I had not realized before the extent to which romanticism unleashes contrary positions, irreconcilable, and yet with much sense that one’s need to be rational is tossed about by Sturm und Drang. So I won’t take up the task to try to distill everything that it is about—I couldn’t do so even if I had wanted. Instead, as I read Berlin’s recount of Herder’s influence on the movement and the rest of the enlightenment that could not recover itself from the internal subjectivity Herder posited to be present in man and his nation, I saw the seeds of conservatism. Seeds that appeared to be once planted but never reaped, now expired—but a seed of thought always present and rarely discovered or, at minimum, rarely recognized.

You see, Herder believed that man could only be what he was and nothing more. Should he attempt to understand another from a distant land, he must know him by being. In other words, to understand Greek art you must “understand what the Greeks were, what they wanted, how they lived”—that to understand phenomena, one must approach with a method to uncover the historical context underneath it, i.e., historicism.

There is some merit in this idea—and we would do well to be cautious of falling into cultural relativist territory; that is to say that just because there are cultural differences between peoples does not mean there is no fixed morality or objective truth. But there is merit in recognizing each age as what they are, for they could be nothing that they are not. He believed that each age contained within it an internalized ideal and therefore any nostalgia for the past is meaningless. “Why cannot we create a world State of such a kind that everybody in it fit smoothly like ideal bricks, will form a structure which will go on forever and ever, because it is constructed upon an indestructible formula..?” we cannot do this because not only are we not the past but the future will reject our attempts to construct an ideal, as our generation rejects our fathers.

The inherent state of conservatism therefore is that the moment it is uttered it is obsolete; and so, we have been charged with being reactionary. While there is some truth to this, Burke knew that conservation is only successful with adaptation. What separates the left from right is that contrary to the unbridled willingness to change for its own sake, conservatives do so prudentially.

There is nothing that exists in the present moment but action. “We can only live in action, otherwise nothing is worth having,” therefore, “make room for action.”

We might ask ourselves why after all this time conservatives have begun to reconquer grounds long ceded and then some more—because gone are the days where we wait for false ‘prophets of progress’ to make a move so that we can merely react. Gone are the days of “we simply want to be left alone.”—There is no more loneliness we can afford without giving up what they are after: the nation. This has been the essence of populism, which is no different than saying a movement belonging to the people. The left has embraced populism as ‘the people’ has always been those who were loudest in voicing their complaints; and still, the left capitulates to what appears to be a minority of loud voices so convicted in what they believe only because it is of popular opinion in their circles. Populism on the right has gone against the country club Republicans who did not care for anything but the economy, which was belatedly realized as nothing more than a front for even more capitulation

So the question we must ask ourselves at this point is, how do we effectively preserve the nation? It won’t suffice to pray that our Supreme Court will adhere to every originalist interpretation of the Constitution (look at the recent decision over the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy); and the Constitution itself, for as ingenious and ineffably brilliant any document can be to devise a country with guardrails against tyranny in many forms, has failed insofar as it did not anticipate the leakage of power in any strong republic, e.g., Congress delegating its powers to bureaucratic agencies and the Executive creating them: agencies who eventually yield greater power than the branches of government.

Some might see a contradiction between Herder’s notion of an internalized ideal and conservatism. If we are not our past, and action in the present is all that has meaning, how can one rightly claim to be conservative? doesn’t it lend itself to anachronisms and so refuses an ‘internalized ideal’ of its own, instead, adopting that ideal of the past it seeks to conserve?

To repeat: Herder believed that man could only be who he was, nothing less or more; and to understand another from another land one must immerse himself in the who and what, that is to say the history that has produced him. This historicism finds its place in conservatism where one takes prudent steps into the future by looking at the wisdom behind him; he does not assume that he knows more than he does; and so, unlike the left-wing that would have us believe that change is progress, the conservative is skeptical that any change predicated upon demolition of itself is ‘progress’ at all. Even if we were to accept Herder’s idea that each age has an internalized ideal and so nostalgia is meaningless, that does not mean that these ideals are meaningful, wise, or viable, and it does not mean that one must dispense with the past, only that it does not do well to fantasize. So, while we are not our past, our past has produced us. To do away with it would be to do away with us, the nation.

These are the romantic qualities conservatism retains. Romantic insofar as it recognizes the inability to construct an ideal world, forever and ever, as a result of the internal differences between each age and peoples; it recognizes that the past from which we were produced is innately unique to us. Destroying it would be as though we destroyed our spirit. It recognizes that nostalgia is fruitless, and action is all that we have; however, it is anti-romantic, insofar as with prudence we are not tossed about by the vicissitudes of the present and the arrogance that comes with believing that our ideals are valid simply because our passions judge them to be.