Conservatives must finally come to grips with it, at least if they wish to finally establish conservatism as a robust political philosophy and a viable prescription for governance. The possibility of a conservative revolution, counter-intuitive though it may be, is actually tacitly conceded by both Left and Right in the United States. One public official at the time expressed the paradox pithily, saying that it was precisely because he was conservative that the prevailing political milieu allowed him to stand for change. Reagan, after all, was elected on a vision that included rolling back certain aspects of the welfare state going all the way back to the New Deal. Indeed, when the survival of a tradition or way of life is at stake and threatened by new institutions inimical to it, the conservative faces a dilemma.
Abortion is the perfect example.
The constitutional decision legalizing it is now more than a quarter of a century old. Somewhat analogously to the pundits who seized on the idea of a Reagan revolution, German thinkers in the early twenties were also keenly aware that preserving old, endangered values might sometimes necessitate drastic measures. Except that in this case, the values they sought to resuscitate were really old, the institutional and intellectual roots choking them really deep. As these thinkers conceived of it, the conservative revolution would reconnect the Volk to the primordial vitality it enjoyed in the Middle Ages. The prize lay dormant in the basement.