In a recent essay for Compact, Jon Askonas argues convincingly that the conservative project failed because “it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit.” Conservatives, he says, were too obsessed with “left-wing revolutionary politics” and missed the real threat, which was technological change so swift and powerful it fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside, and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete.

Instead of questioning these technologies, asking whether they would contribute to human flourishing, conservatives acquiesced to their inevitability and focused instead on narrower issues. The result has been the transformation of society within the span of a single human lifetime, and with it the wholesale destruction of our traditions and the looming implosion of Western civilization.

A Marxist thing happened to you or some shit