Conservatism’s Formation Crisis 

Editor’s Note: This is the third essay in a three-part series on the control of meaning within conservatism. You can read the first two essays in the series here and here.

For much of the late twentieth century, conservatives could imagine a recognizable chain of authority and formation: institutions, magazines, think tanks, donors, pastors, editors, senior statesmen, and a class of writers who helped distinguish the serious from the unserious and the prudent from the reckless. The system was imperfect. But it did perform one real function: it shaped the moral and intellectual imagination of the young. It cultivated ambition disciplined by maturity. My own formation, for instance, came through both popular media like talk radio and outlets like National Review. 

Digital platforms now give a wide audience to so-called “conservative” views that, in earlier decades, would have been filtered out by the conservative movement’s institutions for either their lack of seriousness or even their moral repugnance. But there is now no longer a shared tribunal. Conservatism’s magisterium is under a stress test. No magazine issue “settles” the question. Views previously relegated to the margins in earlier generations now run rampant. Only nostalgia keeps some from admitting this lack of quality control. Gatekeeping is unlikely to return—at least not in its previous form. 

The internet did not merely weaken gatekeeping; it dissolved the institutionally defined perimeters that made such gatekeeping possible in the first place. Young people now no longer wait to be formed. They self-curate through algorithms, assembling a worldview from clips, podcasts, memes, reels, anonymous accounts, and viral personalities. The result is often shallow: someone can spend hours each day on political back-and-forth and never encounter a serious account of constitutionalism, natural law, just war, or subsidiarity. He may know every online feud and still have no idea what politics is for. 

At the same time, not everything outside traditional institutions is worthless. In fact, if I may be so honest as to say it, there is an opportunity for voices to emerge outside the mainstream of conservatism; many of them may be incredibly helpful. Some voices without establishment credentials are serious and worth hearing. In a non-gatekept world, discernment is the necessary virtue. There are risks and rewards here. Such is the tragedy that conservatism ought to embrace. 

The problem, then, is not simply political. It is not just an issue of platform. It is a formation problem. 

So, the real question is what forms of authority, formation, and intellectual discipline are still possible in a decentralized and combustible media environment—especially among the young, many of whom treat inherited conservative institutions with open contempt as the refuge of “beautiful losers.” 

Some of this contempt is unfair. Some of it is not. The charge that “establishment conservatism” lacks sufficient nerve is not unwarranted in some quarters. Without naming names, we can all identify those leaders whose conservatism was really a vector for compromise, a veneer for profile-building, with little actual conservatism there. Younger conservatives rightly perceive careerism, thin-gruel proceduralism, an aversion to robust ontology, and stale rhetoric in parts of the old elite. If older conservatives want a hearing, they will have to earn it. The fact that some prominent figures eventually repudiated their own conservatism is evidence that certain institutional forms of the movement failed to conserve much of anything. 

But that concession does not justify the alternative that has emerged. The collapse of gatekeeping does not vindicate the transgressive ethos that now dominates large precincts of the right. “Owning” enemies does not form leaders. Many young conservatives are good at diagnosis but terrible at offering a cure. 

What is needed, therefore, is not gatekeeping in the old sense, but moral and intellectual apprenticeship. We cannot control the entire media ecosystem, but we can still shape persons. 

First, formation must recover the priority of character. A movement that trains young people to ask only “Whose side are you on?” will eventually produce only morally stunted combatants. The older conservative emphasis on prudence, restraint, and moral seriousness was not merely bourgeois etiquette. It reflected the truth that politics is downstream of the soul. It reflects conservatism’s boundedness by The Permanent Things. If young conservatives are not taught to govern appetites—especially resentment, vanity, and the love of combat—they will be governed by algorithms that monetize those vices. 

Second, young people must be taught to love reality more than narrative. The digital ecosystem rewards outrage, oversimplification, and spectacle. Formation requires older disciplines of judgment: learning to distinguish what is tested from what is viral, what is evil from what is merely foolish or imprudent. In Christian terms, these are the virtues of prudence and truthfulness. 

Third, formation must be local, embodied, and relational. The young need living models: pastors, teachers, mentors, and older friends who show what it looks like to hold strong convictions without becoming spiritually deformed. They need people in real life who can correct them, warn them about their excesses, and challenge their love of constant online combat. 

 

For this reason, Christian institutions—churches, schools, and formation communities—bear a particular responsibility. The Christian tradition offers a rival pedagogy: liturgy, discipline, repentance, study, friendship, service, and a conception of freedom ordered toward the good. This is a genuine alternative to the politics of impulse and affect. Institutions are not merely constraints; they are formative structures that teach us how to love rightly by constraining the tendencies to perform. 

Fourth, conservatives must recover intellectual depth. Young people hunger for coherence. I actually think that stands behind some of the current protests around previous iterations of conservatism. The internet is eager to supply totalizing explanations of the world, however distorted. If conservatives do not teach Augustine, Burke, Aquinas, Calvin, Kirk, Kuyper, Tocqueville, The Federalist, Lincoln, and serious modern social thought—if they do not teach natural law, constitutionalism, moral theology, and the tragic limits of what politics can and cannot do—others will gladly catechize the young in racialized ideologies, conspiracism, and ressentiment. 

If we cannot explain man’s nature, society’s end, authority’s function, law’s purpose, a nation’s identity, and the supreme good—God—we will be replaced by those who can—even if their explanations are corrosive. 

Fifth, conservatives must draw and defend clear moral boundaries. Certain positions and postures are incompatible with both conservative principles and Christian ethics: anti-Semitism, racial essentialism, political paganism, and the delight in bracing cruelties that often masquerade as “truth telling.” Decentralized authorities do not justify moral relativism on the right. Courage still requires clarity on matters that may even find acceptance on the “right,” broadly conceived, but are at odds with historic conservatism. 

It is morally unserious to shrug and say that because the gatekeepers are gone, nothing can be done. Much can be done. We can teach, mentor, and build institutions—schools, fellowships, reading groups, churches, and publications—that reward truthfulness over virality. We can identify and support young leaders who combine courage with self-discipline and self-awareness. We can stop mistaking audience size for moral gravity. 

Formation has always been slow, personal, and demanding. It was never mainly a matter of policing boundaries from above. It was about patient cultivation of judgment, character, and love of the good. 

Decentralization has not made formation impossible. It has made it harder and more competitive. If older conservatives want to be heard, they will have to become worth hearing: more honest, more learned, more courageous, more personal, less managerial, and less aloof. 

Conservatism, if it deserves the name, cannot be merely a marketplace of grievances or a contest of personalities. It must be a training ground for judgment ordered to the good of persons, families, communities, and the political order.  

That work is slower and less glamorous than online combat. It is also how civilizations are actually handed down. 

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