I got some weird looks this past week when, riding the red line home, I stood up to take a picture of an advertisement lining the wall of the train car.

At first glance, there wasn’t much about this particular advert that would distinguish it from the usual sort that populate the DC Metro: a mix of texts and images and colors, with each element undoubtedly set at just the right angle or printed at just the right size or colored at just the right hue so as to manipulate the cerebral configurations of unsuspecting commuters, lodging in their subconscious the cause or product being peddled; I usually ignore them on principle.photo

But for whatever reason, this one caught my eye. It was an advertisement for some ambiguously named consulting group of one stripe or another, and while I can’t recall taking in its colors and designs, a single line of text stood out: “How can we secure 141 million square miles of ocean without endangering lives?" I took a picture of this advertisement because this question disturbed me, for two reasons.

The first has to do with the question’s content. Implicit within it is the assumption that “we,” America, ought to be “securing” the entirety of the earth’s oceans. The advertisement was not making any type of argument on behalf of this thesis. It simply assumed that there was no argument to be had, because the necessity of securing global waterways for the sake of international trade is taken as a first principle. There is nothing there that can be questioned—only how it can be achieved.

Closely related is the nature of the question. Preferring to ask “how can we” instead of “why should we” betrays not only shortsightedness with regards to a particular policy-area, it also indicates a wider-spread pathology that infects the inside the beltway crowd and classrooms across the country. I refer to the emphasis on technocratic fixes and mechanistic solutions for any and all of life’s seeming imperfections, which leads to an unhealthy and unbalanced focus on “STEM” concerns at the expense of any deeper and not purely instrumental knowledge.

Perhaps these conclusions are a little much to draw from a Metro advertisement. After all, the people at Leidos merely wanted to highlight that they’ve developed submarine sonar that doesn’t kill whales. Nonetheless, though the connection may be a bit contrived, I believe my conclusions concerning the advertisement’s question are applicable across most of the American political landscape, and certainly within the contemporary centers of power of either the left or the right.

Which is problematic for someone like me, who thinks that the rapid expansion of economic globalism is a problematic development and that the shift from “why” to “how” leaves our nation equipped only with tools, but not the ability to recognize what truly needs fixing. At one point in time, these concerns would be classified as those of a “conservative.”

But taking an assessment of things reveals that being a so-called conservative today actually means, in most cases, embracing these positions. This was the point made by Patrick Deenen recently in The American Conservative, in an article that I was reading at the time the Metro advertisement caught my eye. Deenen argues that those who advance the banner of Edmund Burke today are mostly posers:

“Today’s conservatives are liberals—they favor an economy that wreaks “creative destruction,” especially on the mass of “non-winners,” increasingly controlled by a few powerful actors who secure special benefits for themselves and their heirs; a military that is constructed to be only loyal to the central authority in the capital, frequently moved about to avoid any rooted loyalty, and increasingly isolated from most fellow citizens; an increasingly utilitarian view of education aimed at creating individuals who will become able cogs in a globalized industrial system, largely without allegiance or loyalty.”

And Deneen attributes this shift to a flawed form of conservatism that merely seeks to fill in the ideological space vacated by the ever-leftward-moving liberals:
“Where once American conservatives opposed an expansive commercial economy, today they are its champions. Where they once decried identification with the nation over localities, states, and regions, today they are the most vociferous nationalists. (Long forgotten is the fact that the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, cousin of the utopian novelist, Edward Bellamy, during the high-water mark of the Progressive era.) Where they once deeply mistrusted “foreign entanglements” and insisted upon a citizen militia, fearing that a standing army would become subservient to the ambitions of a distant elite political class, today they are the close allies of the “military-industrial complex.” In each instance, they have moved to occupy the positions once occupied by the left.”

And:
“If conservatism is broken today, we need only blame liberalism. There is only one party in America—your choice is liberalism with deliberate speed, or liberalism in a hurry. What is needed is a new, doubtless very different, American conservatism.”

I agree with Deneen’s assessment (though I do admittedly find it surprising to see him construe the Anti-Federalists as authentic conservatives), but his conclusion does not leave much in the way of temporal optimism. Conservatism, because of what it is by nature, doesn’t seem to have the capacity to actually engage and confront liberalism on liberalism’s home turf, which, to be clear, is where things stand today. A revitalization of conservatism is desperately needed, but seems only likely to come once liberalism itself has run its dehumanizing, unsustainable course.