Daniel Larison strikes a chord that rings true in our current circumstance. By current circumstance I mean the paradigm where conservative and liberal, perverted and moral, old and new are all interwoven into a patch quilt pattern; the end result being an amalgamation that ultimately tramples the old and the moral.
Pat Buchanan proclaimed in 1992 that a cultural war was being waged. Few understood that war was for home, hearth, kirk and kin. The slogan has been revived to describe all sorts of superficial conservative issues but no political leader with the ability to wage this war has identified truly what we are fighting for or what we are fighting against.
It is easy enough to identify and label many anti-conservatives. I use that term in the most negative of possible connotations. A person that refuses to cling to that which tradition, family and history have provided is a fool. How else can we describe such a person? How can a person truly believe in anything that is so new that it dispatches with all that came before? On a very fundamental level this one principle bespeaks of all that is wrong with the notion of humanism that sprang from the Enlightenment. The notion that man today can know more and see the world clearer in all cases that all of our forbears is just as silly as a teenager believing they always know better than their parents.
Anti-conservatives that are easy to spot and can be identified by their dedication to the Democratic Party, their disregard of traditional values and their fascination with "personal" freedom on moral issues -guaranteed and protected by a centralized government. (These are not the only anti-conservatives - the GOP has plenty too, they are just a little harder to spot unless you know what to look for.)
Of course real conservatives are all for personal freedom on moral issues as well - most of us believe if you want to be a pervert you are free to do so but the government has no business or right protecting you. In a truly conservative world most social malcontents would have a hard time finding a place to live in most towns. Malcontents should be free to do their thing, and regular folks should be free to refuse them rent, jobs etc. Real conservatives do not need government to protect their traditions and values; we just need government to stay out of the way.
Evangelicals lost sight of this a long time ago in the United States. They pinned their hopes and dreams on national leadership, combined resources and active participation in the political process. If their efforts were founded in a political philosophy they may have succeeded. Instead they put themselves into the bed of an existing ideology; without the anchor and foundation of a political philosophy they lost their way and have been continually confused with the definition of conservative.
James Wilson recently posted a simple quiz that provides two possible "conservative" solutions to various issues. Of course real conservatism is not issue-based, rather it is principle based, but this post highlights how "do-gooder conservatives" so easily get it wrong. You see on that quiz many "Christian" hot button issues - it is on these issues and the reliance on the Federal Government that the evangelicals went astray.
One might get the impression that I am against what evangelicals believe at the core; after all, I show them no love in my treatment of their foolishness over the last 30 years. This would be an incorrect assumption. Real conservatism must be true to the people and the place it exists. In the United States, particularly where I come from, this means Christian values.
Real conservatives have religion - the primary and traditional religion of their home. Real conservatives are also environmentalist, preservationist and conservationist. In some sense conservatives are an eclectic lot - not the sort of eclectic, pragmatic compromise that exists in our two main political parties. As Larison says:
there is really nothing all that surprising about including a latter-day hero of the Country party in a conservatism that can proudly embrace the Antifederalists, Agrarians and Bradford in its tradition. But, then, you would never know that these people form an important (some might even say central) part of that tradition if your acquaintance with conservatism was limited to the main magazines and talking heads of the last ten years.
Somewhere along the way real conservatives became fractured, divided and married to more liberal groups - folks who proclaimed to champion the causes most dear to certain groups. Conservationist and environmentalist were usurped by the left in the 1960's - to most uninitiated conservatives today environmentalism is a bad word, but a real conservative must be an environmentalist and a conservationist. Evangelicals have been seduced by the liberal minded neoconservatives. Agrarians, states' rightist, constitutionalist (more or less antifederalist) are left out entirely with no viable voice. Thus we conservatives have compromised away our most treasured principles, colluded with the enemy to enable the advance of liberalism and abandoned several of our political brothers to be left without a political voice at all.
There is a cultural war going on; not west versus east or Spanish versus English per se. (These are but side shows).
The real cultural war is occurring where you live. You see signs of it-
- at the school your children attend
- on the street in your town
- in the air you breath and food you eat
- in the closed "mom and pop" stores down the street from the corporate giant Wal-Mart
- in the filth played over corporate owned radio and television stations
Until conservatives realize what conservatism (paleoconservatism) is, and who conservatives are, we will continue to flounder around in the mess we now swim. We don't need big government to fix these issues; we need them to stop protecting corporations, legislating morality, educating our children and generally running our lives. We can fix the rest at the local level - if only we conservatives could speak with one voice on what we really want from government.
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