Redstate

Thanks for the time and effort that clearly went into this. I'll try to offer up some thoughts to bat around tomorrow.

and I tend to more closely associate my meaning of a Principled Conservative with Thomas Hobbes. I have read The Leviathan previously, at your suggestion, and I still hold it to be the most definitive piece on conservative principles I have yet to read.

As for categories, I agree with you, those 3 seem to be most appropriate, our conservative fore fathers certainly subscribed to all 3, they were spiritually, physically and fiscally conservative beyond almost anything we see today.

Good job man, thanks for the work. I for one, appreciate it.

Managing Editor

Founder and contributor to The Minority Report and Senior writer for The Hinzsight Report

be the old textbook definition of resistance to change, Conservative is a name we call ourselves. But in a socialist world we must be for change.

I would say that for me conservative principles are very simple.

1. Clearly defined limits to government power.
2. Tolerance for others, not necessarily acceptance
3. A personal lifestyle which is modest and adds rather than subtracts from the community
4. A philosophy which promotes human progress and betterment not through the action of a few elites but through commerce, industry and science among the people.
5. A strong antagonism to all of those who would set themselves up as rulers. Political careerists, academic elites, pettifogging bureaucrats, wealthy politicaly minded businessmen, entertainment personalities etc.

At least that is why I have always called myself a conservative.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

Are conservatives more traditionalist or progressive? I can’t tell from anything posted in your essay, or in response to it yet. Should we simply ignore such distinctions when defining conservatism? For myself, I sense a continuing struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and now I suppose for what its means to be conservative, between those I would describe as being more libertarian or liberal in the classic sense, and those who I will call traditionalist. Each of these factions seems to want to ignore the other like an embarrassing relative they’d rather pretend didn’t exist. Is there room for both in any description of principled conservatism? Is it not relevant to the discussion at hand, or am I simply opening a can of white elephant that should remain hidden at the back of the cupboard?

Kirk is often a good place to start. Here are his ten principles:

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

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Kevin Holtsberry
www.kevinholtsberry.com

Whatever you may think of him, Andrew Sullivan sheds considerable light on the topic you raise in his book The Conservative Soul. I have read it. I think it does an excellent job of uncovering the fundamentals of conservatism (which he summarizes today, in response to Glenn Greenwald's review of his book, as "small government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, strong defense").

Let me be clear, I do not agree with every point made by Sullivan - I am especially at odds with him on the issue of abortion (where he argues for a consensus that it be allowed to occur in the earliest weeks after conception) - but I must say that, IMO, overall, he has built an impressively sturdy intellectual and philosophical framework for conservatism. It certainly withstood most of my scrutiny.

I would only add individualism. Not a subject Kirk stressed but implicit in his life, work, and choice of conservative figures.
Any man who could write "The Conservative Mind" back in 1953 and go against the collectivist tide, who could pick Mecosta as his home and refuge, and who could wear cape, cane, and wide brimmed hat, valued the sometimes lonely and thoughtful self. The person apart from the crowd, the vagaries and follies of his age, and the thoughtless and rootless whims and fancies of his time.

Prudence, Order, the Past, Community, and Individualism are bedrocks of conservatism. They mesh or vary according to the challenges faced by the principled conservative. They don't lend themselves to packaging in a neat bundle, not being an ideology, but rather a disposition both personal and founded in the lessons of history and experience. And, I might add, the person's sense and need of freedom.

Quick and easy answers are the provence of the restless and rootless mind, unwilling to wait, unwilling to test carefully and with caution. To them has freedom become the sensual and history a bad memory which stands only to be criticized and corrected. Prudence has been unseated and replaced by Ego and Vanity, it's tool or weapon government, it's goals uniformity,standardization, and inescapably, coercion.

As with Isaiah's Remnant, conservatism, man's fealty to enduring values, will remain. Battered at times but surviving.

"Build oneself a fortress within one's impregnable mind". Antisthenes

"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville

There is a reason Orwell's Ministry of Truth was focused on reconstituting the language. Socialists/Marxists/Statists (SMS's) understand that reason: Deprive people of the language to accurately describe something and you deprive them of the ability to think about it. These SMS's work that principle at all times and in your attempt to set out the problem, the extent to which they have succeeded is clearly evident. You use a Marxists definition of Conservative as "someone who resists change" and use Hegelian/proto-Marxists term "ideology" in an attempt to define something which conservatives themselves deem to be explicitly NOT and ideology.

While I'm not done reading and thinking about the previous postings defining and discussing 'Reactionary' I think most of the items there do accurately describe the things I think of when I use the phrase conservative. They have at least one significant benefit in that they do not attempt to use the negatively connotated words our adversaries (enemies?) use to describe what we advocate.

As I have posted elsewhere, I think of conservatism not as an ideology, but a methodology of thinking about things so that we can make judgements about what is best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. It involves learning of history so that we know what has come before and can try to tease our for ourselves some of the consequences of previous actions so we better know what actions to take ourselves. It involves studying the nature of man so that we can evaluate how other people who are not our clones might react to our propositions and assertions. It involves studying science so that we better understand the world around us. And it involves studying relogion so that we can learn moral goods, because it is the nature of man that not all of us know what moral goods are or why they are good. Learning these things helps us synthesize hypothesis on which to move forward or take actions. Each new action leads to new information which feeds back into the matrix of analysis. As such it never is an ideology because you can never define the logic underlying it, only the process of arriving at the hypothesis. Ideology by definition lies out a logical construct to which all things are fitted. If something does not fit one either has the choice of beating on the offending observation until it either conforms to logic structure, or abandoning the logic structure. Ideology is by definition static, conservatism is dynamic. The one must alway die, the other may grow if it is well tended.

I see that you mean to walk on the path of growth by the way you have approached the wording of your questions. But we must seek to define and promote our own language about what we think, because only when we successfully promote that language over the constricting language of the SMS's will we be able to communicate what we seek to those who are not already conservatives.

I think it’s useful to make a distinction between political philosophy and what might be termed “applied politics”. The former concerns itself with first principles, the latter with accomplishing results in the real world. There is some degree of overlap between the two but it’s not as large as many of us would like to think.

Assembling a ruling coalition in American politics requires gathering support from people who very likely work from different first principles. The FDR coalition combined northern blacks and segregationist whites, joined together to deal with a common problem, the Depression.

These coalitions are prone to start falling apart once the conditions which called them into existence disappear. Has the Reagan coalition outlived its time? I’d say it has not, although arguments can be made either way. Reading the Reagan speech linked to by haystack I was struck by how much of it is still applicable today. Which is another way of saying that the Reagan coalition still has not accomplished what it set out to do. Why it has not done so, and whether it can do so, is perhaps a subject for another series of threads.

Applied politics concerns itself with assembling sufficient political power for action. If I have a goal of, say, dumping the UN into the East River, all I care about is that 51% of the people agree with me. Whether they do so from neocon, paleocon, theocon, or even Marxist principles is not important. This kind of indifference to motive is one of the cornerstones of classical liberalism, in the true sense of that badly abused term.

That being the case, its ironic that the people in our society who obsess the most about the purity of other peoples motives describe themselves as liberals, and often as classical liberals.

I think the endlessly talked about “split” between “social conservatives” and “libertarians” is stupid and counter-productive. The dominant force in the Republican party today has a poor opinion of both of these groups, to whatever extent they can even be considered separate.

The relationship between conservatives and the GOP today has reverted back to what it was in the pre-Reagan era. We are on the outside looking in, and if we want to take control of the party it will take some effort. It will also require some unity, little of which is evident in conservative circles these days. The Rockefeller Republicans rule at present. What are we going to do about it? If present trends hold we are going to nominate another one for president in 2008.