That’s right, the US has been correcting itself throughout its history. That’s to say this country is fundamentally progressive, i.e. “modern” and liberal, which leaves no room for authentic conservatism in the US.

I recognize no such conservative pitch for democracy. Just look at the logic you used about the “selection and removal of policymakers,” which differs from mob rule. That’s liberal not conservative logic. Both monarchy and mob rule would be conservative in that they’d be autocratic, dictatorial, and totalitarian (and thus natural or wild). By contrast, the regular selection and removal of policymakers reflects the modern humanist’s humility and skepticism which are essential to liberalism.

I see the distinction between the New Deal and the Great Society, although I think you’re stuffing the latter with some dubious stereotypes of progressives or socialists. Elsewhere I’ve followed a Hoover Institution analysis in writing that the New Deal was meant to save the US from a communist revolution and was thus pro-capitalistic. It was a compromise to triangulate against hardcore socialists who might have wanted to abolish private property in the US. I suppose you’d say Johnson’s Great Society was about creating a nanny state to support those who fail in capitalist competition. Instead, the Great Society was largely yet another compromise in lieu of reparations for centuries of slavery.

You say, “Government should tilt the playing field, not control the players.” But don’t you think the peasants were controlled in a monarchy? The relation between individualism and conservatism is complicated by the need to distinguish between the intentions and the effects of capitalism (as I’ve argued in the article or elsewhere in this series I’m doing on conservatism). The modern intention was for capitalism to liberate everyone to succeed or to fail on their merits, and to eliminate serfdom and the decadent nobles’ ability to keep the masses down with punishing taxes and laws.

So that plan for individual freedom contrasts with a nanny state that binds everyone in red tape, and with an oppressive monarchy or dictatorship.

But the effects of laissez-faire capitalism amount to the imposition of plutocracy, which is another form of the conservative’s beloved autocracy. Once again, the lower class is indebted to the rich (chiefly to the banks via credit card debt). Instead of merely owning the land, the neo-nobles just have more money than God, and instead of taxing the masses or outlawing rebellion, the capitalist elites just refuse to raise wages much to keep up with inflation. Businesses became transnational so they could make money by exporting to foreign consumers, leaving behind the American middle class.

Here, then, is where individualism merges with conservatism since both approve of those effects in a crucial respect: both are Darwinian in wanting to honour an amoral sorting of the social classes into winners and losers, a process that rigidifies itself into a virtual dominance hierarchy. Both individualists and conservatives want the rich to effectively have the right to consolidate their gains to the point of being able to enslave the poor (by capturing the regulators, neutralizing the democratic controls, and so on).

And that’s why my distinction between a planned and a wild dichotomy is useful. Sure, there are degrees of planning, and not all governmental interventions in an economy are oppressive or totalitarian. But it’s crucial to see that where individualism and conservatism meet is in implicit social Darwinism, as in George Will’s explicitly Darwinian defense of capitalism, and your ongoing appeal to the “Darwinian” sense of “sustainability.”

I see, for example, how carefully you choose your words in speaking of the entrenchment of standard gender roles in childhood due to the nature of social competition. Your reasoning is evolutionary and therefore non-normative. You’re talking about the probability of winners and losers in a social sorting process, not about whether patriarchy is better than feminist egalitarianism.

Without getting into all of that, my point here is just that if you’re a conservative, it’s because your thinking is at some level socially Darwinian—as predicted by my big-picture view of the real difference between conservatism and liberalism. It’s roughly the difference between animalists and humanists, and far from being useless, my view predicts the social Darwinian lapses of so-called conservative classic liberals like you and George Will.