Preservation and Utopia in the Conservative Imagination

Last week, the Buckley Institute’s fifteenth annual conference opened with a lunch plenary on the question, “What Defines Conservatism?” 

Moderated by Buckley Program president William Barbee (YC ‘26), the conversation brought together Dr. Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Charles C. W. Cooke, senior editor at National Review, and Judge Michael McConnell, professor and Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. Over the course of the hour, each offered his understanding of what it means to be conservative, and what that label now signals in the Trump era. 

Cooke opened the discussion with a provocation. “If there is one thing that the conservative should believe,” he said, “it’s that we cannot create a paradise on earth, and we cannot create a new Soviet man.” Who am I, a humble graduate student, to disagree?

Still, the claim bears scrutiny. Conservatives may deny dreaming of paradise, but our rhetoric—and our politics—often gesture toward an idealized past just as fantastical as any progressive future. Conservatives are powered by a form of nostalgia, it is this force which propels the posturing (for conservatism is neither religion nor ideology) of being conservative to be deferential and protective of the goods of the past. 

Nostalgia, however, is inherently imaginative, merely being backwards facing where progressive utopianism looks forward. Conservatism also aims to protect fragile things, standing athwart history yelling, “Stop!” to save the true, good, and beautiful from the forces of history. Finally, the conservative believes in a moral, even religious, order that is held to be absolute. Restoring this order can function like a utopian mission. 

There is a core tension in the conservative reality and understanding of that reality. Conservatives deny utopianism yet often operate within a quasi-utopian narrative of moral restoration. Nostalgia becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive, a vision to restore and protect. Edmund Burke, grandfather of modern conservatism, and his “contract of generations”—the idea that society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn—is often cited as conservatism’s great argument against utopian ambition. Yet this contract also reveals the imaginative heart of the conservative project. Burke treats the past as a repository of wisdom and moral order, a coherent inheritance that the living must humbly preserve. 

But this past, like all political pasts, is partly idealized: it becomes a harmonious standard against which the chaos of the present is judged. The conservative is tempted not only to conserve what remains, but to restore what has been lost, to reassemble the fragments of an older moral world. In this way, Burkean restraint can blur into a quiet form of restorative utopianism—the hope that the best of the past might be recovered in something like its original form. 

Conservative utopianism is not only a theoretical abstraction—it has long had a political life. Consider Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America ads, which framed the 1984 election as a return to prosperity, optimism, and national coherence. The America depicted was selective, idealized, and morally ordered—a world where families thrived, citizens worked hard, and the nation stood proudly on the world stage. This was not an invention of the future, but a supposed restoration of the past, repurposed as a political vision. Like Burke’s contract of generations, it relied on the imagination to assemble a cohesive standard from fragments of reality. Reagan’s triumphalism shows how nostalgia can function as a kind of conservative utopia: a world we cannot quite recover, but a world we strive to preserve and reclaim.

Going back to the panel, the speakers were right that conservatism distrusts rationalist schemes. However, it was collectively understated that the conservative collective has our own imaginative ambitions, this is not a solely leftist characteristic. The distinguishing factor between the conservative and progressive, however, is that, according to Sir Roger Scruton, “conservatism is to resist the lure of unrealizable dreams, including those that consist in the recovery of a vanished past.” Any attempt to impose a dreamed-up idealized order—left or right—is utopian and dangerous. This includes nostalgic or reactionary utopias alike. The conservative must constantly be aware of idealizing the past completely. 

In contemporary America, the pull of conservative utopianism feels especially strong. Rapid cultural change—shifts in family structure, moral norms, and political authority—intensifies the desire to restore what has been lost. Institutions conservatives have long relied on to anchor society—the church, the family, local communities, even universities—feel weakened or under siege. In their absence, a kind of vacuum emerges, one that the conservative imagination rushes to fill with visions of order, stability, and moral clarity. 

What begins as a simple effort to preserve can easily take on the energy of a restorative mission, a backward-looking utopia promising to reclaim a past that may never have fully existed. But this backward-looking vision carries real risks. Restorative utopianism can easily slide into reaction: efforts to purify, exclude, or mythologize the past can take on a rigidity as inflexible as the utopias conservatives claim to reject. In seeking to reclaim a lost moral or social order, conservatives can mimic the very tendencies they often oppose—overreach, centralization, and moral certainty—turning preservation into coercion. The desire to restore what is imagined as a coherent past can transform into an insistence that society conform to that vision, and in doing so, the energy meant to protect can become the energy to remake.

So what might a responsible conservatism look like in the face of these temptations? It begins with gratitude rather than myth: a recognition of the goods we have inherited and the people and institutions that sustain them, rather than an idealized reconstruction of a past that never fully existed. It emphasizes stewardship over restoration, understanding that our role is to protect and maintain the fragile inheritance of society, not to force it into a perfected image. And it embraces imaginative modesty: the humility to conserve without overreaching, to guide without coercing, and to honor tradition without turning it into an unattainable standard. 

In short, it is a conservatism aware of its own limits, yet still capable of hope—hope grounded not in utopian dreams, but in careful, deliberate preservation of what is true, good, and beautiful.

In the end, the question of what it means to be conservative is not answered by slogans or simple definitions. It is lived in the tension between humility and hope, between reverence for the past and vigilance in the present. To be conservative is to walk a careful line: to protect what is fragile, to honor what has been inherited, and yet to do so without mistaking memory for blueprint or nostalgia for destiny. It is to recognize that history does not pause for us, and that the world we seek to preserve is never perfectly recoverable. 

And yet, even in this imperfect endeavor, there is purpose and beauty: the patient work of stewardship, the quiet defense of what is true and good, and the enduring belief that even amid change and uncertainty, some things are worth holding onto. In this, perhaps, lies the truest measure of conservatism—not the dream of paradise, but the courage to safeguard what makes human life meaningful, one generation at a time.

It is that they may attempt to recreate an old one who never entirely existed, and in doing so, forget the humility that made conservatism worth defending.