My Father’s Conservatism

By Joseph Palange

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

My father is and always has been the most conservative man I have ever met. Not because of his politics; he has never been a partisan of any kind. Prompted by an explanation of U.S. elections in my first grade class, I asked who he was voting for in the 2000 election. “Who do you think you are?” he asked.

 

“You don’t ask a person a question like that.” I still do not know, and there’s a chance he does not remember. He’s not culturally conservative either; my father has always been more of a “live and let live” kind of guy. I am talking more about the plainest meaning of the word conservative. The man is careful and circumspect.

 

He’s uncomfortable speaking in absolutes and is careful about asserting knowledge or skill, even in fields where he’s an expert. He’d rather be quiet about what he knows on the chance that his passivity opens the floor for someone else to share. “Ask so-and-so about that, he knows a lot more than I do,” he always says. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. But the point is that he does not care about being perceived to know a lot, he cares about being honest about the limits of his knowledge. He has no shame in appearing uninformed. My father is perhaps the wisest person I know, simply because he has never imagined himself to be.

 

He’s the kind of man who would turn a bag of cash into the police department not just because it is the right thing to do, but because he knows the world doesn’t give you a free lunch without a catch. He will not drive his company vehicle to the grocery store and I never heard him swear until I was in my 20s. He would rather die broke than have a single person justifiably say he screwed them because a clean conscience matters more to the man than all the wealth in the world.

 

In 2018, having just gotten off work, I met him for dinner. When he asked how my day went, I had to admit, not so well. I had previously told my boss that I knew how to run an excavator when I had only ever done it a few times. That morning, my boss asked me to run one for him and was frustrated with my rudimentary skills. 

 

My father asked why I said I knew. 

 

“They won’t trust me to do anything if they think I’m a novice,” I said.

 

“Wrong,” he said. “They won’t trust you to do anything if they don’t think you’ll be honest about what you do and don’t know, and they’ll never teach you anything if you won’t admit you need to be taught. Always say ‘I don’t know’ when you don’t know.”

 

I took his advice and started saying “I don’t know much about that” when I didn’t, and “You might know more about this than I do, what do you think?” even when I was knowledgeable. I learned more than I ever had before, simply by signaling that I wanted to be taught. The work I did was of higher quality because I was no longer operating under a “fake it till you make it” mindset.

 

Once, after a few times being named foreman on crews where everyone else had more experience than myself, I asked a superintendent why. “Because you admit what you don’t know,” I recall him saying. “So If you’re running the crew, I can be confident that the guy who knows the most about an aspect of the work will make the decisions about it, because you’re going to ask him what he thinks. Everybody else would rather shoot from the hip.”

 

Despite having learned that lesson, I still sometimes struggle to apply it. When I scraped up some money and bought a small three-family apartment building from a slumlord on Cleveland’s west side, I planned to fix it up on my own while living in one of the units. But my father was constantly suggesting I hire out some of the work. “Why?” I argued. “I know how to run electrical, why waste my money paying someone to do it?”

 

“Because you’ll never be as good at anything as someone who does it every day,” my father said.

 

His point was that it’s not just knowledge that gives a person expertise, it’s having many years’ worth of instructive mistakes. I cannot learn the lessons of the electrician or the doctor or the economist without being one. Problem-solving in the same field every single day makes someone an expert. You can’t borrow that. The only way to act wisely about something you aren’t an expert on is to accept how little you know about it, and use the knowledge you do have to inform how you outsource decisions.

 

I didn’t get that when I bought my triple, and it seems that those in the Trump administration don’t get it today. I cannot list all the assertions made by President Donald Trump that were plainly out of his depth, but to name a couple of particularly characteristic examples: claiming he could run the Federal Reserve better than the Fed’s board of governors and declaring he could solve the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Sadly this unearned conceit is not unique. Belief in an almost supernatural ability to solve problems that have proved intractable to those who have devoted their lives to them seems to be at the heart of the current Republican Party.

 

While Pete Hegseth seemed like an underqualified pick for secretary of defense, that alone is not sufficient to damn his tenure. Hegseth could have been grateful for the experts who worked for him and used their knowledge to keep himself from being drowned by a job that he was ill prepared for. But instead he fired many of those very people, reportedly for voicing disagreements with him. I cannot imagine a more foolish reason to fire people. It is like getting annoyed at the chirps of your carbon monoxide monitor and throwing it out the window. He is silencing the signals that should guide his actions.

 

As disagreeable as I may find tribalism and outrage politics, I can understand their allure. But I have a much harder time understanding admiration for foolish, conceited men speaking unequivocally and acting recklessly in realms for which they have no relevant expertise.

 

On every jobsite I have ever worked on, this kind of arrogance is mocked. But when the hubris of a novice is abstracted to realms with which we aren’t familiar, we might lose the ability to see it for what it is. So we imagine that underqualified men and women somehow defy the common sense that to be successful in a particular discipline requires either having expertise, or the wisdom to outsource decisions to those who do.

 

My father has always told me: “As soon as you think you got it all figured out, that’s the moment you don’t.” The vast expanse of information, the limitation of time, and the flawed nature of our species constrain our ability to ever know all that much. Yet, as long as we understand this, we’re capable of acting with wisdom. Sadly, it seems such self-awareness has gone out of fashion. When expertise, accrued knowledge, and circumspection become suspect, I’m not sure what about today’s “conservatism” is all that conservative anymore.