The problem with constructing a manifesto for postmodern conservatism is that principles, once propositionally articulated, have a way of organically untethering themselves from the experience out of which they were borne. So we idealize generalizations from our lived and pre-theoretical experience such that the nuanced particularity of their original context gets calcified into arid, excessively universal categories. The moral realism of our founding American Thomism, understood as the recognition of our unique dignity and equality as rational and erotic beings, was apparently too easily transformable into the apriori abstraction of Lockean individualism. THE foundational principle, if one can call it that, of an American postmodern conservatism, is that we must try to recapture the real moral experience that animated its founding premises before their metamorphosis into experience independent postulates. If at the heart of this moral realism we find a peculiar brand of Thomism, then the recovery of Thomism, however specifically articulated, might be at the heart of a postmodern conservatism. If at the heart of any postmodern conservatism is the excavation of the Christian categories that modernity claimed to repudiate but instead subsumed, then American postmodern conservatism (and yes, the nomenclature is becoming unwieldy) might be central to any rethinking of conservatism itself.
