Restrained by Reality: The Central Truth of the Conservative Vision
National Conservatism Conference 2025
Washington D.C.
September 3, 2025
It was back in 1989 that Thomas Sowell wrote his book, The Conflict of Visions. And in it, he described two visions, irreconcilable and in contest for supremacy in American life, American politics, and American culture. He wrote this. “One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws, to monetary policy, to education. Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence again and again. It happens too often [he observed] to be a coincidence and it’s too uncontrolled to be a plot. It is a basic conflict of visions.”
When he spoke of a vision, he spoke of something that’s cognitive, but pre-analytical. It’s a way of looking at the world, a basic set of presuppositions. He framed the conflict as between a constrained vision and an unconstrained vision. He defined the constrained vision as one that is constrained by nature, by human nature, by inherent facts of life, by permanent moral truths. He mentioned his exemplars of this constrained vision: Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton. They understood that society is absolutely necessary for human peace, happiness, and prosperity, but they also understood that human beings would be necessarily imperfect.
This is a worldview that prizes moral truths and economic principles and natural rights. In contrast, the unconstrained vision, he suggested, is a vision of the entire cosmos as changeable, mutable, improvable, human nature, not quite perfect, but growing more perfect, advanced by advance, with no fixed social or moral realities. He mentioned William Godwin, Thomas Paine, Marquis de Condorcet. Restrained in his sense meant conservative, valuing prudence and tradition and truth. Unconstrained meant liberal, valuing innovation, inevitable progress, potential towards perfectibility, utopian dreams. The constrained model was the American Revolution. The unconstrained model was the French Revolution with The Terror and its despotic totalitarianism.
Similarly, but with a major distinction today, I want to argue for the essence of conservatism, the essence of what it means to be conservative. I argue that the first principle of a conservative vision is more than constraint, it’s restraint. And we are, I want to argue restrained by reality. I want to call for a restrained conservatism, gladly restrained by reality. I want to point to something underneath Thomas Sowell’s constrained vision, something he did not acknowledge, and that is a fundamental reality.
We are united in conservative principles and a conservative vision, but there must be a foundational reality beneath, underneath these principles and this vision. I mean to assert the necessity of ontology. Our conservative principles are empirical, to be sure, based on honest observation of human beings and their behavior, human societies and their relative failure or success, even empires and their rise and their fall. But a worthy and lasting conservative vision has to stand on foundational truths, a foundation that is not only articulated and asserted, but true. And when we say true, we mean true truth, ontological truth. So, what is it as conservatives we recognize that truly constrains us?
What restrains us? Well, first of all, we need to note in contrast all around us, the evidence of an unconstrained, unrestrained, ideological Left that long ago abandoned ontology and has embraced the libertarian impulse, defining it as liberation from everything including ontology. Marx and Engels made this central to their vision of the ideological Left in the statement, “all that is solid melts into air.” Nothing’s ontological, nothing’s real. That’s the explicit platform for never ending revolution, whatever the cost. Everything must give way to that revolution and comrades, there are no fixed truths and no fixed realities and everything is plastic right down to human nature.
This idea of ontological truth, is as relevant as a hearing this morning in the United States Senate, the Committee on Foreign Relations. There was a confirmation hearing in which Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, just today, asserted that he was appalled by and scared by one of the nominees making the assertion, quoting the current Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, that our rights are given to us by God. Kaine declared that to be a form of theocratic threat. He quoted the threat of Jihadists in the midst of all this, and he went on to say he was absolutely scared by a notion of human rights that did not ground those rights in government and in law. He said it out loud.
The nominee from the State Department who was responding, I proudly want to say, pointed the United States Senator to the Declaration of Independence. Senator Ted Cruz, when he was given the opportunity, abandoned his prepared remarks and simply went at the very fact that it is indeed the creator who has endowed us with these inalienable rights. And that’s hardly a new American idea. And quite frankly, it’s scary that you would have a United States senator who thinks that rights are only plastic, that they’re only grounded in government or in assertion or in law, but that just tells us the battle that I want to talk about is as current as today.
But on the conservative side, assertion is not enough. Even the right assertions are not enough. Tradition alone is not enough. The right political principles alone are not enough. If the conservative vision is just assertion, no matter how respectful, it will fail. There must be something underneath our house of principles and our vision. I speak as a Christian theologian. You won’t be surprised that I will argue that there must be a foundation of transcendent truth, indeed a foundation of theism. Otherwise, our conservatism is just a castle in the air. Far better on offer than the unconstrained vision better in its effects as necessary aid to human society. No apologies there, but thanks be to God, it’s not just a castle built in the air.
We need to acknowledge that if our conservatism is merely a conservatism of will and assertion, it will die with us. It’s no match for the urgent energies of the Left and its ideologies. Furthermore, left as mere assertion, it can appear as nothing more than a reactionary retrenchment. Now again, sometimes retrenchment is absolutely necessary, but it’s not enough. I do not believe that a truly secular conservatism is adequate to this task. Over time, it’s no match for the whirlwinds of the Left, but a conservatism that acknowledges eternal truths, fixed and revealed by a transcendent God can survive, has survived, and will survive. We honor conservative principles, not just because they are ours, but because we believe they’re true.
We honor prophets and apostles and patriarchs. This conservative vision is a conservatism of conviction. We unite Jewish conservatives and Christian conservatives, Catholic conservatives and Protestant conservatives, Eastern Orthodox conservatives, all in a shared conservatism of principle and conviction, mutual respect and mutual assistance, mutual commitments and commitment shared to those conservative principles. Such a worldview would deny that this represents theological compromise, and would call for believers to show up in full conviction, making very clear what is shared is the commitment to theism and a commitment that means we stand for what is true, not just convenient or asserted or argued, but true.
Our affirmation takes a necessarily confessional form. I would argue that secular conservatives are welcome to join theistic conservatives in a common conservative effort, but I want to say to my secular friends that your efforts are underwritten by something you have not acknowledged. When I speak of ontology, I’m speaking about Genesis 1, the creator’s sovereign act of creating out of nothing everything that is – his creation of the entire cosmos, this planet, this earth. Human beings are not just said to resemble God’s image. I believe every single human being is made in God’s image. By the way, ontology these days is contested at levels previous generations could not have imagined. I speak for the fact that male and female are ontological realities. Our common task is to respect these realities. Creation order realities include marriage and family and eventually tribe and nation.
The modern crisis of ontology we need to understand is deadly dangerous. Ontological categories are necessary in order to ground human dignity, human identity, even again, male and female, man and woman. I was very pleased–that’s an understatement–when President Donald Trump and his inaugural address for a second term made very clear that for his administration and thus for the United States government, during the time that he is president, the government shall recognize two and only two genders. And you’ll notice it was premeditated precisely because the White House was able to give a definition, that so far as I know in previous generations, was never necessary, as to what it means to assert that there are two genders, two sexes, male and female, and I love the way the White House did it. This is memorable. You can share this with your 13-year-old. The male has the smaller reproductive cell. The female has the reproductive cell that is larger. Anyway, it was a discreet way of making the point. Ontology matters, and ontology has to be grounded in something, and I speak unapologetically as a Christian.
So, that means I am pointing to the necessary acknowledgement that the principles that we would propound, that we would expound, that we would share and upon which we would build our lives, our work, our families – they are based in reality. They’re not only convenient and helpful, they’re true. I also want to argue that conservatism must prize that affirmation of reality. The knowledge of a necessary affirmation of reality itself is a great gift. It’s not an imposition on us. It is a great gift.
But I also want to suggest that conservatism must also have a proper telos, an end. Unapologetically, as a Christian, when I speak of this telos, this end, I refer to the eternal kingdom of Christ where Christ reigns forever and where every eye is dry and every tear is wiped away in his perfect rule of justice and righteousness.
I want to argue that it’s deadly dangerous not to have a teleology. For if you have no teleology, you will do your best to engineer a false utopia on earth. The last two centuries reveal the bloody death toll of that quest when historians simply summarized the 20th century with reference to that quest as the century of Megadeath. Robert Kagan in his recent book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart–Again, makes this amazing statement. “Liberalism is not inherently about progress, therefore except the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of human rights. Notice here it’s not about progress inherently, except it is. He then says this, “It has no teleology.”
That’s an amazing statement of contemporary liberalism. Now they tell us. There is no teleology, he says, “No final resting point toward which liberalism aims.” Okay, so this is just Hegel on drugs. It’s just an ever unfolding something coming after what comes before. It really explains that their math requires the plus sign after LGBTQ. It is just ever unfolding, there is no telos, there is no end, brace yourselves, buckle up. It’s astounding, but at least it’s honest. Nothing is left but unfolding liberation of rights not invented by an activist court or demanded by the academic Left, yet the plus sign reminds us that is still to come.
Theism prohibits such chaos and confusion. Theism implies a telos beyond mere human contrivance. On the liberal side, on the Left, there is no constraint, no restraint, just unfolding, revolution, everything plastic, nothing is real. So, in the time I had assigned to me following on what I’ve had the opportunity to say to this conference before, I just want to come back and assert that we’re not here because of anything plastic. We’re not here because of anything artificial. We’re not here merely in the name of tradition, though we revere and prize tradition for what it reveals about what is true. We’re looking for the conservative affirmation of what is true and that corresponds exactly to what is real.
When we talk about human dignity, we’re not talking about something humans defined about ourselves, and gave to ourselves as a compliment. When we talk about human rights, we’re not talking about contrivances that have been developed in order to meet our hopes and aspirations and demands consistent with our definition of liberty and personal autonomy and freedom. And we’re speaking of what we believe is real. Truths that correspond to the real and thus are true truth. So, restrained by reality, gladly, we are able to affirm being is real. I know that is a great comfort to you at the moment, but the alternative is impossible to imagine.
We’re here because actually we do affirm that being is real, truth is real, beauty is real, good is real, love is real, human dignity is real. Moral truth is real. Male and female are real. The family is real, mother and father are real, sons and daughters are real. Principles based upon truth revealed in creation and revealed in God’s Law are real. The nation is real. One of the most astounding claims that we must make together is that the nation is not merely a contrivance or an abstraction. It is something far more powerful than that, far more real than that. And we need to understand that the senator’s confusion earlier today reflects a very widespread confusion, and indeed a subversion coming from the ideological Left.
We need to understand that on the Left, the nation is neither real nor necessary. We believe that for the good of humankind, for the reality of human flourishing, we affirm a conservatism that is unapologetically grounded in the acknowledgement of nation. But even some who would say they affirm the nation do not go so far as to suggest that there is something underneath it other than convenience. So, rightly understood, a national conservatism worthy of the moment would affirm what is real right down to the cosmos, right down even to the nation.
The conflict between these two worldviews remains irreconcilable. The battle between the constrained and the unconstrained continues every moment of every day. It is what characterizes the central conflict of our times. It is what is always at stake in the intellectual and political life of our times. As conservatives, we have much to do and we have much to defend. Also, I would go on to say, much that we must assert. We have also much to define. We have to defend at times by definition and unapologetically so. But fellow conservatives, I want to encourage you today to rejoice in the gift of reality and accept gladly the stewardship of conserving the good things that flow from reality. We are gladly constrained. But beyond that, we are restrained by reality, by truth, and by principle, by wisdom and right reason.
The bottom line is that we have a place to stand. We’re not standing on nothing. We’re standing on something. And that something primarily is first of all, not what we have built, but what we have been given. We have a place to stand and a conservative vision is gladly restrained by that reality.
I realize these are fighting words. Well, these are fighting times. When we think about the great battle of the age, there are people who say the primary thing is Right and Left. Well, that’s unavoidable and in some sense, absolutely central and dominant. But behind that and underneath that, we understand far more is at stake. Every once in a while, we just need to look each other in the eye and say with gratitude that we actually believe in reality. We actually believe we are accountable to reality.
We truly believe that truth is true, and that brothers and sisters, constrains us. But it also liberates us. So, I encourage you to continue in that truly conservative vision, constrained by reality and so constrained, gladly.
God bless you all.