When I talk to other conservatives that are lamenting the decay of our culture, I will often console them by noting that “life is conservative.” In other words, the realities inherent in all our lives tend to validate the conservative position. There is a reason why the book of Proverbs can resonate with anybody, a believer or not. We can see that people that are honest, and work hard, and treat people well, tend to do pretty well in life. We see that the sluggard isn’t not going to make much progress. God has orchestrated a moral order to the universe that generally works; not necessarily in every situation, but in most situations. And it tends to work itself out in peoples values to a degree. For instance, despite all the talk the left wants to say about the gender gap in voting trends, the more nuanced look shows that it is a marriage and family gap, rather than a gender gap: single women will tend to vote more Democratic, but married women with kids vote more Republican. The more someone is invested in the future (e.g., has kids), the more conservative they become–almost always. Not that having kids makes one a conservative, but it will tend to make you more conservative than you were before kids. Reality and life events tends to shape one towards a more conservative position. As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.

This is in large part because a conservative view of the world recognizes the world we actually live in, rather than the world we might wish we would live in. There is evil in this world because it is fallen, so we expect people to behave badly unless they have incentives to do the right thing. We believe the downhill slide in Romans 1 is very much descriptive of the world outside God’s transformative work to save people. This leads us to support institutions that in God’s common grace promote and enforce virtuous behaviors. We know that we can’t change peoples’ hearts, but we’ll settle in this world for limiting some of the nastier actions that people are capable of, which is why we support police and the military. Vladimir Putin does not surprise us, and we have little naivety about what the Iranian mullahs intend to do. The conservative idea of Prudence is “seeing the world as it really is, and acting accordingly.” Unfortunately this view is often seen as not optimistic enough about the future, and Utopian thinking can easily creep back in. We think that everyone can have health care, and there is no cost to anyone (well, maybe a few billionaires, and they can easily afford it). We think that people are capable in themselves of understanding their true identity–that what God says and what biology reveals is too restrictive, and we are capable of ordering this world after our own vision–we will be gods ourselves. But then reality creeps back in. Economics is the most conservative of disciplines to a large degree because it concerns itself with 2nd order effects; the economist’s favorite question to any proposal is “And then what?” What is the reality that is going to follow your utopian plan? In the real world, there is no spending that is ever going to come at zero cost just as there is no printing of more claims to purchasing power today that is not going to have an inflationary bias to what it otherwise would have been. Adam Smith will have his day, and so will Milton Friedman.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So below I have a few pictures of reality creeping in during our Biden era. You can come to your own conclusions. My encouragement to you is that the pendulum is swinging back. If you think of better pictures, put them in your comments with a link and I’ll add some of the better ones to the post.