I spent a year reading a lot of information about conservative principles. I learned a lot and was astonished that conservatives so readily incriminate themselves - though, of course, they don’t see it that way. I think that most of today’s conservatives don’t know a lot about their core principles, and that could include Hannity and Coulter; and perhaps a lot of progressives also aren’t aware of the core conservative principles.

My sources for this essay are primarily the icons of conservative principles: Burke, Kirk, Buckley, Kendall and others. I did look at books by Coulter, Hannity, Bennett and Malkin but found them to primarily be ad hominem assertions which lacked any intellectual credibility.

I present here a much condensed version of what I have learned in hopes that it will profit other people who are interested in debating conservatives at the level of basic principles.

The text ascribed to authors by italicized indentation should not be construed as verbatim quotations. Rather the text is representative of an author’s attitudes and thoughts, culled from his writings. Some are quotations. Many are not.

By their own declaration belief in a transcendental moral order (also called natural law) is the one fundamental conservative belief upon which all other beliefs are based. The Transcendental Moral Order is like the Ten Commandments, a spelling out of how God wants mankind to behave. Here is John Hallowell’s three principles of natural law.

Probably the most common wording of this fundamental believe is the phrase "objective moral order."

The problem for conservatives is to produce a believable account of how men, living in a secular world, can know with some specificity what the actual content of the Moral Code is. Hallowell cited reason as the vehicle by which God’s moral code is perceived. Russell Kirk throws open the window to admit almost any other way of perceiving God’s will.

[Russell Kirk, Heritage Lecture #469]

As you might expect conservatives can’t agree among themselves what God’s will is. Brent Bozell and Frank Meyer, for instance, largely agree that God’s purpose for Western Civilization is to promote Christianity. But they disagree on whether God’s purpose in government is to promote virtue or liberty.

They can’t agree.

It is important to realize that while conservatism can be an attitude or perspective about the world, it is still always about government; government is assumed, even when Libertarians insist that no government is the best way to organize our relationships with one another; government is either the text or the subtext; and for Traditionalist conservatives government as the earthly agent of the objective moral order is always the subject.

A number of influential conservative writers look back to a God-Centered time in the middle ages as a time when Western Civilization was on the right track in following God’s will.

Conservative convictions that Western Man made an error is based on the religious belief that a Transcendental Realm exists and that after the end of days (the end of profane history) the "saved" human beings will live in that realm for eternity.

By labeling some events of history as "error" conservatives seem to have a belief that there was a way that things "ought to have gone or happened," but that "error" occurred instead.

Voegelin believed that trying to make the profane, secular world better was equivalent to man trying to become God. He called this a heresy and dubbed it Gnosticism.

whatever else conservatives may say is their top value their real top value is "order and stability" of the status quo. The second piece is that conservatives are caught between two urges. One urge is to make things better by trying to recapture some past greater morality that has degenerated over the last five hundred to one thousand years. The other urge is to "do nothing," since given the "nature and condition of man" nothing can be done.

The conservatives’ overall problem is that they have an impossible time creating a credible narrative about how the secular world is, how it gets to be the way it is and, not inconsequentially, how the secular world and the Transcendental Realm can interact with each other. Follow one conservative belief to its logical conclusion and it inevitably contradicts another conservative belief.

integrated philosophy but is an amalgam of Libertarianism - which is devoted to capitalism - and Traditionalism, which is devoted to cultural conservatism.

I’ll say it now, and will probably say again, the genius of 21^st century conservatism is its ability to avoid acknowledging how truly incompatible these two pieces are.

The errors that Weaver and Voegelin have in mind include the Reformation, which created the Protestant religion; the Enlightenment, which conservatives credit with wanting to replace God with man; the French Revolution, which emphasized equality over liberty, and; the Welfare State, which conservatives credit with eroding personal responsibility.

Medieval Christianity was Catholic Christianity. Catholicism emphasized certain values, such as authority, order, inequality, hierarchy, duty and obligation. Individualism and thinking for oneself is not a value of Catholicism. The "New Conservatives" refers to those conservatives who became prominent writers about conservative theory following World War Two.

Protestantism was created as a revolt against the authority of Catholicism. Protestantism emphasized that people should think for themselves. Liberty is a Protestant idea.

A snowball rolling downhill would be envious of the accumulating problems of conservative beliefs. The problem of human nature is chief among them.

Medieval Christianity emphasized that mankind inherited Adam and Eve’s sin and, so human nature is intrinsically depraved. M. Stanton Evans captures the tension in this major problem for conservatives.

Conservatives recognize that there are two principles in human nature -

good and evil - and these are in constant conflict. [Dinesh D’Souza]

Libertarians, on the other hand, those who emphasize liberty and the free market have a different view of human nature, as they must.

The reason the conservative outlook has serious problems is that human nature is not

on all fronts. [Tabor Machan]

Conservatives favor small government because they believe that human nature is essentially depraved and that being in government invariably brings out the worst of our depraved human nature. But what conservatives most always ignore is that those same human beings running government also run corporations, churches and families. M. Stanton Evans hits the nail again.

fundamentally evil, how does government become a force of virtue? [M. Stanton Evans]

The same can be asked of corporations, churches and families. Self-interest is not the same as depravity.

Liberty is a secular idea, is, in fact, a Gnostic Heresy. But as time went on conservatives began to assert that liberty is a God-given right that exists independently of man and specifically exists as part of man’s human nature as it exists in nature.

This is convoluted stuff. Conservatives have given human nature an objective existence outside of our secular world. Discovered no more than 300 years ago liberty has become a major conservative principal. How did this happen?

Free market capitalism is what happened and conservatism had to bend so that it wouldn’t break. For free market capitalism requires a different personality and a different set of values than the medieval characteristics of authority, hierarchy and obligation.

So what happens when "sinning man" goes forth to do battle in the competitive market place? Why should we expect any good consequences? Remember, self-interest is still not the same as depravity.

Traditionalists and Libertarians share only two beliefs and that is an antagonism toward strong, centralized government and a shared belief in liberty.

A shared belief in liberty, however, obscures the difference between basic assumptions of the Traditionalists and the Libertarians. The Traditionalists believe in communities of people and values. Libertarians believe that society does not exist; that only individuals are real and important. Libertarians are more likely to see human nature as less threatening than Traditionalists. These differences have occasioned much wrangling between the two sides of conservatism.

Conservatives cannot agree. Libertarians think that liberty is an end in itself.

Though it may not appear so on the surface this is an argument about the role of government [we previously contrasted Meyer and Bozell on that subject]. It’s also about Christianity, salvation and what God wants for man.

Not every conservative is convinced of the value of liberty.

Morality is and must be a prohibitive system, one of the main objects of which is

[James Fitzjames Stephen]

What is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible

combining mind. [Edmund Burke]

Corporations can restrain liberty as well as government. [Willmoore Kendall]

Conservatives are well aware of the contradictions and antagonisms between the various people who could claim the mantle of "conservative."

But one of those on Rothbard’s list above, Frank S. Meyer, an associate editor at William Buckley’s magazine National Review in the 1960s, set himself the task of bringing together the Libertarian and Traditional branches of conservatism. His solution, a formula: Reason Operating Within Tradition. Though Meyer did not wholly support this label, his position came to be known as Fusionism.

In seeking to lay out common ground between Libertarians and Traditionalists Meyer edited a book published in 1964 for which authors from both sides contributed essays. Meyer declared that he had found a consensus in these writings upon which both sides could agree.

Meyer’s declaration of consensus was initially met with a good deal of scorn, but over time Fusionism came to be widely accepted as a true statement about those things that bind diverse individuals’ viewpoints together in conservatism.

But being accepted and being correct are two separate things. Libertarian Murray Rothbard in an insightful essay demonstrates why Meyer’s Fusionism fails.

Modern conservatism is said to have begun with the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France by Irish politician Edmund Burke in 1790. Russell Kirk is his American popularizer. Burke is the source for the idea that the accumulation of "tradition" has been a result of God’s will acting within human history.

of the narrative put forth by today’s Traditionalists. Morality comes from God. Conservatives know morality better than anybody. The family and the church are the primary traditional institutions.

I think Murray Rothbard sticks a fork in the idea that Western Christian traditions are inerrant expressions of God’s moral code.

Friedrich Hayek devised "a third way" to explain how history is driven not by God but by process. Hayek describes his theory of "spontaneous order" as a third alternative in contrast to human design or supernatural design to explain the workings of society.

the world has gotten to be the way it is, so it deserves a lot of scrutiny to see if it has merit. Historian Jerry Z. Muller describes some problems.

Another factor underplayed in Hayek’s theory is that in order for spontaneous market activity to work, freedom from tyrants, kings and religious authorities has to have already been accomplished.

development of order." Things, including a capitalistic economic system, have multiple antecedents which occur in specific times and places. Hayek’s conception of "spontaneous order" just does not capture the reality of the secular world. While he starts out to dismiss a supernatural explanation his spontaneous order is itself an evocation of a supernatural cause, a process, in his case, rather than a deity.

While I rely on the commentary of Libertarian Murray Rothbard to skewer Traditionalism, I think that the Libertarians are on even shakier ground than the Traditionalists. George Will and others point out that human beings do not exist independently of the world in which we live, and the world into which everyone is born comes complete with a culture and society already made, unchosen by us; a culture and society, including level of technology, from which all our choices are presented to us.

English conservative Roger Scruton and Frank Meyer are excellent foils in the argument over whether society or the individual are basic.

Meyer couldn’t agree less.

I’ve made it plain that I agree with Scruton.

The rhetoric advanced by contemporary conservatives is based on the doctrine of Individualism. Their rhetoric lauds personal responsibility and disparages collectivism. It is a collection of untruths and distortions which I shall do my best to puncture.

Individualism asserts that the individual does everything for himself and is responsible for everything which happens to him and this results in the best of all possible worlds.

actions. [Clarence Thomas]

That is the dominant conservative rhetoric; but conservatives also believe in another theory that concerns the consequences of an individual’s activities when considered as part of millions of decisions and activities by millions of individuals.

his actions might be for society when mixed with millions of other actions.

The typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude and misery. [Milton Friedman]

conservatives. But conservatives are schizophrenic. Side by side with the pessimism is a series of optimistic beliefs which I’ll return to later, but for now I’d like to look at the questions raised by the above statements.

Sowell explains what he means by the tragedy of the human condition.

physical geography of the earth, the dispersal of people around the globe, the diversity of human beings, the uneven distribution of wealth in countries, the immutability of human nature, the equality of men’s souls and the presence of good and evil in the world.

for human beings for one reason or another; a sense that nothing could be done to alter the way things are; and, also, that nothing should be done to alter the human condition.

Inequality and poverty, as Jaffa says, are to be accepted by the wise conservative as just the way things are. Liberals, conservatives say, are naïve in believing that human beings can and should lessen inequality and poverty.

poverty and inequality - are the natural human condition, just the way of the world. Liberal attempts to ameliorate such conditions usually result in making conditions worse than before.

By asserting that human society is naturally organic and hierarchical he points to an often unrecognized conservative principle: that order and stability are the most important considerations for conservatives, more important than anything, including liberty, justice or virtue.

Probably most conservatives will tell you that they are not against change per se. What they are against is rapid and unpredictable change. "Organic" is a word they use a lot to describe how society or culture is supposed to operate.

themselves in unhappy conditions. Many people would say that the unhappy conditions are not of these people’s making, but conservatives would probably not be among them.

At what age do conservatives start blaming the children for being abused? I’m not being mean. Conservatives have two conflicting theories about social cause: one theory is that the individual is responsible for everything that happens to him; the other theory is that systemic processes - Sowell’s language - is responsible for social structure.

Conservatives hold adults responsible for what happens to them. When does a child reach that age? It’s a fair question.

I ask the same questions again. Was it systemic processes that created the discrimination against women or was it their individual lack of character which resulted in women getting their just deserts? Men made the laws that discriminated against women. Do conservatives view that as "just the way the world is" and counsel one another that "nothing can or should be done?"

Character? Systemic processes? Just the way the world is?

In the Burkean world God is responsible for the way the world is, which includes assigning an individual to poverty or discrimination.

I suspect most people today wouldn’t subscribe to that stark an explanation. Yet there is the question of how one country ends up with no outlets to the ocean; how one country ends up with great mineral wealth and another does not; how one country ends up a third world country and another ends up a leader in industry and science; how one country ends up poor and another country ends up rich beyond imagination.

It just happened. That’s just the way the world is. Resources are distributed unevenly. Individual talent and intelligence is distributed unevenly among people. Some people are born with healthy bodies, some are born deformed. That’s just the way the world is.

I asked this question once of a conservative: If character is the determining factor of a person’s success, do you mean to tell me that all the poor people in the world, all the poor in the third world are poor because they have bad character? He said no. He realized there were exogenous reasons for poverty in other countries. It is in the United States, with our humming free-market system, that anybody can achieve anything they want and that the only explanation for remaining poor in the United States is that the individual chooses to have poor character. I kid you not, but then I know you’ve heard this same rhetoric millions of times yourself.

Charles Murray has written about the deserving poor and the undeserving poor in the United States. [This is language which was also applied to the poor during the Dickensian era in England]. Murray detects a difference in morality between the deserving poor and undeserving poor.

Conservatives have created an improbable theory about the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States. The theory is that the free-market is perfectly sensitive to character and will produce results accordingly. The free-market will respond to people with good character by making them successful. It will respond to people with bad character by making them failures. Conservatives invented the term "just deserts," meaning that everyone gets exactly what they deserve according to the goodness or badness of their character.

Among the human conditions that conservatives want to do nothing about is the current status quo, current being defined as any day that the conservative is thinking about it.

Conservatives don’t care how the status quo is caused. They figure that in some way it is inevitable. But while some degree and distribution of wealth and power are inherent in the nature of things, liberals argue that a specific distribution of wealth and power is not inevitable. We can form an intent to make a change. And this is where liberals part company with conservatives: at the beginning. Liberals choose to form an intent to change the status quo: we will choose to try to change slavery and discrimination and to alleviate poverty through planning and purposeful actions. Conservatives believe that either mysterious processes or bad character are responsible for unhappy conditions and are willing to let the same causes keep on working without interference.

This is a choice based on a preference because there are other possible choices. Conservatives seem to feel that - as Frank Meyer makes clear - that individuals are the only thing that matters; that conservatives are not connected to the larger society - which, again, Meyer says does not exist - through any reciprocity or responsibility. As George Will notes:

morality.

from taking any moral responsibilities for conditions in their own society.

What relationship did conservatives imagine they had to the immigrant children in the New York tenements in 1890; or white people to black people during our whole history as a country; or men to women all during the time that "the rule of law" discriminated against women? Or the relationship of straights to gays today?

As far as I can tell Individualism imagines only one relationship; and that is the relationship of one individual to one other individual while they are involved in one voluntary exchange transaction. The relationships imagined between members of a family or church or voluntary little associations are part of the Traditionalist heritage, not Individualism’s.

If individualists would be supportive of an improvement in income or equality of the immigrants, blacks and women at those times and in those places their support is restricted to the mysterious process that occurs when all the individual transactions aggregate. Their support is contingent on their idea of how the world gets to be the way it is.

conservative outlook about trying to change things for the better.

Efforts to improve things often make them worse. [J.W. Forrester]

Conservatives have two thoughts about liberty. One is that it is part of human nature as it exists in nature and the other is that liberty is a "right" given to humans by God [or is part of the Objective Moral Order]. So, liberty is either part of the "natural law" or a "natural right."

A third theory, after natural right or natural law is that liberty is a consequence of history. Here’s the historical explanation for liberty.

in different times and places and has evolved not as a whole but in pieces. Milton Friedman corroborates the idea that liberty is a relatively new occurrence on the human scene.

This explanation is in direct conflict with the natural law and natural rights theories of liberty which place liberty’s origin within an Objective Reality outside of human history.

There is a confusion among conservatives about what is cause and what is effect regarding liberty and another confusion about the need for human action in the creation of liberty.

For it took action by men to create liberty. It took a civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation, an amendment to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and much more to create greater, though not yet equal, liberty for Negroes; and to win greater liberty for women it took agitation, an amendment to the constitution, a feminist movement and much more.

Conservatives have created and embraced - so it’s not just Libertarians - an elaborate and tortuous narrative about the place and importance of liberty in American society. But remember, though they try to impress you that liberty is their highest value, their highest value is actually "order and stability," i.e., maintenance of the status quo.

I’ll use "freedom" and "liberty" as being synonymous. Conservatives pepper their speeches with acclaim for the United States because we are free or have liberty. It’s about two things: being able to choose from a lot of options and being free from coercion concerning our choices, usually free from government coercion.

Conservatives typically derive liberty as a right from God, emanating from the Objective Reality.

Conservatives contend that political and economic liberty go together; in fact, that economic liberty assures political liberty.

The assertions that conservatives make about the evils of big government and collectivism play a big part in their thinking about liberty, so we need to know what it is they say. We have a couple of contrasting beliefs right off the bat.

The State is our enemy. [Frank Chodorov]

raise a host of questions and I won’t have the space to deal with them all here. The big problem is that conservatives lump all governments together, ignoring time, place and history. Another problem is that they pick a few examples of governments, such as Nazism, and generalize. And another problem is that Individualism, which recognizes only the individual and rejects the notion that society even exists, has a difficult time reconciling itself to the very existence of any government. Then there is the problem of human nature. Our evil and depraved human nature seems to be the source of the basic skepticism that conservatives have about government.

There it is. The basic conservative concern and the reason for the genesis of the elaborate and convoluted dance with modernism, the free-market and government. A common refrain among conservatives, based on this assessment of man’s nature, is that:

Government should be structured so that bad men can do the least harm.

Stanton and other conservatives tie together freedom, the free-market, man’s nature and limited government in one nice package. Freedom is based on mistrust of human nature.

includes in its definition the admonition that the coercion of one person by another is justified only to prevent that person from harming someone else.

referred to as "the police power of the State." And yet it is thought by conservatives that government is the greatest threat to the coercion of the individual.

Contemporary conservatives, for instance, see nothing wrong with using the police power of The State to enforce their views on morality, including a prohibition against abortion and gay marriage.

Timing is everything. Things generally happen in tandem, though not necessarily at the same time and in the same degree. So it is that the accumulation of economic and social power in the United States preceded the development of government. The government that was created reflected the priorities of those already with power and the police power of government was exercised in conformance with their interests.

Conservatives assert that there exists an "American Tradition," which all citizens have some obligation to follow. What actually exists is a tradition from which many Americans were excluded in the forming. The poor in America at its founding were one such group.

Conservatives warn of dire consequences in the loss of liberty if a nation creates a Welfare State. Liberty is a preference of conservatives and is not, as they try to convince us, a mandate from God.

The United States has adopted social security and Medicare and Medicaid - two socialist programs - and most of our citizens are quite happy to give up some liberty - if that is the case - in exchange for these social programs. Most Americans feel that conservatives’ dire predictions have not come to pass. "The very shape of our existence" may have changed, but most Americans believe it has changed for the better.

At no time in my reading of conservative literature have I seen support for policies that will enable American citizens to choose policies that will purposely lead to a better life for them as they perceive it. Conservatives always emphasize that their highest value is individual choice no matter what the consequences.

The dire warnings that conservatives make about the Welfare State have the intention of taking away from individuals the opportunity to choose Social Security and other social programs. It tells us that Individualists are not really in favor of choice, but only in favor of choices of which they approve. Ultimately conservatives end up claiming that they know what’s best for everybody.

Conservatives would have you believe that you are a traitor to America is you have even the slightest bit of skepticism about a mysterious process for which no one can take responsibility.

When conservatives advocate the creation of a system in which "bad men can do the least harm." it is assumed that conservatives are speaking of the potential evils of men who have the reins of government, but to be consistent the free-market ought to be viewed with the same "mistrust of human nature" as it is in government. This is not the case.

20^th century. Traditionalists believe that morality should be a check on the potential evils that bad men can do in the free market. Neo-conservative Irving Kristol points out that Adam Smith assumed that morality would hold potential evil in check, but Kristol believes that the modern free-market has become a system that is indifferent to the morality of the individual.

Friedman and the Libertarians have a couple of problems. One is that most people have really strong constraints about their voluntary choices. Power and money make some people more equal than others.

The other problem is that people come with values already determined if they are adults. They come with already determined economic and social status. Friedman’s view of the free-market is that every individual is interchangeable with every other individual.

Free-market theory also contains a number of assumptions which are just not true. It ignores differences in social and economic power among individuals and assumes that power is distributed in a democratic way across the population. It also assumes that it’s very birth was instantaneous and disconnected from government and the rest of society’s institutions. Not true.

You may remember that people like Hallowell and Rothbard are skeptical that the processes of history which produce institutions and traditions [the Burkean and utilitarian models] produce only good traditions. And given the presumed evil and depraved nature of man it would seem a good bet that man would produce evil institutions even more frequently that good institutions.

Hayek and Friedman have presented us with a theory which says that the interactions between individuals in the Market nullify the inherent evil in each individual and in some mysterious way midwife only good consequences. Hayek even describes his system as a "third way," which doesn’t rely on supernatural causes. I think Hayek doesn’t recognize the supernatural when he sees it.

Conservatives tie freedom to this model of process in a free-market and extend it to society as a whole, the "spontaneously emerging social order" Buckley and Kesler cite.

conservatives about freedom and the free-market and let Burke have the last word here.

Conservatives don’t believe in total or unrestrained liberty. So, when they tell you about liberty they are lying, at least by omission. Conservatives see boundaries on liberty.

Some form of constraint is necessary to let men live together. [M. Stanton Evans]

Conservatives assume a status quo when they talk about liberty, an American Tradition upon which citizens agree. A society has a right to defend itself from those who would overturn its basic principles.

against the desires of other American citizens for a better life.

I’ve been trying to show that conservatives’ condemnation of The Welfare State is basically a preference for a status quo which has at one time or another serially marginalized blacks, poor people, workers, immigrants, women, gays and anybody else you can name who might threaten the status quo. At any given time there is only so much material and social power to be distributed and in order to give anything more to those on the lower end of the power scale the haves would have to give some of their stuff to the have-nots. That, they emphatically have not wanted to do. So they have concocted a scheme whereby the have-nots can only improve their lives if our economy grows. The have-nots must earn their better life through hard work in the free-market. Rather than any noble dedication to liberty this is simply a con job designed to preserve the status quo.

To those with the tragic vision the fundamental question is: Who is to choose? [Thomas

Sowell

Sowell correctly states that there is never enough to go around and that making one group better off usually makes another group less well off. [His analysis of spontaneous order is ill conceived as I have discussed]. Trade-offs must be made, Sowell continues, and somebody must choose the ground rules for how the trade-offs will be made.

And Milton Friedman does acknowledge the positive role of government in our society.

Hayek, Sowell and Friedman all begin their theories at a point in time or in their minds when the marginalized have already been marginalized: they are already slaves or already poor. They never got a seat at the table. They got lost, became a given in the vague and unspecified "inherent nature of things."

George Will seems to come closest to getting it, but doesn’t get it.

If I understand Will’s last sentence correctly he is reflecting the oft heard claim that America is a success because "the poor don’t want to overthrow the rich, they want to become rich." They have bought into the free-market paradigm.

What I question about Will’s statement is who determines what the desirable social ends are. I have the same problem with the passage from Hayek.

Again, who determines what is socially beneficial and how? If we had included slaves and women in determining our social aims we might today live in a somewhat different society.

It would be a lengthy catalog that listed all the conservative misrepresentations about the way the world is and works. I’ll just recap with a few of the most pervasive.

In 1961 William F. Buckley wrote a comment in National Review rejecting Pope John XXIII’s encyclical which supports liberal social policies. If Buckley and the Pope can’t agree, who can?

This demonstrates one of the primary flaws of conservatism. Individually conservatives tell us that they know the mind of God, but collectively they cannot agree. An Objective Moral Order may exist but conservatives don’t know what it says.

There is a contradiction between the conservative views that human nature is immutable and that morality - presumably a part of human nature - degenerated somewhere between the 9^th and the 20^th century. If morality can degenerate it can also improve, which means that human nature is not immutable. This is a contradiction between two basic conservative principles.

This is an example of the conservative preference for simple, single causation for all conditions and events. The Biological Model of causation says that conditions and events are caused by complex, interacting antecedents and I believe this is the way the world really works.

Conservatives do postulate the existence of a mysterious process that has numerous individual exchanges. But they do not imagine that the process has complex interactions which may have negative consequences for anyone. They believe that whatever happens is inerrently

justified and this is another example of their preference for simple causation.

Conservatives’ view of human nature fits the same pattern. I prefer a more flexible and malleable view of human nature that is open to learning, growth, change. Those attributes of human nature are absent from the conservative perspective.

Preference For Abstract, "Un-Moored" Principle

Conservatives’ Individualism is disconnected from any specific time and place and, hence, applies to nothing. This preference for principle allows conservatives to imagine that the United States in the 21^st century is no different than Germany in the 1930s. It also allows conservatives to ignore just about any historical condition that doesn’t neatly fit into their scheme. We don’t hear a word of events such as industrialization or urbanization as being important causes in how the world got to be the way it is. This preference for principle does allow them to embrace their single cause theories and to ignore the fact that people and societies learn, develop and grow.

God, Personal Responsibility, Mysterious Processes, Just Deserts and Competition.

Conservatives cite each one of the above, during different discussions, as cause, single cause, but cause. No doubt an agile conservative mind can make this all work out, but it’s going to be hard and include a lot of sophistry. They are in contradiction to one another.

My primary sources were two anthologies: Keeping The Tablets, by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Charles R. Kesler; and The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash. Two websites were also very useful: The American Conservative Union website and The Intellectual Conservative website.