Republicans need to embrace America’s conservative roots which made her great in the first place
Here’s a question for ya. Why do REPUBLICANS need to embrace conservatism? Why do I say that? Shouldn’t DEMOCRATS also embrace conservatism? Shouldn’t Martians, tall people, and people who love horses also embrace conservatism (that’s for you, C)?
In point of fact, yes. EVERYBODY should embrace conservatism. But we are Republicans, and operating the political machinery of the nation to benefit the nation is our business. We’re smart, realistic, handsome (or beautiful), we shop at Home Depot, and we love America better than we love political power. The Dems can say those things too, but they are lying when they do so. So let’s start with us, and we’ll get to the others as time allows.
Follow me to school...
Today we continue the ongoing series outlining the true principles of conservatism. We Republicans desperately need to steer the Party back to conservative principles. Why? First, because America is great, and we want it to stay great and become MORE great; second, because the Washington DC version of the GOP has become nothing more special than Democrat-Lite, with no prospects of change ahead; and finally and more importantly, because EVERYTHING great about America – the greatest nation in the history of the world – has its roots in conservative principles. That is a fact, and that is beyond debate – although if you want to dispute that, hey, take your best shot. Let me say once again, I like the way that sounds: everything great about America has its roots in conservative principles.
What exactly IS conservatism?
First, let’s get this said. Words MEAN things. While the exact boundaries of conservatism may be a little fuzzy, it is NOT an elastic, evolving, “living, breathing” thing that adapts to fit peoples’ tastes and whims. It is ALSO not some unattainable, esoteric standard that nobody can possibly meet. That is a load of crap. It is an ignorant, self-serving copout that allows squishes and their shills to play the “me too” card. I can say authoritatively that conservatism, as defined, is FULLY embodied in your average Texan (who does not live in Dallas, Austin, or Houston), and average rural American anywhere. It is fully, 100% embodied in Jeb Hensarling, Coburn, Flake, DeMint, and a minimum 20 others in Congress. It is NOT fully embodied in a great many OTHERS of our esteemed elected Republicans.
Conservatism as a term is much bandied about, and its meaning seems murky, hard to pin down. Of course, to lefty commie Democrats (I repeat myself) and their Treason Press toadies, it means: starving children and elderly people, imposing Christianity on everybody, commandeering women’s bodies, taxing the poor to give to the rich, invading those perfectly happy Iraqis and stealing their oil, polluting, raising global temperatures, driving SUVs just to run over Priuses, taking jobs away from blacks and giving them to Christians (but what about black Christians?), ruining pristine Alaskan paradises with those unsightly oil rigs, and pissing off terrorists and Bill Belichick. But we knew that was slightly off. After all the Treason Media says it, so it is therefore a lie.
OK, I’m back (I do that, hey shoot me). Conservatism is a set of interrelated guiding principles that involve the way a free, self-governing nation should do its thing. I summarized the core principles the other day, crudely as these: traditional moral values that include moral absolutes, traditional family values, law & order, primacy of personal property and basic freedoms, personal responsibility and accountability, recognition that humans are both noble and utterly untrustworthy, and the humble recognition that as a good rule of thumb, that government which governs least, governs best.
Why study conservatism anyway?
You’re kidding, right? Why does a young prospective preacher go to seminary? After all, the Bible is all there, what do you need all that extra learning for anyway? Savvy? We study our craft to understand its roots, its basics, its effects, to become more closely in tune with it, to benefit from the wisdom of those who have spent lifetimes studying it, and most of all, to equip us all to forcefully and ably defend it, teach it, and hold our elected officials (and candidates) to accountability to it, in a world that is hostile to it.
Let’s Get Started
As we study specifically the Ten Conservative Principles as outlined by Russell Kirk, who built on the writings of Edmund Burke -- and which express themselves aptly in the writings, acts, and deeds of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and in this generation, the great Fred Thompson – you’ll start to see what I mean.
So with no further adieu, let’s get started with Conservative School: Books out kids, the text is found at the Kirk Center.
Conservative Principle 1:
Did you ever wonder how adherence to the rule of law came to be a conservative position? Or pro-life, or building the fence, fierce opposition to judges who “legislate from the bench”? How did SoCon and MilCon get to be 2 of the 3 legs on the conservatism stool? Family values (whatever that means), capital punishment, getting tough on crime? And how did evangelical Christians (in the main) come to be associated with conservatism, in that the term ‘social conservative’ has become the Democrat code hate word for Christian? Before anybody goes yelping at this point that many or all of these are debatable as to whether they represent legitimately conservative views, I ask you to read on, then we’ll discuss. Quoth Kirk:
First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.
Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.
It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.
Wow. Grand. Humble. Indicting. Can you honestly wonder why I love Kirk so much?
A moral compass. Absolutes. Some things are always right, and some things are always wrong. Obeisance to a higher authority – whether that higher authority is the One High God Jehovah, or whether to enduring moral principles of right and wrong, not especially attached to a deity. Hah, just try and sell ANY of THAT on the Dem side of the aisle.
Further down Kirk’s list we get to personal freedom, but THAT is not where conservatism begins. It starts with personal responsibility, personal truth, what I call the contract of civilization. Consider this: if the most high principle were personal freedom, then the first directive of society would be to ‘do whatever you want’. A purely and completely free society would last about 8 milliseconds, instantly devolving into the worst kind of chaos. There would be no order, therefore no safety, and very soon no freedom, because the criminal element would instantly use their freedom to deny you YOUR rights to life and liberty. We could spend all day giving obvious examples of how this would play out disastrously. Let’s not – let’s simply acknowledge an astoundingly obvious point -- society MUST begin with responsibility, with obedience to right and wrong, and with obedience to authority.
What are the spinoffs, the resulting principles (penumbras? I kid) emanating from acknowledgment of an enduring moral order? Let’s reel off a few, and they’ll sound familiar:
-- I, as a citizen, have responsibilities. My freedoms are not unlimited. I am responsible to obey the laws of the land. I am responsible to limit my own freedoms so that they don’t encroach on the freedoms of others. This rules out murder, rape, and theft (to name a few obvious ones) as exercises of my personal freedom. Liberty is not license.
-- In the same way, the GOVERNMENT has responsibilities. It has the responsibility to enact and enforce laws and institutions that respect and enhance the freedoms of all citizens (as well as aliens) and enforce adherence by citizens (and aliens) to the basic contract of civilization.
-- This leads unerringly, DIRECTLY to the Rule of Law. What laws have been passed must be enforced, and must operate in practice as the law of the land. Institutions operating under the banner of government MUST not be allowed to ignore the body of law, or to spin its OWN law (think judiciary, think bureaucracies, think the Congress itself). Follow this to its root, and in the United States we find that the MOST fundamental law of the land is the United States Constitution, as amended. It is sacrosanct. It MUST not ever be usurped, for it is the founding contract. Just as a legally created contract between two parties, once agreed to and signed, must not be re-written by one party to change the terms, absent the approval of the other party, so must the Constitution NOT be amended other than by the terms defined IN the Constitution.
-- The Constitution establishes the provisions by which it can be amended. It is a firm, self-contained contract. Because adherence to the Rule of Law is sacrosanct to conservatism, THIS is why conservatives find judicial activism, and the so-called living constitution, so morally repugnant. Oligarchs who use their position on the bench to usurp the Constitution and the statutes issued by the Congress, these people are violators of the rule of law, and violators of any moral code. These are vile people. No less vile are those in the Congress and the White House who practice the same thing. For example, the filibuster of judicial nominees, allowing a minority in the Senate to deny consent DIRECTLY subverts the text and meaning of the Constitution, and it is vile. People who do it are vile. People who in a position to stop it and don’t do so are useful idiots.
-- Note that while conservatives rail against judicial activism committed by leftists, they EQUALLY reject judicial activism operating on behalf of ostensibly conservative causes. To just state an oft-painted scenario by leftists, I hereby call out and reject those who would call on the judiciary to usurp the Constitution in order to illegally legislate Christianity as the state religion. Yes, yes, I know, few if any on the Christian right are actually agitating for that, but we sure get accused of it.
The adherence to the rule of law has other direct spinoffs:
-- Building the fence. Why is building a border fence a conservative idea? Oh, and by the way HERE AND NOW I assert that it is. Commence railing as you wish, but let me save you some time and agony, by establishing the terms of such an argument: this is NOT an argument about (a) whether it is ‘right or wrong’ to build the fence [by engaging this, you pre-suppose that right and wrong exist, THEREBY conceding a moral order before you start – MAN, I love me], nor (b) whether it is ‘legal or illegal’ to build the fence [Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which makes it the law. If you wish to argue legality, I see no other possible tack than to argue that it’s unconstitutional to establish and enforce sovereign boundaries – and good luck with that], but rather THIS is the debate front, (3) whether building the border fence is a CONSERVATIVE idea. Your sources are (a) the writings of Edmund Burke, (b) the writings of Alexander Hamilton, (c) The US Constitution as amended, (d) the Declaration of Independence, (e) the Federalist Papers, (f) the writings of Russell Kirk, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. That’s it, no other original sources are acceptable in a claim of conservatism.
Here’s why building the border fence is a conservative idea. Conservatism teaches adherence to the law; more importantly to this issue, it teaches ORDER. Sovereign borders and citizenship are part of national sovereignty. A wide open border that is being actively invaded by what has to be a million illegal aliens per year constitutes a huge threat – order breaks down, it becomes increasingly pointless as a citizen to obey the law when so many others ignore the law (including all the citizens who support and encourage illegal immigration by hiring illegals or benefiting from the attendant underground economy)
Adherence to the rule of law means rejection of legal shuck and jive, semi-legal endruns, rejection of seeking legal loop-holes to subvert the plain meaning of laws, appeals not to enforce properly enacted laws, the use of Senate rules to subvert the plain meaning of the Constitution.
Further, and this is important, it means standing up to those who do so. Conservatism calls for courage. The forces of tyranny, of creeping government encroachment on personal property and rights (:ahem: AGW Nazis, for example), of nanny-statism, of judicial activism, of cracen political power – they will never rest. Comity is nothing but cowardice if that’s one’s excuse for allowing, unchallenged, these forces to run amok.
If you are an elected official and believe these principles, then either fight for them or get your dumb ass out of the way so somebody else can. If you are a regular citizen and believe in these principles, then insist that your representatives (and candidates) embrace these principles. When you MUST, work for the best of bad options, but NEVER give up in the long game. If a Republican won’t play, primary him.
Let's discuss
All right, now. I’m a student just like you all. I’ve tossed out some thoughts on border security, and some on judicial activism, as they relate to Kirk’s first conservative principle – enduring moral order.
Discuss these, and/or the other things I’ve suggested -- pro-life, family values, capital punishment, being tough on crime, and so on. Or bring up anything you want to that has some bearing on “enduring moral order”.
Tata! Don't feel like you can't read ahead. Next up – Fredheadedness 3 – Adherence to Custom, Convention, and Continuity – aka, why rush to change society?
