American conservatism has recently won several astounding victories. Yet in a disappointing sign that the political Right may be as addicted to outrage as the political Left, conservatives have not taken any time to step back, take a breath, and acknowledge the epochal nature of what has taken place.

In the past few years, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade , abolished affirmative action, and protected the free speech of Christians in the workplace.

These are epic decisions. Yet many of those on the Right have not taken a week off or even torqued down their outrage. In one story that was reported, after Roe was overturned, a group of pro-life workers paused to cheer, then minutes later hunkered back down on their desks to continue working. Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and other popular social media conservatives haven’t even seemed to downshift in their attacks on the “woke.” Mark Levin has a new book coming out about how Democrats ”hate America.” It will drop around the same time as Christoper Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

This reveals a dangerous obsession with politics, which is usually a problem on the Left. Part of the problem stems from the fact that American conservatism hasn’t offered any alternatives to liberalism. It has failed to build an infrastructure in the arts — that is, film, publishing, and television — to compete with liberals. The Right can offer timeless wisdom about the importance of family, yet — blasphemy alert — family is not everything. People need jazz, challenging movies, life-altering books, and passionate love to make life worthwhile.

If conservatives win the culture war, they have to offer something more than the suburban dream. Many of the criticisms of the 1950s, from Jack Kerouac and Anne Sexton to the novel Revolutionary Road, were not totally off the mark. The perfect life can be miserable.

People also need things other than politics. In his book On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs , the late and great Georgetown Jesuit James V. Schall argues that we are closest to God when we have the humility to admit that the political things that we obsess over may not be that important. I’m not talking about abortion or preventing war or protecting women's and children’s rights in repressive countries or even passing sensible traffic laws. I mean the manic state that some political junkies get into, where they devote over an hour of rabid TV shouting about changing the tax rate from 35.6% to 34.7%. I honestly can’t watch Ben Shapiro “destroy” another “woke” audience of college students.

Schall argues that when we are dancing, making love, reading books, or gardening, we are actually doing our most soulful and important work because these things reveal our acceptance of our limitations and the limitations of our political aspirations. They say that in the end, God is in charge and that letting go and going to have a beer with friends is a vital acknowledgment of that. Schall cites Plato: “Each person should spend the greatest and best part of his life in peace. What then is the correct way? One should live out one’s days playing at certain games–sacrificing, singing, and dancing.”

Schall explains how the modern world has inverted the rational order of human affairs, devaluing the activities of leisure and placing an exaggerated emphasis on political concerns. Defending the importance of simply wasting time, losing ourselves in play, and Chesterton's claim that "a thing worth doing is worth doing badly," Schall contends that the joy that accompanies leisure, festivity, and conviviality gives us a glimpse of the eternal.

Such activities also enable us to get beyond ourselves and are essential if we are to rightly order our worldly concerns. For as Schall reminds us, neither man nor his projects are the highest things in the universe, and it is only by understanding this fact that man can attain his true dignity. We need Congress, Aristotle, and the New York Times — but also Charlie Brown and long aimless bike rides.

Conservatives have won titanic unimaginable victories. It’s time to go have a beer.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.