The Relationships Between Republicans And Conservatives (Cathryn Crawford)

Washington Dispatch ^ | October 31, 2003 | Cathryn Crawford

[Scenic Sounds]

Does a Republican equal a conservative? There is an entire spectrum of beliefs embodied within those elected officials that have an (R) after their name, and most of us assume that if someone is a Republican, they are conservative. However, political parties die when they are stagnant, and so there is constant change.

To answer the conservativism question, first we have to know what the basic beliefs of conservatives really are.

Historically, their most common belief – the one issue that typically unites them – is a belief in a limited federal government. Conservatives in American tend to believe that power is best left to state and local governments – the governments that are closest to the people. They believe that these smaller governments know better what their own communities need than the more distant federal government.

Conservatives also believe that the government should have a limited fiscal policy, and that the economy runs better with as little government interference as possible. We believe that most government regulations on economic issues serve to stunt growth, and that the capitalist system works best when it is allowed to work as freely as is possible.

Conservatives believe in the rights of the individuals over the rights of the government. They also deeply believe in the idea of personal responsibility. They believe that with individual rights comes individual responsibility. With a limited government comes a limited amount of assistance for its citizens, and conservatives embrace this, because it encourages individuality and freedom from dependence.

Conservatives believe in a strong national defense, and they tend to believe that our borders should be tightly controlled. They support the military and tend to believe that our military is not well served when it is spread all over the world on peacekeeping missions.

These make up the core of conservative values. While there is room for argument within any of these, they are the foundational tenets.

Now, let’s get back to our original question. Does a Republican equal a conservative? There isn’t a simple answer, but the most obvious one is no. There is no Republican that can say that he has held to these values without fail. The problem occurs when the leaders within the Party stop making conservative values their goal.

When the foundation of a belief system is taken away, the entire system wobbles. When one tenet is taken away, the rest threaten to crumble. If Republicans cease to believe in the idea of a limited central government, it becomes easier to justify more regulation and restriction on our market system. When our troops become less of a defense force and more of a peacekeeping force, it becomes easier to justify spreading them out from country to country, which tires and stresses our military. When personal responsibility stops – anything can happen. If no one is to blame, then no one must fear consequences of what they do.

Perhaps the question really is – Should a Republican equal a conservative? For those of us that believe in the GOP, that answer is a resounding yes – but this question will be answered by the people, over a period of decades, who will give their money and their votes to the Republican Party. As the GOP moves closer to the center, there will be a day when conservatives must decide whether the Republican Party is still the party that represents them best; and if they conclude that it is not, they will have to find an alternative.

Cathryn Crawford is a student at the University of Texas.

[tpaine]

Scenic Sounds wrote: What you say is true, tpaine, but, as they say, every man has a price.
Aren't there some regulatory laws that you favor? Aren't there some laws that you are willing to trade some personal sovereignty for? ;-)

---

Weird question.. I favor our constitutional system and all the regulatory laws that conform to that system.
-- States/localities can 'reasonably regulate' most anything to conform to community standards, as long as they don't violate our individual rights in the process.
-- Our's is a simple system of checks & balances on power, much abused.
-- To bad that so few of us understand its basics..
And whats worse is how many disagree with those basic principles.

[Dane]

And there's no show on TV that skewers liberals nearly as well as South Park does so. Have you ever seen their attacks on Babs Streisand? Janet Reno? Klintoon? Classic stuff

And they "skewer" religious people also.

Big freakin deal about their "genius", it just shows that the creators of South Park, have no core. Kinda of like the Clintons, IMO.

[Dan from Michigan]

Does a Republican equal a conservative?

Sometimes.

most of us assume that if someone is a Republican, they are conservative.

That's true in a lot of cases. Luckily, our county party is conservative, and in fact, one of the major topics lately is RINO hunting. In order to win almost any partisan office here, you have to be a republican, so some D's run as R's.

Historically, their most common belief – the one issue that typically unites them – is a belief in a limited federal government.

...somebody tell Bush(and especially Rove) that.....

The problem occurs when the leaders within the Party stop making conservative values their goal.

When that's the case, it's time for the leaders to be fired.

If Republicans cease to believe in the idea of a limited central government, it becomes easier to justify more regulation and restriction on our market system. When our troops become less of a defense force and more of a peacekeeping force, it becomes easier to justify spreading them out from country to country, which tires and stresses our military.

Unfortunatly, a lot of that is happening with some of the GOP feds.

As the GOP moves closer to the center, there will be a day when conservatives must decide whether the Republican Party is still the party that represents them best; and if they conclude that it is not, they will have to find an alternative.

There is no alternative though. 3rd parties haven't made it big in 150 years.

The only alternative would be the dems, and there's no chance there. The only option availible that is winnable is to use 3rd parties as a protest vote against a McCainiac, and to keep control of the local GOP if it's conservative, and toss the bums which are big government statists.

[jmc813]

You're watching the Raging Rudolph link now, right?

[x]

Talk about conservative "revolution" or "rollback" is bound to be disappointed. It didn't happen with Reagan or with Gingrich and isn't going to happen with Bush. It won't happen any time soon. And major changes in politics don't always work out for the best. Things are done in passion and haste and without thinking. It's usually measures that have powerful special interests or emotional appeal behind them that prevail, not those that are the most needed or best thought out.

For the most part, politics isn't about radical change or rollbacks. It's about gradual, considered, incremental change. And conservatives and Republicans can surely cooperate in that process, even if their final goals aren't identical.

From this I conclude that politics isn't always a matter of "us against them," "good against evil" or "black against white." By all means fight for what you believe. But understand that you'll often have to make common cause on some issues with people that you disagree with on others. Realizing that all the good isn't on one side and all the evil on the other gives me more respect for less conservative Republicans than I had earlier. Moderate and Liberal Republicans are very wrong about some things, but not about everything.

It made sense for Barry Goldwater to paint the starkest contrast between himself and Nelson Rockefeller. He was right about the difference, and on the better side of most of their conflicts. It made sense for Ronald Reagan to stress the Cold War issues that separated him from Liberal Republicans, even though the neo-cons who supported him weren't so different from on domestic issues from the less conservative wing of the party. But today, in the age of President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" differences are -- or should be -- more muted. What Mr. Bush is saying now -- more or less what any electable conservative President would say -- is something moderate Republicans can subscribe to. Indeed, much of what he's saying or doing is what they've argued for in the past.

The leaders of any "movement" like liberalism or conservatism sometimes carry it in directions the rank and file don't want to go. At such moments, you may find that you have more in common with people outside the movement. Don't be phased by it. It's a part of life. A party isn't everything. It isn't life or truth or God. But neither is an ideological movement. Parties may be wrong or misguided, but the same is true of philosophies or political movements.

Conflict and division are inseparable from politics, but it's a mistake if tribal affiliations become the purpose of politics and put what's actually done into the background. Bulletin boards and chatrooms emphasize what divides us -- an essential part of politics. It's important not to forget what unites us as Americans.

[Scenic Sounds]

Well, tpaine, the problem is that it would be hard to find anyone who would disagree with nearly everything in your post. I can't think of anyone in public life who advocates that the Constitution should be ignored or evaded. As you know, there are people who interpret the Constitution differently than you (or me), but who nevertheless believe that they are interpreting it correctly.

The one point in your post that you might diagree with is your statement that you favor "all the regulatory laws that conform to [our Constitutional] system." Surely there must be some laws that have been constitutionally enacted which don't win your favor, right? But, you're the judge of that. ;-)

[Dane]

You're watching the Raging Rudolph link now, right?

Nope didn't even hit your link, from your reply #128. And anyway I can't hear the audio, I was messing around with the computer a couple of months ago and deleted the sound drivers accidentilly, been trying ever since to download the audio drivers, but no luck.

And yes, I looked through the old computer box and there is no cd and I ain't paying $100 bucks just to get a new sound card.

[jmc813]

And yes, I looked through the old computer box and there is no cd and I ain't paying $100 bucks just to get a new sound card.

Doh! Go to the manufacturer's web site, and more likely than not it'll be a free download. If it's a real old soundcard, you might try www.windrivers.com and sign up for a one-day membership which costs five bucks.

[honeygrl]

Wow, that is excellent.

[Maelstrom]

Partisanship has saved this country.

You do NOT want government groups to get along because when they do, government power is unstoppable.

What does that mean?

That can mean civil forfeiture is expanded to all other crimes.

It can mean the abolition of the 2nd Amendment instead of having it merely ignored.

It can mean the nationalization of the wealth of all individuals with the top incomes or most assets.

YOU DO NOT WANT GOVERNMENT PARTISANSHIP to go away. This nation relies upon it to keep the FDRs and the Bill Clintons in check.

[honeygrl]

So what do you disagree with in #68 specifically? (other than your dislike for tpaine)

[Maelstrom]

Conservatism isn't a reflective term.

Smaller government has a concrete basis: the minimum amount of government to fulfill the government's Constitutional responsibilities.

Strong national defense also has a concrete basis: the ability to protect us from foreign enemies. This has meant the ability to fight 2 wars at the same time.

Limited fiscal policy also has a concrete basis: the minimum amount of regulation to prosecute abuse in the free market.

Smaller, stronger, and more limited with respect to it's current situation colliquially, and to the concrete bases that are readily available to anyone who's actually thought about their conservative beliefs.

[Dane]

Doh! Go to the manufacturer's web site, and more likely than not it'll be a free download. If it's a real old soundcard, you might try www.windrivers.com and sign up for a one-day membership which costs five bucks

I did a google search of the maunfacturer and nada.

Anyway it is no big deal, I don't get that annoying "bliiing" when I turn the computer on.

Just like life, there are advantages and disadvantages.

[Dane]

So what do you disagree with in #68 specifically? (other than your dislike for tpaine)

Uh no self proclaimed Queen bee. All I was trying to convey is that when you all go into your micro machinations and proclaim your superiority, you turn people off, IMO.

[Mini-14]

I used to live in Texas. Too bad I never met any nice level-headed ladies like you.

Can you please translate "Algunos misterios son tan profundos y maravillosos que deben ser explorados para ser entendido"?

[honeygrl]

You appear to be the only one here that was turned off by that post.

[CyberCowboy777]

Ten Conservative Principles
by Russell Kirk

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives’ convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims. In various editions of my book The Conservative Mind I have listed certain canons of conservative thought—the list differing somewhat from edition to edition; in my anthology The Portable Conservative Reader I offer variations upon this theme. Now I present to you a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine. In fine, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era. The following ten articles of belief reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays.

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.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to he gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.

Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities, puts strongly the case for private property, as distinguished from communal property: “Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.” For the institution of several property—that is, private property—has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own—these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.

For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

Such, then, are ten principles that have loomed large during the two centuries of modern conservative thought. Other principles of equal importance might have been discussed here: the conservative understanding of justice, for one, or the conservative view of education. But such subjects, time running on, I must leave to your private investigation.

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.


Copyright © 2002 The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html

[warchild9]

There are pro-choicers on FR (a few--gotta have heterodoxes, otherwise ban everybody and FR becomes the same as DU). We also have vegetarian, non-Christian, anti-hunting, non-W-worshipping Southern Nationalists like myself.
Leavening for the loaf.
Oh, and I should have added that there is a general respectful attitude towards Reagan here (which I share).

[jmc813]

We also have vegetarian, non-Christian, anti-hunting, non-W-worshipping Southern Nationalists like myself.

Interesting combination.

[warchild9]

I'm complex. Like most of the active posters here. The complexity of the non-bots here is only reason I keep coming back (along with Freeper Foxhole).