Conservative Thought in the Time of Covid

With the arrival of Covid, and the reactions across the world which have involved locking down entire communities, this may be an appropriate time to have a look at what it means to be a conservative in relation to politics. There have been massive efforts, largely successful, by the non-conservative side of politics to employ the pandemic in attempting to subvert our established political order. We will only know in years to come how successful these efforts have been, but they are nevertheless a useful reminder of the political dangers which perennially exist from those who would like to run our societies from the centre.

This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe

I am hardly the first to try to define and explain what it means to be a political conservative, but have also been led to this by reading Jordan Peterson’s most recent book, which I reviewed in Quadrant in May under the title, “Abandon Ideology”, which was an instruction from Peterson…