Important institutions should never be led by those whose primary qualifications are eccentricity and provocation.
Conservatives have a special duty to protect iconoclasts.
At first blush, this idea doesn’t quite square. Conservatism, properly understood, seeks to protect order and tradition. Why should it defend those who challenge the status quo?
There’s a simple answer: Because iconoclasts sometimes raise the right questions. Conservatives, at any given moment, could be preserving a bad idea, an unfair practice, or an outdated system. By making room for those willing to dissent, conservatives are actually guarding against decadence and a misguided sense of certainty. Ideas now considered invaluable were once thought heretical, after all: Isaac Newton’s and then Albert Einstein’s theories on gravity, Adam Smith’s understanding of markets, Frederick Douglass’ and Susan B. Anthony’s approaches to equality, Luis Alvarez’s research on the extinction of dinosaurs.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch
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Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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