Conservatism will always be with us. It is as natural to the human condition as the urge to liberality, the urge to make all things socially just and equal, and the urge to submit one's will to an authority figure. We all have those urges somewhere within us, and we all have to live with those who choose to respond to different parts of our native selves than we do, and we have to respect those who make incorrect worldviews into something with which people can live.
McCain was the example in our time of Aristocratic Conservatism, a conservatism of duty and public service which believes that the privileges he inherited required him morally to give back to a country which gave him so much. This is the conservative tradition of Eisenhower, Adenauer, De Gaulle, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Bismarck, Disraeli, and Edmund Burke, which now seems to be taken up by Merkel and Macron. It's a conservatism that only opposes the extension of freedom because the extension of freedom for those who are not free may dramatically curtail hard-won freedoms of others. McCain's conservatism knew that there was no world in which the upper class could ever be threatened by those beneath them unless those beneath them were provoked to do so. It is the conservatism we need from our Republicans. When allowed to flourish, it can be of enormous welfare to the un-prosperous in already prosperous societies, when allowed to die out, the conservatism which replaces it can destroy the lives of millions.
We are all thrown into this world with people with whom we could not disagree more strongly. Our only option is to respect those people with other opinions who are not so fanatical in their beliefs that they chase an extreme version of them. Without them, there is only a liberalism that curdles into revolution, and a conservatism that desiccates into tyranny.
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