What Is a “Conservative”?

NRO ^ | May 11, 2005 | Jonah Goldberg

[Once-Ler]

While we are getting strong defense from current conservatives we are NOT getting limited government.

Has America ever had limited government? At what point in history has government gotten smaller?

[goldstategop]

Good point. Americans like big government. They just don't want to have to pay for it. Its a contradiction but its also a very American one. No one notices it until its pointed out.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[editor-surveyor]

"Conservatives like Buckley..."

Buckley is no consrvative by todays definition. He is an elitist global socialist.

[oldbrowser]

conservative = bases opinions on observation or experience.
liberal/progressive = bases opinions on unproven theories or
wishful thinking.

I think the problem derives from the fact that the liberals have been allowed to call us conservatives and themselves progressives. I think we should be called the realists and they should be called the wishful thinkers.

[Jokelahoma]

Seems reasonable. I still bet within the next few weeks (if it hasn't happened already) someone on here will disagree with you and tell you that you aren't a conservative, based solely on the fact that they consider themselves to be, and you disagree with them. That's what I mean by "internalizing" the labels. The faulty logic of "I am X because I believe Y, but you don't believe Y so you cannot possibly be X" is unfortunately all too prevalent.

[Rytwyng]

The best definition of a conservative was given to me by a Mormon Ph.D Chemist (i share his title and degree but not his faith). He said:

A conservative is a person who lives by time-tested values rather than experimental ones.

I've never heard a better summary than that.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

What is a conservative?

Someone who realizes instinctively that liberal secular humanism is stupid and silly.

[Pelayo]

Comfort with contradiction

I'd have to agree; since I'm a monarchist by choice, a republican by necessity, and a intellectual liberal by temperament. I'm the ultimate contradiction of an extreme-constitutionalist who doubts the philosophical authority of the document.

[Pelayo]

[A conservative is] Someone who realizes instinctively that liberal secular humanism is stupid and silly.

What about conservative secular humanism?

[dsc]

"Seems reasonable. I still bet within the next few weeks (if it hasn't happened already) someone on here will disagree with you and tell you that you aren't a conservative"

Well, it has happened that I have been called an ultra-rightist or the equivalent of the Taliban for expressing "time-tested values," but I can't recall having been called a liberal in recent years.

[Arrowhead]

Conservative-the believe that through wise restraint, freedom can perpetuate and expand. Calls for accountability in the use of liberty with consequences to pay for violating the principles thereof.

Liberalism-do be able to do what ever you want to whomever you want without being accountable to nobody. But, accountability does apply to everyone else when it is the liberal that has been violated.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Secular humanism isn't conservative. Since there is no data to validate a secularist conclusion from agnostic premises, there is no valid conservative reason to pursue an anti-Christian agenda within a conservative Western cultural context. An agonstic who wants to identify with conservatives can only remain mute on spiritual matters and admit that they do not understand such things and omit themselves from religious observance. To advance a "secular humanist" agenda is to enter into the pathologies of modernity and silly liberalism. Since aristocratic Christians invented conservatism, the non-believer has to respect the theistic realm albeit from a murkier penumbra of epistemological uncertainty. Usually, they end up converting.

[King Prout]

GOOD STUFF.

[Qwinn]

I look forward to the days when Jonah Goldberg gets his groove on. A lot of the time he's kinda forgettable, but once in a while, like with this piece and in his duel with Jonathan Chait, he's a really brilliant read. He raises a lot of very good issues with this piece.

I would LOVE to see this thread really develop, and hammer out some of the ideas that he suggests. The potential for this thread is tremendous, especially given some of the finer conservative minds on this forum.

Since part of the point of the essay is that there's so many different flavors of conservatism, it would be useful for each poster to identify what flavor of conservatism they favor.

Me? I'm a limited government free-marketer (anti-monopoly laws are about the only market regulation I can see as justifiable) and social conservative. Agnostic, but generally inclined to side with Christians (and particularly conservative Catholics) in the culture wars.

Okay, now that that's out of the way...

I think Jonah is absolutely right about how liberals are unable to acknowledge the concept of tradeoffs. Liberals seem to be congenitally incapable of cost/benefit analysis. Attempting to justify liberal ideology consistently consist of engaging in single sided bookkeeping.

It manifests itself in some really hilarious ways. There's nothing easier than to find a liberal screed against Halliburton that purports to demonstrate that they are unconscionable war profiteers by citing Halliburton's -revenue- in Iraq. Look at this - they had $500 gajillion dollars in revenue in 2003 - they're making money hand over fist! But revenue is utterly meaningless - it's one sided bookkeeping. They don't even register that Halliburton has -costs- over there too, and when you actually look at their -profit- margin, the idea that they orchestrated this war to "profiteer" from it is laughable. They could get a far better profit margin fixing potholes on the NJ Turnpike than they get in Iraq, and with better opportunities to finagle kickbacks from a corrupt local government.

Then there's the environment. "Why not adopt Kyoto? If there's even a chance that global warming exists, and if you care -at all- about the environment, then you have to be for it!" They can't even perceive that there's a downside to it, and if you mention the obvious fiscal downsides, the impact of regulatory compliance on the prices of goods, etc., they just assume that you're part of the "pollution lobby" and you're just making excuses in order to justify your real, evil, nefarious motives. There's no such thing as too much environmental regulation. This only makes sense if you believe that the attendant cost can never be greater than 0.

It's a major difference in the worldviews. I would almost describe conservatism as "the ability to engage in cost/benefit analysis". Liberals completely lack this ability.

One further point for now: The biggest monstrosities of the Left are a direct result of this inability to acknowledge that X can only come at the expense of Y. Sometimes, reality makes the tradeoff so blatant and so undeniable that the only way liberals can reconcile their one-sided bookkeeping is to irrationally completely devalue Y, no matter how obvious a value Y has in reality. Abortion is a perfect example. X is a woman's "right to choose". Y is a viable unborn human being in it's 8th month of gestation. A tradeoff is obviously unavoidable. Liberals negate the tradeoff in their minds by simply erasing the value of Y altogether - and thus you can get excuses for something as monstrous as partial birth abortion. The value of Y - the human being in the womb - MUST be devalued to 0 - otherwise they'd have to engage in a cost/benefit analysis, and it's a ground they simply cannot engage in. That's how you can get absurd concepts like "Life begins at birth", as if the existence of a human life is dependent upon it's physical location.

Anyways. That's my thoughts for now, but I suspect I'll have more to come. I know, I know, you'll all be just hanging on the edge of your seats waiting, pffffft :P :)

Qwinn

[The_Reader_David]

As the Anglicans used to say, "read, mark, and inwardly digest".

It drives me mad when so-called conservatives on this board don't really want to conserve anything at all, but want the market to run everything (or--the more usual, want the market to run everything, except for the areas where they vigorously uphold some kind of traditional morality, where the state is to be turned into an enforcer for their moral vision).

Even though, on one measure, as a former leftist (when I was 13 I was a Marxist--I outgrew it a along with acne) I'm a neocon, I used to say I was the 'last person to join the old right'.

(BTW: now that we've liberated the color red from the left, can we have the word 'liberal' back: after all it's really ours, and their proper name is "socialist'.)

[youngtory]

As what someone said, "If it ain't broke don't fix it."

[LowCountryJoe]

Hey, did you guys read this whole editorial?
I'm pretty sure that there's some knuckledraggers who've responded to it that may not have really read the whole thing. Maybe they need some quotes from it thrown back at them because of the way they nodded at it earlier - like sheep - without picking up some of the important aspects of the piece.

[k2blader]

"Crunchy conservatism"??

Examples??

[Pelayo]

Well Humanism itself goes back to the Renaissance. And, even in it's earliest forms there was a prevailing tendency towards secularism. Modernity is realy just the resurrection of paganism with Christian liberalism twisted into an amoral concept.

So if you really stretch it like I'm doing, you can argue that modernistic-progressive-amoral-liberals are actually conservative pagans ; ) .

[Toddsterpatriot]

Good article.