The Conservative's Dilemma
Surprisingly, Never Doing Anything Doesn't Work.
When we’re very small, we learn about what is.
When we’re young, we hope for what could be.
But when we’re old, we dwell on what was.
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What does conservatism, Blockbuster Video and helping your kids get married have to do with one another? Well, lets find out…
It’s been many years since I stopped referring to myself as a conservative. While my beliefs match up well with traditional familial, moral and religious ways of living, conservatism as a movement, an ideology, a political position, has nothing to do or say about those things anymore, if it ever did.
Very Serious Conservatism has produced a reality comprised of the following data points:
1 in 3 Millennials, and probably even more of Gen Z, will never marry.
The share of 40+ year old Americans who have never been married has never been higher ever in our history.
Only 60% of American kids live with both biological parents.
The American fertility rate in 2025 was 1.59 children per woman, far below replacement rate.
73% of teens watch pornography online, with 40% saying they watch it at school.
Over 70% of married couples live together before marriage.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. As it relates to my and perhaps your “traditional” family, moral and religious beliefs, absolutely nothing has been conserved or protected, much less expanded. How can we go on conserving more of nothing?
A Case Study
Time for an MBA school analogy: the “innovator’s dilemma”. In brief, this concept describes the choice some businesses face between serving today’s customers and serving the future of the market.
Famously, this dilemma hit Blockbuster Video at the turn of the century.
at the time the market was demanding exactly what Blockbuster offered
but the near future of the market would demand the opposite
so to survive, the right play was for Blockbuster to undercut it’s own profitable stores before Netflix, et al, did.
But it never quite makes sense in the C-suite to blow everything up while you’re still stacking cash. And so they waited until it did make sense but by then it was too late. And now, the brand has one store left in Oregon, kept alive only because nostalgia wills it so.
What does this have to do with anything?
Well, it’s important for us, especially for fathers to realize that we are Blockbuster Video. Not Blockbuster in its heyday during the 90s, not even Blockbuster in 2010 on the verge of bankruptcy. We are Blockbuster Video in 2026. Our way of life died. And the stats above prove it.
Yes its spirit lingers on, “conserved” here and there… just as video rental exists here and there as a novelty, just as you can still buy VCRs on Amazon. Just as people nostalgically look back to Friday night at Blockbuster with their friends.
The Conservative’s Dilemma
While Blockbuster offered consumerism, we “conservative” parents offer the truth, and for that reason there’s still plenty to hope and work toward.
But it requires us doing something that doesn’t come naturally to us as parents: cultural risk-taking and innovation. The conservative, assurance-seeking instinct is useful when we can launch our kids into stable orbits around a pro-family society. But as the list of stats above shows, that is no longer possible. We’re launching our kids into pitiless orbital mine fields. Seen in this light, the risk of innovation is at an all time low and choosing stability is in fact the greatest gamble.
Innovation and change are progressive sounding words, and so I want to be clear about what I’m saying here.
The outcome is traditional: generations of happily married men and women with thriving families, living moral and faithful lives.
But the structure, the how we get there, the “market strategy” may look wildly different.
Because what worked for you 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, what worked for granddad in ye olden times, isn’t going to work well for your kids.
The dilemma we face is this: are we willing to break from our own experiences, our own successes, our own tried and true practices1, our set of nostalgic favorites in order to give our kids a better chance at success?
Let me give you a tangible example of what it could look like to use new practices to fulfill old principles.
How To Help Your Kids Get Married
A couple of years ago I wrote an article called “How To Help Your Kids Get Married” and came up with the framework of the “Coordinating Parent”. The coordinating parent isn’t a matchmaker or arranging marriages for his toddlers; but he is intentional about how his adolescent and young adult children interact with the opposite sex by asking these 4 questions at each stage of their maturity:
With who?
Doing what?
Where will it happen?
What is success?
And of course, the answers to these questions and the role the parent has are quite different for a 14 year old vs an 18 year old or a 22 year old.
In short, for a younger adolescent, answers to those 4 questions are geared toward modeling relationships and creating a sense of belonging. For older adolescents, the answers create a proving ground, a chance for teens to practice social skills, use technology properly, and gain confidence. Then lastly for young adults, intentional answers to these questions produce young people capable and desirous of building an actual marriage.
No one likes this framework, not because it sucks (it’s actually quite good, according to sources2) but because it penetrates the fog of parental passivity without being prescriptive. It’s not what we did, it’s not what anyone else did, and it’s not quite traditional enough to be dismissed as out of date.
Following it means you as a parent are venturing into the frontier and staking ownership over something society says should just happen in its own way and time. It means you’re imposing a bit on your kid’s choices. (Never mind that their choices are already constrained by society in the opposite direction.) It means that you have to try new things that may not work out exactly as you intend. It means that maybe your kids will reject it. It means you’d have to work with other parents to actually pull it off (the worst!).
I met and married my wife just fine without this framework, and some percentage of our kids will do fine without it too, but it’s been a risky bet for awhile now. As the stats show, we are the survivors.
Maybe there are better frameworks, and ways to spur action on this topic. I’d love to see them. But one thing I do know is that the attitude of “well, if it happens, it happens” won’t cut it at the bottom, irrelevant end of market. Marriage and family formation do not occur ex nihilo.
Conservatives will dwell on what was, proclaim that family values still matter, and yet not go so far as lifting even a pinky finger to avert cultural bankruptcy.
But you, acting as an innovator, can teach youth what can still be; and project into the future what generations of conservative thought-leaders and politicians have failed to conserve: your family’s way of life.
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The secret is this has always been the case. The past was not a single tradition. Families picked up and dropped traditions as it suited them. We should not confuse practices and principles. Principles are why you do what you do. Practices are what you do; those things which help us make sense of our principles. Conservatives tend to hold a practice close to their heart and see it as the essence of a principle – long after it ceased to be useful.
The source is me. And my wife. We think it’s great.
Love this, Michael... your insights make me think about things a little differently, and I like that. Also, I love your sources footnote... very sweet!
A common refrain on the Right today is "what did the conservatives conserve?" You point out that the answer is "nothing".
However, I find this is the fault line between today's conservatives and what (for lack of a better term) I call post-liberals. The George Wills and David Brooks of the world see this failure and say: "we'd better accept it; we can't stop the train of progress." (Buckley tried; didn't work.) However, the Patrick Deneens and Red Drehers and Sohab Amaris say, "the train is running off a cliff; let's stop fantasizing about something that doesn't exist anymore and figure out how to build new things that work today."
I place your piece here firmly in the latter camp. I don't know if you would embrace the post-liberal tribe, but your sentiments here certainly agree with them.
However, that tribe has no home on the traditional Left-Right spectrum as said continuum is derived from the Enlightenment (specifically the French Revolution), and post-liberals are tentatively stepping outside that framework.