[William McKinley]

Several hundred years? Pretty impressive in a country that is less than 300 years old. And Hamilton was one of the founders (not that I agree with Hamilton).

My point stands- there have been different flavors of conservatism since the founding of this country.

[JohnGalt]

'Big government conservative' was a term a writer at the liberal New Republic, Fred Barnes, now of Fox News, authered to descibe neoconservatives, who, as we have learned, have a rather 'new' intellectual history.

(Conservative intellectual history runs a little longer than 1776; generally dates back to the Plato and the Jewish carpenter fellow.)