Abby McCloskey, Columnist

Conservatism Could Save America. The Small-C Kind

April 28, 2026 at 10:30 AM UTC

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Would Burke approve?
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North America

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Conservatism is in decline. True, it’s not dead — in 2025, a larger share of Americans described themselves as conservative (35%) than liberal (28%) — but this seven-point difference is the smallest Gallup has measured since 1992.

This is bad news for American politics. As a philosophy, conservatism possesses the key virtue that’s missing from modern political life: humility. “What is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness,” wrote Edmund Burke, one of the fathers of conservatism. He was right.