The task before conservatives, is not to conserve. Whatever we thought we were conserving, it has already been lost. Our task is to rebuild.

Observe, for instance, the Rule of Law. It may be obvious to conservatives that as far as the law is concerned, the task is to preserve the influence of the common law tradition, while holding the line on the only sensible method of interpreting constitutional and statutory law: to decipher, based on the text and the historical time in which the text was written, its original meaning, and to regard this meaning as the law’s only binding sense. But in fact, this understanding of the law was already lost 50 years ago when the court made abortion legal.

When the great Justice Antonin Scalia restored true interpretation to the court, he was not conserving anything. He was rebuilding.

We must do the same.

As we rebuild, we must remember that what was lost can never be recaptured as it was. We can never go back. A man cannot return to his mother’s womb to be born again, and at the entrance to paradise lost there stands and angel barring our return with a flaming sword.

What we rebuild, we build new. But if we build rightly, and well, we can perhaps breath into the nostrils of this new thing the life of the lost, so that it is animated by the same life-giving spirit.