Constitution cons: that which unites conservatives.

'IN the late 20th century," wrote the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken, "there has been a quickening 'speciation' among social groups. Teens, for example, were once understood in terms of those who were cool and those who weren't. But in a guided tour of mall life a few years ago, I had 15 types of teen lifestyle pointed out to me, including heavy-metal rockers, surfer-skaters, b-girls, goths, and punks. Each of these groups sported their own fashion and listened to their own music. The day of the universally known Top 40 list is gone."

McCracken wrote that way back in 1998. There are, no doubt, many more types of teenagers now. If he ever turned his gaze toward conservatives, he would find the same pattern. The modern conservative was invented a few generations after the teenager, but from the start there have been several types. In the 1950s, conservatism was made up of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists, with the odd (usually very odd) monarchist sprinkled in.

They have been speciating since then, and the rate of speciation has risen. In just the last few years, we have been introduced to "crunchy cons" and South Park conservatives." I try to keep up with the conservative tribes, but I'm afraid I have only a hazy sense of these two groups. I gather that the crunchy cons fault other conservatives for their relative indifference to the aesthetics of everyday life, and that the South Park conservatives like cursing and raunchy entertainment. But I could be wrong--and I am beginning to sympathize with all those political reporters who, looking at conservatism from the outside, can't quite figure us out.

In this respect as in others, the Internet has been the servant of plenitude. It has made it easy to form and sustain overlapping but distinct subcultures within conservatism. Some of these worlds within worlds have naturally fallen prey to the temptation to imagine themselves larger than they are. "If only the Right were not led by impostors," the bloggers tell themselves, "and the public were exposed to real conservatism"--defined in the subculture's terms: say, pro-war paleolibertarianism--"why, then we would prevail." So the effect has been to increase not only the number of factions but also their factionalism.

It would be foolish, because futile, to seek to impose an artificial conceptual unity on the Right. Whatever holds the conservative coalition together, it is clearly not any of the most intense passions that immediately motivate its factions. Conservatives are not held together by the Christianity of the social Right or the free-market faith of the libertarians or the aggressive nationalism of the hawks.

Yet I think that most American conservatives, of whatever stripe, can reasonably be described as engaged in a common enterprise, even if the fact that it engages them in common sometimes eludes them. That enterprise is the conservation of the political inheritance of the American Founders.

It is also an enterprise that divides them. Different types of conservatives have different understandings of what that inheritance is, emphasize different aspects of it, and reach different conclusions about what conservation practically entails. This may be a paradox but is not a contradiction. The enterprise consists in important part of a continuing conversation about what it means to conserve that inheritance.

Libertarians, mindful of the Founders' fear of government as "a dangerous servant and a terrible master," strive to revive constitutional limits on government power. Social conservatives follow many of the Founders in regarding a virtuous public as indispensable to self-government. Natural-law conservatives ground their politics in the moral truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Nationalist conservatives combat what they regard as the dissolution of a common American culture at least in part because they worry about its effects on the longevity of the Founders' experiment. Foreign-policy neoconservatives--for lack of a better phrase--see in the Founders' liberalism an aspiration toward liberty for all people, an aspiration that they believe requires, in our time, very active American encouragement.

Not all conservatives are originalists in the strict sense: They do not all believe (although most do believe) that constitutional provisions should be read to mean what their ratifiers understood them to mean. Almost all of them are "originalists" in the looser sense of seeing a relatively strong connection between their own political philosophies and that of the Founders.

I do not wish to minimize the practical disagreements among conservatives. Even their second-order disagreements can have enormous importance. Thus, for example, two conservatives who agree on the precise dimensions of the constitutional limits on federal power may disagree about the appropriate role of federal judges in enforcing those limits.

As vague as this ostensive definition of conservatism may seem, however, it has enough specificity to distinguish it from liberalism. It is true that many liberals will resort to "originalist" arguments, in the loose sense, when they are handy. It is also true that some liberals have sought to present their entire political philosophy as an outgrowth from that of the Founders. But it is notable, first, that they do each of these things less often than conservatives do. I suspect that they are constrained less by a sense of intellectual humility toward the Founders than by a sense that the Founders are not generally helpful to their arguments. (A large claim, I know, which I will not defend here. Let's just say that several features of the Founders' thought--for example, their demonstrable obsession with the security of property--do not suit modern liberalism well.)

Second, liberalism has long included a powerful, and maybe dominant, strand of impatience with, and even hostility to, the Founders and their handiwork that has no analogue on the right. Teddy Roosevelt may have a complicated legacy in our current politics, but he spoke for the Progressives in calling constitutional limits outdated now that the people were running the nation. Woodrow Wilson thought that "Fourth of July sentiments" held the country back and delighted in the fact that his generation was the first to criticize the Founders. He thought that the Constitution should be "living," by which he meant something close to protean.

Liberals in the era of Herbert Croly had to overthrow the fixed principles of the old republic in favor of, well, The New Republic (which Croly founded). Today they rarely speak the way Wilson did. Yet they still sometimes do. In 1996 the liberal writer Daniel Lazare wrote Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy. It is impossible to imagine a conservative writing a book with that title.

If these notes toward a definition of American conservatism point in the right direction, there are (at least) two practical implications that conservatives might profit from pondering.

The first stems from the fact that almost all varieties of conservatism regard the task of conserving the Founders' political achievement to be, in important part, a task of recovery. Liberals imagine that the conservative judicial project is to resurrect a "Constitution in Exile" from the bench. That is not true: Conservatives are not plotting to confirm judges who will overturn the New Deal. But it is true that most conservatisms consider us to be in exile from the Constitution.

So which way back to Eden? It has become quite clear, during the Supreme Court debates of the last few months if not before, that precedents are a problem for conservatives. Few people doubt that John Roberts, had he been on the Court at the time, would have dissented from many of the activist decisions of the 1960s and 1970s. It's not clear how willing he is to revisit them.

Precedent is a special problem for judicial conservatives because it is hard to devise a satisfying account of when it is binding. One of the selling points of judicial conservatism is that it constrains courts' discretion. But allowing an exception to originalism based on precedent brings discretion in through the back door to a judicial philosophy that sought to close the front door against it. If originalist judges manipulated precedents to reach the conclusions they desired, we would be left with a different kind of political judging.

Conservatives face similar dilemmas outside the courts. To the extent they accept the modern state as a fait accompli, their political philosophy risks losing its principled character. Conservatives would then be engaged in nothing more edifying than a battle for spoils, with the benefits of big government being redirected to their favored constituencies. Yet opposition to every aspect of the state to which conservatives object would be unrealistic to the point of utopian. In both the judicial and non-judicial cases, thoughtful conservatives understand that to conserve a tradition is not to freeze it in place. But that understanding doesn't make the adaptation of the Founders' politics to modern times any easier.

The dilemma has led to repeated efforts to recast or refound conservatism (in the form of, say, compassionate conservatism or national-greatness conservatism). Some of these reformulated conservatisms attempt to avoid the difficulty by starting their narratives in a period of American history from which we are less distant than we are from the Founders--such as the Progressive era. Or they may omit reference to the Constitution, and constitutionalism, entirely, concentrating instead on finding policies and themes that will attract enough constituencies to build an electoral majority. Which brings me to my second implication: If I am right about the essence of American conservatism, all these attempts are doomed to fail.