolshevik revolutions, die defense of slavery and Jim Crow, die attack on social democracy and the welfare state, the serial backlashes against the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights - have been anything but that. Whether in Europe or the United States, in this century or previous ones, conservatism has been a forward movement of restless and relentless change, partial to risk taking and ideological adventurism, militant in its posture...