It’s no secret that conservatives have always loved to debate what conservatism means. And the debate has been particularly divisive of late. Now, there are two battle lines drawn up in the form of dueling manifestos from National Conservatives and, more recently, Freedom Conservatives.

There are at least two ways one can think of conservatism: as a general manner of understanding or engaging in political life, or as a practical political program or movement. Both tend to be highly contentious. One would hope that the former informs our understanding of the latter. But it is easy to let the arrow go the other way—to let partisan politics reshape our understanding of what it means to be conservative.

Both the National Conservatism and Freedom Conservatism statements, and the broader discourse in which they take place, tend to speak to both of these questions in a sort of ill-defined middle. Talk of basic “foundations” and “fundamentals” is used liberally alongside very specific points of policy, and it’s never quite clear where one begins and the other ends. The National Conservative declaration, for instance, includes statements affirming that all nations must be culturally rooted in a religious tradition and that we ought to invest more heavily in R&D if we’re going to beat the Chinese. The Freedom Conservatism statement, likewise, affirms that certain liberties are “essential to a free society” and that we have to get this national debt under control.

The tendency to blur the lines between specific policies and more fundamental premises is not particularly helpful when seeking clarity. This was one of the reasons I opted not to sign the Freedom Conservatism statement, even though I agree with ninety percent of it, and share the desire to push back against the right’s growing affection for nationalism and centralized political power. I had the sense that the statement defended many of its commitments (which I generally share) simply by declaring them to be foundational principles. I think that repeats a mistake that contributed to movement conservatism losing its bearings, and doesn’t clarify precisely what a conservative approach to politics entails and requires in our present moment.

Particularly, I was struck that most of the principles it outlines do not appear to be distinctively conservative: equality before the law; freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; protection of private property; and the practice of fiscal discipline. In the 1990s, most any center-left liberal would have affirmed the value of such things, at least in principle. And I don’t think there’s anything stopping moderately left-leaning people today from affirming them. These are the important and reasonable practices of any free, small-l “liberal” political order.

That does not mean conservatives shouldn’t be committed to these things. We absolutely should. But what makes conservatism distinct, I think, is not so much its commitment to these small-l liberal practices, but its understanding of why they are valuable, and how they are to be maintained and defended.

For instance, though the statement does like to use the language of fundamentals, there is nothing in it suggestive of how or why we learn from our past; nothing about human imperfectability; nothing about taking our policy bearings from the norms, expectations, and traditions of society; nothing about the need to rely on prescription; nothing about the value of social continuity. These are the sorts of things that set apart the conservative understanding of the small-l liberal political order from the understanding put forward by pure liberal theory.

I don’t mean to place too much blame. The statement was not political theory but a rallying cry, and as such, it may serve a useful function. But we should be careful not to define conservatism on the basis of partisan manifestos, even if we agree with them. We can get ourselves into trouble when we loudly affirm our commitment to certain things without a thoughtful recognition of why we do so.

I’ll offer just one example. The conservative commitment to individual liberty and to equality under law, I think, emerges from a recognition of human beings’ (and, especially, one’s own) intellectual and moral imperfection, and a corresponding skepticism of the ability of powerful, expansive government (always directed by imperfect men), to create a just social order. If, however, we take liberty and equality simply as “self-evident” principles or declare them “fundamental”—without this conservative foundation—we might easily begin to see them as a permission slip for a never-ending political quest to make the world ever more free and ever more equal. Or we might find it increasingly difficult to square our defense of liberty with a rejection of the left’s demand for absolute individual autonomy and equity. Or, more to the present debate, we might program Caesarist tendencies in young conservatives who—not appreciating the deeper reasons why the modern, centralized state can never simply be turned to good ends—naturally grasp for the “levers of power” whenever the “regime” fails to live up to their particular vision of freedom and equality.

And when I see in the “Freecon” statement the rhetoric of the “shining city on a hill,” of a “world[] led by the United States,” of “promissory notes,” and of the “moral obligation” that private institutions have to uphold certain political principles, I get an uneasy feeling that this statement may be calling simply for a return to an early-2000s conservatism that had indeed lost sight of more foundational conservative premises and (in part) set the stage for the revolt of the New Right.

Granted, this reads a certain vibe into the statement that I’m sure some of its signatories might deny. But I do think that among critics of national conservatism more broadly, serious reflection on the failures of conventional, movement conservatism is often lacking. The national debt skyrocketed under movement conservative presidents. A movement conservative president championed a massive, nationalized education program. No serious, sustained effort at decentralization was ever undertaken aside from a few block grants here and there. And, of course, the Iraq War was justified by a movement conservative in the name of high principle. This is why directly facing up to the failures of movement conservatism should be a central part of any attempt to refocus conservative political efforts on our liberties, communities, and constitutional order. If it’s not, National Conservatives will continue to win easy points by deriding their critics for just repeating “stale platitudes.”

I don’t think the planks of the Freedom Conservatism statement are actually stale platitudes. They are vital commitments that are being abandoned by both the right and left. But I don’t think that simply repeating them is enough—either to achieve greater clarity on conservatism for ourselves or to counter the new right-wing narratives so attractive to many young people on the right. At the intellectual level, we ought to rearticulate the distinctively conservative case for these values, and at the practical level, we ought to show how their recovery can address our present moment of turmoil.

These criticisms are offered in a friendly spirit. I hope the statement can generate some enthusiasm among conservatives for liberty, constitutionalism, and locality. The foregoing merely demonstrates two points: First, that I am a bit of a fastidious crank when it comes to such matters. Second, and more importantly, that we should make sure to go beyond Manifesto Conservatism.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.