It’s more useful to think of political conservatism as an impulse rather than as an ideology. Specifically, it’s the impulse to preserve what is good about our present social, political and cultural arrangements, or at least to limit harm when those arrangements inevitably change.

In my sense, then, there are no conservative beliefs as such. “Abortion is wrong,” for example, is a belief that a person might try to use to influence society in either a conservative or non-conservative manner.

The conservative impulse takes with utmost seriousness the law of unintended consequences. Any meaningful social change will have effects that we had not envisioned, much less planned on. One important conservative task, then, is to do our best to envision as many of those consequences as we can.

It is undoubtedly true that “things could be so much better.” It’s also true that things could be much worse. No one doubts the Bourbon Dynasty in France needed to go; but the way in which the thing was done gave the French people the Reign of Terror, and then Europe the ocean of blood shed by Napoleon.

At the same time, I don’t conceive of the fundamental opposition between progressives and conservatives as one of optimism versus pessimism, per se, but rather concerning the speed (and probably extent) of social change.

In our American context, the conservative impulse flows from the following recognition: American society, for all of its manifest and serious flaws, is incredibly free, prosperous, and yes, even equal, from the perspective of the whole of human history. We do have a moral imperative to make it better. We have an equally strong imperative not to break what we already have.

On to the pressing issue of the moment: Conservatives can be at the forefront of finding creative ways to create an environment in which more black Americans can succeed. This will require thoughtful changes to our present economic, social, legal and judicial systems, but not the scrapping of those systems.

For example, conservatives can, and should, advocate for incremental changes to policing that show promise in reducing disparities in how white and black people are policed, while ensuring that the police can still do their jobs effectively.

A growing number of folks on the left see the American system as essentially and irredeemably racist, such that black Americans can never succeed in it. This is proven false, I think, by the fact that black household incomes have been growing since the Great Recession. They’ve been growing too slowly, and they are being held back by some systemic factors. But black people can succeed in our country, and it is a task of conservatives to facilitate that success.

Sometimes the conservative impulse is wrong. William F. Buckley famously opposed federal civil rights legislation, hoping that segregation would eventually die out without the need to expand the federal government’s powers. He was wrong to do so, as he himself later admitted. There are cases in which pervasive social change should occur more rapidly than the conservative feels comfortable with.

Finally, and most importantly, the only possible justification for a Christian to entertain the conservative impulse is the conviction that it’s the best available way to fulfill the commandant, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”