Something may be needed to pull us back from that brink, but I see no reason to call it "conservatism" unless we want to make that label arbitrary. What I call for is the existential, cosmicist, pantheistic perspective I write about, but is it conservative? No, it's realistic.

Conservatives can come across as pessimistic realists compared to young, progressive optimists, but then we're talking about the clash between pessimism and optimism. What makes pessimism especially conservative? Conservation of the truth? That would no longer be much of a political distinction.