Conservatism is a cultural map foregrounding traditional society as worthy of veneration and defence against waves of avantgardism and modernizing change. As William F. Buckley, a leading activist of this ideology, quipped: a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. Recurrent themes of conservative ideology include: sacred tradition, time-tested folkways, conventional morality, inherited authority, a critique of rationalism in politics, the need for prudence, and a call for cautious and incremental change. True to its designation, the aim of conservatism is to conserve the cultural patrimony bequeathed to society by its ancestors. Conservatives defend the status quo insofar as it represents the visible summit of the past.

For much of the nineteenth century, American political movements did not adopt the title of “conservative”. This may have been an after-effect of the Revolution of 1776, in which Patriots clashed with Loyalists who maintained fealty to the British crown. Since the Patriots founded a new regime based on ideas of Enlightenment liberalism, hybridized with various other ideologies, this likely discredited early conservatism which allied itself with the ancien régime. Indeed, in its original European form, conservative politics was marked by hostility to the revolutionary Enlightenment – although, as we shall see, this relationship has always been complex.

Conservatism's twentieth-century rise in the United States was pioneered by a small band of intellectuals and activists who unabashedly claimed the name as their own. These early thoughtleaders sought to resist the dramatic societal changes that began with the New Deal but came to include feminism, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, radical ecology, the counterculture, and the rapid evolution and expansion of progressive ideology. A trailblazing work was Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. Among other things, Kirk conjured forth a homegrown lineage for conservatism that included figures like John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville (neither of whom thought of their own politics in these terms).

In this way, Kirk introduced a new idea into mainstream political discourse, while positioning it as a longstanding tradition. Viewed through Kirk's eyes, conservatism was simultaneously insurgent and venerably old. This was an important feat for an ideology suspicious of novelty and deferential to the authority of an inherited past.