Hated textbook gets Reagan’s dark side half right

Rare ^ | 2-25-14 | Ian Huyett

[ReformationFan]

Conservative student group Turning Point USA caused a stir last week by posting pages online from a textbook used at the University of South Carolina. The book calls Ronald Reagan “sexist” and says conservatives “take a basically pessimistic view of human nature” — one in which “people are conceived of as being corrupt.” Several avowed conservatives balked not just at the negative portrayal of Reagan but also at the idea that the conservative persuasion contains a measure of pessimism. On this point, the textbook is right and they are wrong. Russell Kirk was the man credited by William F. Buckley for the very existence of an American conservatism. To Kirk, human fallenness was an essential pillar of conservative thought. He called Original Sin the one empirically verifiable dogma. “Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults,” Kirk wrote. “To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things.” This sentiment is shared by the Apostle Paul, who wrote that human beings are “by nature children of wrath,” and by John Adams, who warned us to distrust government because “there is danger from all men.” If conservatives are offended by this idea, they have forgotten their own inheritance. The conservative intellectual tradition has been challenging progressive assumptions since Edmund Burke assailed the tyranny of Jacobin France.

[fifedom]

It is interesting that the article, which comes from an apparently libertarian website, quotes Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke and other conservatives.

Kirk was strongly opposed to libertarianism. See this article that he wrote:
http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/a-dispassionate-assessment-of-libertarians
“The term “libertarianism”is distasteful to people who think seriously about politics.”

Conservatives believe that we need societal institutions and constraints to function as a civil society. That is why libertarians and conservatives disagree strongly about fundamental issues like abortion and re-defining marriage.

In politics, the Rats routinely sponsor and finance libertarians to split right-leaning voters to enable them to win close elections like the recent Virginia governor’s race, the Montana Senate races, and many others.

All in all, any conservative who votes for a libertarian even in races where a Republican or Rat will clearly win is making a big mistake.