Chapter 1
Definitions
“What are conservatives trying to conserve?”
“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality.”
This was Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, who was, according to conservative theorist Russell Kirk, “the most eloquent of American conservatives … the American Burke.” A man unafraid to speak his mind, a man of tradition, a “champion of personal liberty” and a man who rejected democracy in favor of government led by an aristocracy of class and intellect. His commitment was strong enough that in 1820 he joined John Adams, Daniel Webster, James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall and other conservative luminaries in what Clinton Rossiter described as a “hopeless struggle to limit universal suffrage.” A struggle encouraged more recently by late Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation, “I don’t want everybody to vote … our leverage in the elections goes up … as the voting populous goes down.[1]
If John Randolph sounds elitist, it’s because he was elitist, and thoroughly conservative. They all were, and today each man perches atop a high pedestal in the pantheon of great American conservatives. But contrast the patrician Randolph with conservatives these days who see themselves as anti-elitist, indeed, as slayers of the elite in the name of the people. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in his 2011 film “A City on a Hill,” warned that America now has a "government by the elites, of the elites and for the elites." Or consider the late William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he’d rather trust the government to the first 400 names of the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard University. A curious remark coming from a man who was an elitist of the bluest blood. Still, Buckley’s populism, faux though it may have been, indicates a significant shift in conservative orthodoxy since the early 19th century and raises important questions.
How can conservatism encompass polar opposite views about elitism and still be correctly called consistent? How can conservatives disparage ‘mobocracy’ in one era, dismissing Thomas Jefferson as a dangerous radical, warm to Jeffersonian/Jacksonian democracy in the next, only to turn around a few decades later to embrace Jefferson’s ideological antithesis Alexander Hamilton’s theory of strong government and embrace Social Darwinism survival of the fittest as though conservatism had just finished evolving from the lower order of things? Now they again purport to worry about the well-being of Jefferson’s modern-day yeoman, aka, Joe the Plumber while revising their history to re-discover Jefferson’s anti-government conservatism?[2] Either somebody’s telling big fat lies or conservatism since Randolph’s day has bred generations of relativists whose hypocrisy is so profound they are either unaware of it or happy to toss it off with a good-natured, Reaganesque shrug.
More to the point, how could conservatives alternate between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, dismissing one, then the other, alternating love affairs as though it were all a high school flirtation? How can conservatives claim TR as a great conservative and then in these conservative times all but read him and Abraham Lincoln out of the Republican Party (and, one suspects, out of the ranks of great presidents)? How could conservatives consider an agrarian America quintessential at one point then several decades later lionize industrial capitalism, often at the expense of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, whom today they once again idolize? Interesting questions, are they not?
So, before we proceed with an examination of conservatism standing athwart history yelling Stop, to borrow again from William F. Buckley, let’s take a look at what conservatism once was and is now.
Please try to keep in mind that this is not about the liberal Democratic Party and the conservative Republican Party. Such polarization is a phenomenon of our own time. Throughout most of the 20th century there were liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats and moderates of both affiliations. In fact, until the 1960s conservatives were at least as comfortable in the Democratic Party as the Republican, if not more so. Critics called the parties Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but you have to wonder how bad this really was. Under those arrangements, where party affiliation often trumped ideology, both parties could consider and filter out untenable ideas from the right and the left. If nothing else it generally made for a more accommodating climate. There was something reassuring and frankly more civilized about politicians of the right and left going at it by day and hobnobbing over bourbon and branch by night, or possible mid-to-late afternoon.
It’s also important to stipulate that there has never been unanimity among conservatives. Sometimes they’ve come close, as under Ronald Reagan. More often they have disagreed, sometimes sharply, over specific issues though usually not the broader agenda. Maybe this is beside the point. Who needs definitions, you say? I know in my heart what it means to be conservative. After all, you just implied it’s a state of mind more than anything. Even if true, gut feeling is where the definitions start. Not where they end.
Can you describe the difference between Barry Goldwater’s feisty libertarianism and Ronald Reagan’s misty-eyed traditionalism? Between Pat Robertson’s ethereal evangelical conservatism and George H.W. Bush’s country club conservatism? Or George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Rush Limbaugh’s angry authoritarianism? Or can you determine if the New Right, neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives have anything in common other than a claim to the C-word? True, these may be dilations of circumstance that will contract over time; they certainly seemed to during the Reagan era. But they came roaring forth at the 1992 Republican presidential convention where contumely hung in the air like body odor and George H. W. Bush was obliged to surrender prime time to various factions in order to suppress it. Instead, it stunk up the joint and hobbled what should have been a Bush cakewalk against Bill Clinton.
The indispensible conservative theorist Russell Kirk argued that conservatism is “not a fixed and immutable body of dogma.” As conditions change conservatives react to new contingencies, new threats to an old order that has evolved slowly over time rather than having been jerked forward in massive waves of legislation or outbursts of untested ideas. In fact, that’s exactly what conservatism has always opposed. Founding editor of the National Review and key figure in the post-World War II conservative revival, Frank Meyer, explained it this way in 1966. “Conservatism comes into being at such times as a movement of consciousness and action directed to recovering the tradition of the civilization.”[3] Harvard’s resident conservative historian, Harvey Mansfield, makes an even balder distinction: “conservatism [is] a reaction to liberalism. It isn’t a position that one takes up from the beginning but only when … things that deserve to be conserved [are threatened].”[4] To that George Nash adds, “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for.”[5] The time-stamp “at the time” that Nash puts on his definition is important. Indeed, British conservative Michael Oakeshott seemed to anticipate adjustment of preference over time when he defined conservatism in his seminal 1956 essay, “On Being Conservative.” “To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown… the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, this convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”[6] Or, one might add, to prefer what’s mine to what’s yours, unless yours is better.
Historian Samuel L. Huntington considered conservatism a “situational ideology” that adapts to circumstances while maintaining core values based on tradition and strong morality. If this borders uneasily on ethical relativism (imagine the fun conservatives would have with “situational ideology” had Huntington been talking about liberalism), Huntington sought, not altogether successfully, to firm up conservatism’s fuzzy edges by arguing, “The essence of conservatism is the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions.” Like most conservatives he believed that the institutional structures of America by their very nature provide virtue, stability and continuity. The task of conservatism is to maintain these institutions so that they can support society. Unless, of course, we’re talking about present-day anti-establishment conservatives who manifest about as much respect for established institutions as Carlos the Jackal.[7]
Although tradition and continuity are highly important, Meyer cautioned that the “claim of the contemporary American conservative movement to the title conservative does not have to be based upon a surface resemblance to the conservative movement of another period. It is based upon its commitment to the recovery of a tradition … which has been under revolutionary attack in the years since 1932.” Meyer was keenly aware that the conservatism he was advocating did not look like the buccaneering conservatism of the Gilded Age or the deferential politics of the Federal period.[8]
Reaction to New Deal statism and its socialistic schemes is the major motivation behind contemporary conservatism. That and an unrelenting bitterness over 60s political and cultural radicalism. But the issues run deeper and stretch farther back into our history than the counter-culture, the New Left and the New Deal. Despite its often slippery logic, there is an internal consistency to conservatism that leaves all its contradictions and intellectual shenanigans largely on the surface. First there are its traditionalist roots; second, its reactive nature; third, its, shall we say, adaptability. Plus a fourth that has been almost completely overlooked, its allegiance to local or regional autonomy, that is to say localistic republicanism or localism. More about that later.
Even when you throw in its ad hocism, conservatism has always adhered to certain fundamentals that have remained more or less constant since the 18th century and remain straight and true today: maximum personal liberty and minimal government involvement in a moralistic, civil society. Conservatives often (but obviously not always) cite these as bedrock over which they have never and will never disagree.
Edmund Burke, conservatism’s Founding Father, relied upon these principles:
· Belief in established institutions and hierarchies that have proven their worth over time.
· Elitism that stems from faith institutions.
· Wariness of progress.
· Wariness of centralized government that does not preclude a pronounced patriotism.
· And, most important, an unshakable preference for liberty over equality.
In short Burke “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” Conservative reaction to the empiricism and individualism of the Enlightenment provided the benchmark, the before and after. “The age of chivalry is gone,” Burke grieved. “The age of economists, sophists and calculators had arrived.” As far as he was concerned, the old order was going down the tubes in a vigorous rush of mobocracy and mayhem. Of course, if the madness of the French Revolution sets the standards, as it did for Burke, no other conclusion would be available.[9]
As the nation moved towards the high-tide of liberalism in the 1950s and 60s, many observers, liberals most especially, crowed that conservatism was moribund, if not as rotten dead as a mackerel in the sun. Lionel Trilling dismissed conservatism as “reduced to mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s characterization reflected the pathetic “intellectualism” of southern segregationists who had formed a loose alliance with many anti-Semites who also considered themselves conservative and a handful of ideological purists. It also had a lot to do with Trilling’s own intellectual arrogance.[10]
Despite the fact that conservatism was associated with laissez-faire, isolationism and deep, dark prejudice, Trilling was dramatically wrong.[11] Though mugged by the reality of the Great Depression, conservatism was mounting a comeback. Writing in the 1950s Russell Kirk sought to reorient Burke’s principles towards “Biblical faith.” Though it may not be immutable, he argued, conservatism held fast to the “preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” Along with this came respect for forebears and ancestors and opposition to the alteration of the world they bequeathed us. Kirk was convinced of the centrality of religious faith as the foundation of conservatism and country. Taking his inspiration from Edmund Burke, Kirk was deeply wedded to the guidance of divine intent. His book The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (later Eliot) remains perhaps the most important single work on modern conservatism. In it he described a conservatism that considered “political problems … at heart moral problems.” Hence, order, inspiration and guidance come directly from the “transcendent moral order” of God through Jesus Christ.[12]
The path for human existence follows the social order and social classes and is best fulfilled in property rights. Echoing John Randolph he was also convinced that “the only equality is moral equality … civilized society requires orders and classes … leveling leads to despair.” Society not only demands but “longs for leadership, and if people destroy natural distinctions among men” a dictator will fill the resulting “vacuum.” For Kirk democracy complains from the back seat while deferential republicanism drives society forward into the future. Despite its explicit elitism, there is a certain compelling truth here. The touchy point though is how these leaders are selected and from what talent pool.[13]
Kirk’s six canons of conservatism became the standards for Cold War era, anti-New Deal conservatism.[14] Here they are in Kirk’s own words.
1. "Belief in the transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.”
2. “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.”
3. “Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society.’”
4. “Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.”
5. “Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.”
6. “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”[15]
Conservatism, according to this last principle, is skeptical of change and progress. Kirk held it as obvious and fundamental that change, reform and even innovation do not automatically constitute progress. In fact these things are more likely to lead to chaos than progress. He considered anything that smacks of equalitarianism as radicalism that threatens “the prescriptive arrangements of society.” Those arrangements include “a political philosophy of limited government, decentralization, political liberty, and a look-before-you-leap caution …”[16]
Since life is defined by a moral order given us by a higher authority, Kirk’s conservatism set itself in established hierarchy and class, rejecting liberal egalitarianism as second guessing God’s work. Further, this means that progress, meaning change often involving enhanced governmental powers, is not intrinsically good, and on those infrequent times when it is absolutely necessary, must be gradual and circumspect to prevent it from straying from God’s order.[17]
Personal liberty includes the right to private property; property ownership is inextricably linked to personal freedom.[18] In the drive for economic leveling, if egalitarianism or redistributionism (quasi-socialism) were to “separate property from private ownership … liberty is erased.” Tradition, especially when steeped in Christian faith, helps maintain an ordered and stable society in which private property is protected and man’s “anarchic impulse” is held in check. Actually, Kirk calls it “tradition and sound prejudice” but one has to believe he might alter the wording today so as not to be misunderstood. ‘Sound prejudice’ sounds suspiciously like ‘sound science,’ which appears to be anything but, unless you deny the Earth is running a temperature right now and Teri Shivo was as sentient as Senator Bill Frist. Still, Kirk’s intentions come through clearly enough.[19]
At its 1973 founding the Heritage Foundation emphasized that it was conceived and dedicated “to four central principles; free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, and a strong national defense.” Twenty years later, in response to the coming of the Christian right, it added a fifth: “traditional American values.”[20] The ‘you know what we mean’ generality of this additional item gave conservatism the impact and immediacy, the chutzpah, to seize and hold center stage into the 21st century. Not only did ‘traditional values’ resonate, it fit a multitude of meanings, aspirations and prejudices. Traditional values, or traditional family values, as it was amended to eliminate any association with racism, became crucial watchwords that made conservatism stronger even if less consistent (due to the same vagueness that also supplied it strength).
All this dedication to the past leaves conservatives with two crosses to bear. One traditionalist and moralistic, the other reactive and attitudinal. Both reinforce what it means to be conservative and American.[21] But both also put conservatism in the unenviable position of naysaying time and time again. Meyer argues, “While conservatism cannot be naked reaction, neither can its concern with contemporary circumstances lead it … to be content with the status quo.” It must act decisively to reverse the radical break with tradition.[22] Conservative theorist John Crowe Ransom posed it this way: “The badge the conservative wears must have two faces. One is resistance to the new event; this is the fighting face … The other is acceptance after the event, permitting the expectation that when once the new ways are shaken down and become old ways they too will be loved.”[23] Perhaps recent conservative vows to save Social Security and Medicare from the monstrous ObamaCare indicate such a shakedown of remaining New Deal/Great Society programs. At this point, who knows?
The best way to get at the heart of this tangle of prudence, prejudice and poppycock might be to keep in mind an essential question posed by Barry Goldwater in his book, The Conscience of a Conservative: “Are we maximizing freedom?” Do public policy, legislation and court rulings, government actions in other words, “preserve and extend freedom?” An additional often asked question is What are conservatives trying to conserve? What is it that matters most to conservatives? Or should matter most? According to former Texan Republican congressman and lifelong conservative, Mickey Edwards, it’s this: “the liberal revolution embodied in the Constitution.” In a word: liberty. That’s what matters most. To that profound end conservatism, he claims, holds to these fundamentals: limiting the breadth and depth of government, protecting “the dignity of the individual” and guaranteeing that priceless commodity human liberty.[24] Not bad things to conserve. Most Americans regardless of how they label themselves ought to favor conserving these American values and most do. But where does this formula put government in relation to individual liberty and dignity? What should government do to protect and guarantee these priceless commodities? Solving this equation is the nut of the problem.
These days conservatives refuse to support, venerate or even begrudgingly compliment long-standing American institutions because they consider them bastions of liberalism. In addition to government, every conservative’s hit list includes academia, the entertainment industry, newspapers, television networks and apparently on alternate Thursdays Wall Street and big banks. Throughout the 1990s with Bill Clinton (and even George H.W. Bush before him) in the White House, government was bad. Then conservatives took over and it wasn’t quite so bad anymore. It stayed that way until November, 2008, when it turned bad again. Never mind the size of the government and its role in our lives grew under Reagan and the Bushes and contracted, in size ate least, under Clinton. Annual deficits and the national debt increased far more under conservatives than under liberals. There’s no getting around that little factoid.
So, is it really about the size of the government? Possibly, but history indicates it’s more about what government does with its size. Or does not do. Notice, too, that the very same conservatives who were promulgating the odd notion of the “unitary executive,” in which the executive branch could put itself above the other two branches and indeed the law itself, have dropped that little canard with a centrist Democrat in the White House.[25] For conservatives these days, moderate is just a polite way of saying liberal.
One can begin to see the problems facing conservatism when leading conservatives had less problem with George W. Bush’s peculiar vision of enhanced governmental powers that rewrote or ignored laws with abandon than Obama’s attempts at building a center-left consensus. Bush unbalanced the conservative equation and many conservatives who objected to this power grab were too scared to say anything. Government’s role lay in facilitating opportunity for individual across life’s broad spectrum: speech, communication, religious belief and practice, self-determination and social interaction. Also education, intellectual and artistic pursuits, economic endeavor and unfettered political participation. Put another way government should exist to insure and maximize personal liberty. It must take those steps necessary to maintain an environment in which the individual can flourish while helping maintain a society that reflects civilized ideals and values. Government steps in only when private institutions from churches, service organizations and charities to bowling leagues and country clubs fail to cohere. Beyond that, government should back the hell off and let freedom ring. But that still doesn’t quite balance the equation.
Given the Founder’s distain for the rabble, it’s difficult to envision them embracing the Tea Party whose very existence represents the mobocracy the Founder’s intended the Constitution to keep at bay. Once upon a time, Jack Tarr in the streets was anathema to conservatives. Unruly disrespect for established institutions and their decided lack of deference towards the better educated, higher class, natural leaders, demonstrated why democracy was kept at arm’s length at the creation of the American republic. Yet despite their hatred of the elite, Tea Party activists are clearly conservative (and Republican).[26] In fact many of the most prominent non-Tea Party conservatives these days, perhaps currying favor, spend much of their time railing against the elite, even while dunning them for favors and funds. And despite conservatism’s very long line of very blue blood. True, a few individuals possessing intellectual power and/or lots of cash don’t an elite make. But given the origins of the creed, I suggest they are closer to the roots than, say, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman or Newt Gingrich. No blue bloods they, though in the case of Mr. Newt, who bought considerably more than breakfast at Tiffany’s, his identification with “the people” has a rather reedy tone.
An explanation for this disparity lies in one of the aspects of conservatism that rarely gets mentioned. It’s the fifth element of conservatism I mentioned earlier, localism, or more correctly localistic republicanism. We Americans have a tradition of controlling (or at least believing we control) the affairs closest to heart and home, matters that once upon a time had to do with survival, literally, but evolved in form and function as the nation grew from farm to towns, cities, metropolitan suburbs and ultimately exurbia. The idea is not so much democratic as apolitical but local autonomy is a fundamental aspect of not only conservatism but of the American character as well. This tradition is best understood as localism, the control or perceived control of day-to-day living and one’s immediate surroundings, including education, land usage, home defense (in earlier times, but an idea that persists today), governance and social and civil structure.
Once England’s North American colonies were established well enough to survive, this became the rule of the day. Britain left the colonies alone for over century to tend to their own affairs so long as they supplied the mother country with what it wanted and helped keep the French and Spanish at bay. History remembers this as salutary neglect and it lasted for 100 years. Essentially, it worked like this. The mother country, England, fended off foreign foes while the colonists took care of most everything else. When the Georges tried to regain control of their rambunctious charges, too much time had passed, too many coonskins were on the wall, too much tobacco in the barn. The colonies rebelled essentially to conserve what they already had.
Eventually, a government located in the federal District of Columbia replaced the crown and functioned mainly to supervise foreign and domestic trade, diplomacy, deliver the mail and the other national matters. The localities ran almost everything else, often than to the exclusion of state governments. With industrialization and the technological revolution, localism began to decline undermined by an increasingly complex nation and in the 20th century an economic disaster of unprecedented magnitude. And then after World War II, the National Security Act create a national security infrastructure that dramatically altered the relationship between the federal government and the locales. Not the Treasury Department “Revenuers” during Prohibition or New Deal social programs. These were paltry compared to the police powers given the government during the Cold War and then significantly enhanced after 9/11. Much of contemporary conservatism can be best understood as a reaction to the real or perceived decline of local and regional autonomy. But this is not about states rights. It’s about people controlling their own lives. To determine what their family does, its living standard, with whom individual members know and associate, in what they believe and to what they aspire. This is one of the appeals of Jefferson’s America of family farmers, which still lies just over the river and through the woods at Grandma’s house where the apple pie is cooling on the windowsill within view of the weeping willow and its rope swing.
Localism unifies conservatives in a way no other aspect of conservatism does. It bridges all divides. Localism is the missing link in any explanation of evolution and continuity over the years. It’s the glue that binds rich elites and not-so-rich “populists” into a strong, though not always impermeable, coalition. Localism as a concept also wildly exaggerates the ability of individuals to bring order and meaning to their lives on their own terms in their own neighborhoods, in association with whomever they please. States rights provide a political theory and catch-all phrase linking this traditional structure and hierarchies it generates. It’s the political equivalent of traditional family values.
As Whitaker Chambers’ biographer Sam Tanenhaus explained just a few years ago, conservatives and conservatism have been anxious for some time about the way industrialization altered their America that was “no longer a pastoral land of rural communities and small towns, with their cracker barrel politics, but an urbanized industrial nation with ever-more-complex constituencies – teeming ethnic populations in northern cities, increasingly organized and disciplined labor unions.” That about says it all. [27]
The pervasive fear was that such changes would distort if not destroy the homogeneity necessary for localistic republicanism to shape and maintain the virtuous republic. Ethnic degeneracy was a fear stemming back to the Founders who debated what to do about the Native and slave populations. They opted for the incorporation and containment of African slaves and, if extermination or removal failed, assimilation for the Indians, something even Jefferson favored for a while. A viable republic depended upon virtuous citizens and the removal from the bowels of society of those who might undermine it. To this end, given the holy grail of liberty for men, citizens must also be accorded the right and power to deal with the potential blots on society. The interesting result was the triumph of localism with its penchant to seize land and control, as Jefferson put it, “with the price in one hand and a sword in the other.” at a time when the western world was centralizing violence in the government.[28]
When people feel as though they have lost control of their lives and their hard work has gone down the tubes, they blame the usual suspects: foreign devils, racial, religious and political minorities, free-loaders, do-gooders and reformers. Or, when all else fails, the government, either in the town hall, the state house or Washington, DC. At the same time, those feeling threatened turn to the ideology, person or party or perhaps religious calling most likely to offer an explanation and a solution, whether it be Marxism, Evangelical Christianity, militant Islam or conservatism.
That people, hard-working and therefore virtuous, in their localities had the freedom and the responsibility to fend for themselves was fundamental truth. From there the nation became nothing so much as a community of neighbors, as TR used to point out. From it many things conservative and most things American flowed. And when that ability for independent action flagged, you saw local outrage as varied as the Whiskey Rebellion and the desperate farmers of the Populist Revolt to the chagrined segregationists touting Massive Resistance and the present Tea Party Movement’s “politics of accusatory protest.”[29]
If a government program works or becomes popular (the two are not synonymous), plenty of people who consider themselves conservative will champion it. If the problem persists or if the programs fail or are perceived to have failed, it becomes another big government intrusion. Basically though if conservatives had their druthers, the leviathan would stay out of their affairs regardless of effectiveness. That has to do with the slippery slope. Unfortunately, not all conservatives want government to stay out. Some are willing if not eager to go to great lengths to insure the state can lay a heavy hand on the people if necessary, and we’re not talking about health care. Traditionalists, sometimes called paleo-conservatives these days, expect the government to do whatever it takes to maintain the correct culture. The king of the paleos political pundit, former presidential candidate and Nixon speechwriter, Pat Buchanan decreed thus: “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” To take back our culture, he would use government enforced English language laws, regulate the nationalities, ethnicities and religions of immigrants, and ban abortion and mandate Christian prayer in school and public places by government mandate if necessary. He also opposed the war in Iraq on grounds of national interest, perhaps shocking notion given his stances on anti-communist interventionism, but utterly in keeping with conservatism’s historic strain of strenuous isolationism.
Buchanan’s conservatism dovetails with one of the newer elements of conservatism: the religious right, largely made up of evangelical Christians but also admits orthodox Jews and Roman Catholics. These three were a traditional enemies until cultural concerns brought them together in the 1970s in defense of “traditional family values,” that rested on a patriarchal society that was mostly white and Christian. They also share a reverence for the death penalty and an antagonism towards feminism, abortion, gay rights, environmentalism, all of which they would rein in one way or another.
The same conservatives that rail against ObamaCare, Medicare, and social security and other “socialist” government programs, advocate strong, invasive government power in the name of national security and appear have no problem giving “jack-booted government thugs” (according to the National Rifle Association) the authority to search your house without telling you, charge you with certain crimes, hold you without access to a lawyer, tap your phone and any phone to which you might have access. The National Security Agency alone will admit that the only thing that stands between the government and total loss of privacy is its restraint. Former senator presidential aspirant and Christian conservative Rick Santorum has gone so far as to claim that there is no right to privacy. Why? Because it’s not explicitly stated in the Constitution. Privacy is an implied right, not mentioned until 1928 and not set in law until 1965. For Santorum and his brand of conservatism, it still isn’t. He apparently has no problem with the feds skulking around in your bedroom, especially if you might support abortion rights. A classic case of what George W. Bush labeled big government conservatism, a convenient oxymoron, a far cry from localistic republicanism and further indication of the problems conservatism has run into as it has risen to dominance.
***
[1] Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978), pps. 43, 46, 15, 88 – 89. Clinton Rossiter, “The Giants of American Conservatism,” American Heritage Magazine, October 1955, www.americanheritage.com/print/62117?page=show. Paul Weyrich, speech, 1980. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw, accessed 11/8/2011.
[2] Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p 279.
[3] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot, 7th edition, (Washington, DC, Regnery Publishing, Inc. 1986), 7. Frank Meyer, “What is Conservatism? (1966)” in Debating the American Conservatism Movement: 1945 to the Present, Donald T. Critchlow and Nancy MacLean, eds. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009), 177.
[4] Mansfield quoted in Corey Robin, The Conservative Reaction,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2012, accessed 1/9/12, (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conservative-Mind/130199/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en), 7.
[5] Quoted in Robin, “The Conservative Reaction, 7.
[6] Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” Rationalism in Politics and other Essays, (London: Methuen, 1962), 168-196. Essay downloaded here: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jo52/POS254/oakeshott1.pdf
[7] Jonny Thakkar, “Why Conservatives Should Read Marx,” (http://www.thepointmag.com/archive/why-conservatives-should-read-marx/). Allit, p. 168. Robin, “The Conservative Reaction,” 8.
[8] Meyer, p. 178.
[9] John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 8, 13, 343-344. Allitt, 168.
[10] Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2003).
[11] Unless one wants to conclude the same about 21st century liberalism.
7 Edwards, 20; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959), 7.
[13] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 7- 8.
[14] see Gerald J. Russell, “The Jurisprudence of Russell Kirk,” Modern Age 38: 354-63.
[15] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 7 – 10. Bradley J. Birzer, “The American Cicero: Russell Kirk,” http://www.hillsdale.edu/academics/majors/amstudies/kirk.asp.
[16] Edwards, 42.
[17] Allitt,168. Mickey Edwards, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost – and How It Can Find Its Way Back, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22, 25, 40.
[18] see Milton Freidman essay.
[19] Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 9.
[20] Edwards, 44.
[21] Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), pps. 3,168, later pages. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). p.
[22] Meyer, 177 – 178.
[23] Ransom quoted in “Russell Kirk and the Critics,” Gerald J. Russello, The Intercollegiate Review, Spring/Summer 2003, 5. This was intended as a criticism of Kirk’s theories.
[24] Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative,14; Mickey Edwards, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost – and How It Can Find Its Way Back, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8-9, 31, 12-14.
[25] Edwards, 6-7.
[26] See, David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, “Crashing the Tea Party,” The New York Times, 8/16/11.
[27] Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism, (New York: Random House, 2009), 34.
[28] Ronald Takakai, Iron Cages: Race and Ethnicity in 19th Century America, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), 60.
[29] Tanenhaus, 32.