Has conservatism failed in America? The answer seems to be an obvious yes. The national debt is now almost $32 trillion, corporate workplaces and public schools are becoming increasingly filled with leftist propaganda, and the federal government continues to expand far beyond its constitutional limits. Over the past few decades, every conservative principle seems to have been slowly purged from American society.

Why should that be? It’s not like conservatives have been barred from the halls of power. Republicans have been in the White House for 24 of the last 43 years. And yet conservative values continued to be eroded not only in Washington, D.C., but in America’s cultural and intellectual centers as well.

As scholar Claes G. Ryn argues in his new volume of collected essays, The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken , it is precisely because conservatives expected too much of politics that they failed to conserve anything at all. Ryn dissects the history of the conservative movement since the 1950s — a movement that at first seemed promising but that ultimately eschewed the philosophical, historical, and moral foundations that are crucial to the success of authentic conservatism. Unapologetic in its tone and penetrating in its analysis, Ryn’s book calls us to consider how American society would have been different if conservatives had taken another road.

It may seem paradoxical, but Ryn argues that conservatives’ failure to enact conservative policies was a foreseeable consequence of a hyper-fixation on politics. This is because what may seem like purely political disputes are not actually so. Politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives all but abandoned the culture to the Left.

“While the so-called Right worried about so-called practical matters,” Ryn writes, “the Left took control of activities that could help refashion society’s imagination. The Left understood the power of directing the mind.” While conservatives obsessed over winning at the ballot box, progressivism conquered academia, literature, cinema, and journalism.

Not all conservatives ignored these vital cultural concerns. Ryn praises the work of Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk for their recognition that philosophy and the arts have a much greater influence on the trajectory of a civilization than what happens at the ballot box. For traditional conservatives such as Babbitt and Kirk, American constitutional democracy only works because it was formed and tailored to the nation’s particular historical and cultural setting. America’s political framework is not some universally applicable structure that can be forced upon the rest of the world.

But the neoconservatives, who came to dominate conservative institutions, showed little concern about the historical and moral underpinnings of American democracy and constitutionalism. Like the Jacobins of the French Revolution, American neoconservatives believed that their government could be the vehicle for civilizational progress — not only for their country but for other countries too. When America invaded Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration explicitly wanted to remake it in America’s image.

The failure of Middle East nation-building proved that the mere existence of a written constitution is not enough to establish a healthy republic. Ultimately, a republic’s success depends upon the culture of the people that it governs. This is as true for America as it is for Iraq.

Several times Ryn quotes Benjamin Franklin, who, following the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, responded to a woman who asked what kind of government they had created: “a republic, if you can keep it.” To keep their republic, “Americans would have to cultivate the moral and cultural traits that had given rise to it in the first place,” Ryn writes. “To be an American is to defend a historically evolved inheritance, to live up to what may be called the ‘constitutional personality.’”

If conservatism has failed, as Ryn believes it has, it is because it did not sufficiently sustain its own “constitutional personality.” It’s not too late to turn things around. But it will take more than just winning the next election or securing the next vacant Supreme Court seat. Revitalizing conservatism and saving America’s constitutional personality will require the same “march through the culture” that the Left took. Conservatives hoping to begin that march should carry Ryn’s The Failure of Conservatism with them.

Tyler Curtis ( @tylercurtis42 ) is a loan officer at a community bank in Missouri. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Missouri S&T.