Reflections on Tom Woods, Empire, and the Conservative Case for Tending to Hearth and Home Instead of Nation Building With the Dollars and Blood of American Families
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This morning I read a post on X by Tom Woods that deserves careful attention—especially from those “conservatives” who now find themselves cheering the language of American empire. That language is anything but conservative in the classical and constitutional sense.
Before going further, it helps to understand who Tom Woods is, because his perspective is often misunderstood. Woods is not a radical, nor a utopian, nor a modern libertine masquerading as a conservative. He is a historian and economist rooted in the classical American tradition: the tradition of the Founders, natural law, constitutional limits, sound money, private property, and local self-government. His skepticism of empire is not a departure from conservatism, but a return to it.
Woods is responding to a growing sentiment on the right that “America First” now means asserting U.S. dominance abroad—expanding power, arresting dictators, projecting force—and celebrating it as national greatness. He is right to be alarmed. Not because America should be weak, but because empire has never been conservative.
When “America First” Is Turned Inside Out
Woods identifies a subtle but dangerous rhetorical shift:
“I’m suddenly seeing on the right an excitement about empire… The argument is that true ‘America First’ means domination of other countries by the U.S. regime.”
This inversion matters because it quietly replaces a domestic principle with an imperial one.
“America First” never meant America everywhere. It meant America at home; its people, its laws, its limits, its domestic order. It meant tending what is ours before attempting to rule what is not.
As Woods puts it, we have enough problems here to occupy us “until we’re all six feet under.” That line is actually deeply conservative in the old sense of the word: aware of human finitude, skeptical of grand schemes, and resistant to utopian temptations—whether they come wrapped in left-wing humanitarianism or right-wing triumphalism.
Hearth and Home Versus Empire
One of the most important insights in Woods’ piece is this:
“Our left-wing crusaders and our would-be right-wing nation-builders share one thing in common: the prosaic pursuit of bourgeois life bores them to death.”
Empire is exciting. It offers drama, scale, and the illusion of meaning. Hearth and home are quieter and even “boring” to some—but far more demanding.
Woods reminds us that conservatism, rightly understood, is not a taste for spectacle or power, but a moral posture: limited expectations, ordered loves, and loyalty to what is near.
As Charles Pinckney observed at the Constitutional Convention:
“We mistake the object of our government if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable abroad… Conquest ought never to be the object of republican systems.”
This is easily dismissed today—but only because we have grown unused to thinking in terms of limits.
Smallness, Love, and Legitimate Loyalty
Woods draws on thinkers who understood that political order must remain human-scaled:
Chesterton reminded us that the genuine patriot boasts not of how large his country is, but how small… Hawthorne observed that a state should be about as large as the human heart can be expected to love… Jefferson envisioned a radically decentralized order—town, county, state, and only finally a restrained national government.
These are not poetic flourishes. They are moral constraints.
Empire, by contrast, requires centralization, abstraction, and distance. It demands emotional investment in places we cannot name, cultures we do not understand, and conflicts we did not create; all while neglecting the moral and civic decay at home.
Why Empire Always Needs a Myth
Woods turns to Felix Morley, who understood the psychology of empire with chilling clarity. Morley warned that empire-building is “essentially mystical,” fostering the illusion that a man is great merely because his nation is powerful.
“People with no individual stature accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them importance without personal effort.”
Empire substitutes collective pride for personal virtue. It offers emotional intoxication instead of moral formation. And because empire cannot survive honest consent, it must be wrapped in symbols, slogans, and lies.
War propaganda works.
As Woods notes, these institutions “couldn’t tell the truth about foreign affairs if they tried.”
Empire Is Not Free-Market—It Is Collectivist
This must be said plainly: empire is not capitalist, not free-market, and not conservative.
Empire requires:
- Massive taxation
- Endless public debt
- Inflation
- Centralized bureaucracy
- Redistribution of wealth from productive citizens to political insiders
War is the oldest and most reliable welfare program for the powerful. American workers pay in dollars and blood. Their children inherit the debt. And politically connected interests reap the rewards—while calling it patriotism and “winning.”
This is not American strength. It is anti-American collectivism draped in a cheap patriotic costume.
Venezuela and the False Charge of “Liberalism”
Opposing empire does not mean denying evil. No serious person denies that Nicolás Maduro is a socialist tyrant or that Venezuela has suffered terribly under socialism since Hugo Chavez days. But acknowledging evil is not the same as granting the United States moral license to act as world police; especially absent of constitutional authority or a clear case of self-defense.
Non-intervention is not liberal nor leftist. It is in fact the opposite; it isthe older conservative position, rooted in natural law and the Founders’ warnings against foreign entanglements. As George Washington cautioned in his Farewell Address: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is… as little political connection as possible.” And Jefferson said, ““Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”
Empire always promises precision. It always delivers devastation. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. This will end the same way.
And it is mothers and fathers—grandmothers and grandfathers, here and abroad—who bury the cost.
War Culture Is Anti-Family
Empire is not just a foreign-policy posture; it is a domestic moral injury.
Endless war:
- Normalizes death
- Militarizes culture
- Hardens the national conscience
American families live with broken veterans, psychological wounds, generational debt, and a culture that treats war as entertainment. Families abroad are left with destroyed homes, fatherless children, and collapsed civil society.
Empire does not protect families. It shatters them.
The Conservative Question
A genuinely conservative people must ask:
- By what authority do we intervene?
- At whose expense?
- To what end—and for how long?
If the answer is “because we can,” then we are no longer conserving anything. We are consuming our moral capital.
Why This Matters to Parents
Parents understand what empire-builders forget: you cannot save the world by abandoning your home.
A nation that bleeds its sons abroad while neglecting its families at home is morally disordered. Peace is not cowardice. Restraint is not weakness. Limits on government power are not liberal errors; they are conservative necessities.
They are the line between a Republic and an Empire.
A Final Word on Tom Woods
Tom Woods’ reflection matters not because it is novel, but because it is faithful; to the Constitution, to the Founders, and to a moral realism our age resists. He reminds us that a nation does not prove its greatness by how far its power reaches, but by how well it governs itself.
That reminder is not radical. It is conservative in the most serious sense of the word.
Come Home, America
I am anti-war and anti-empire not because I despise my country, but because I love it. Because I take the Founders seriously. Because I believe limits are a virtue. Because freedom cannot survive endless mobilization.
There is much here worth tending, repairing, and cherishing.
Come home, America.
You were never meant to be an empire.
❦ Mrs Armstrong
thehearthofvirtue.com 