Conservatism Series, Part One: What is a conservative?

Back on Sun­day I said that I would start a new series of posts deal­ing with con­ser­vatism based on Phil Valentine’s book, The Conservative’s Hand­book.  I don’t think a per­son can fully grasp why a con­ser­v­a­tive believes what he or she believes until you under­stand where con­ser­vatism came from.

True con­ser­vatism is at least two cen­turies old.  The main idea behind con­ser­vatism started to man­i­fest around the time of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, and was first made famous by a man named Edmund Burke.  Although he fiercely opposed the French Rev­o­lu­tion, he was some­what sym­pa­thetic to the Amer­i­can Revolution.

Burke was an Anglo-Irish states­man, polit­i­cal the­o­rist, and philoso­pher who served many years in the British House of Com­mons as a mem­ber of the Whig party.  The core of con­ser­vatism (in short) is the val­u­a­tion of time-tested social norms and val­ues, and the oppo­si­tion to sud­den change or exper­i­men­ta­tion within the government.

It must be pointed out, though, that con­ser­v­a­tives do not resist all forms of change. As Burke puts it, “A state with­out the means of change is with­out the means of con­ser­va­tion.” And con­ser­va­tion is the very cor­ner­stone of being a con­ser­v­a­tive (hence the name). But instead of change com­ing about force­fully (i.e. rev­o­lu­tion­ary) or man­dated, it must be organic. Try­ing to force change through or for some sake of ide­ol­ogy or doc­trine runs the risk of going badly in way of the law of unin­tended consequences.

Rus­sell Kirk has ten basic prin­ci­ples of con­ser­vatism. I won’t re-list them here; go check out this web­site for the prin­ci­ples. He can bet­ter explain them than I can.

I will list the four main areas of con­ser­vatism, though. They are as follows:

1. Com­pas­sion­ate Conservatism
2. Lib­eral Conservatism
3. Lib­er­tar­ian Conservatism
4. Clas­sic Conservatism

There are other areas, but usu­ally are co-beliefs held with one of the four up top. I hold the lib­er­tar­ian con­ser­v­a­tive view, which is the com­bi­na­tion between the lib­er­tar­ian and con­ser­v­a­tive “small gov­ern­ment” prin­ci­ples.  That is the view that I express here on my blog, and the one I’ll be delv­ing into in greater detail later in this series.

The next post will cover Phil Valentine’s first topic in his book — “Amer­ica is good”.  No mat­ter what has hap­pened recently with the bailout, I still believe this to be true.  I also believe that most Amer­i­cans are more libertarians/conservatives than they real­ize — and I just hope they real­ize it before Novem­ber 4. 

So, until next time.

Terms and def­i­n­i­tions from Wikipedia

Related Posts:

• Open Thank-You Letter
• Start­ing a New Series
• Con­ser­vatism Series, Part Two: “Amer­ica is Good”