Abby McCloskey, Bloomberg Opinion, April 29, 2026

“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.”