you are arguing against conservatism on a conservative website that, at its very heart, DOES value social conservatism.
I am not arguing against conservatism, actually. I think Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles are a pretty good jumping off point. Unfortunately so-called conservatives have a tendancy towards an orthodox doctrine [see T. Cruz], and thereby ignore many of Kirk’s principles, in particular:
Principal 10 - the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.....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.
I agree with you. Americans and so called conservatives have gradually accepted the bastard child of true conservatism, the GOPe, MSM, DEM operatives version.
Can you imagine any true conservative being willing to give away our sovereignty as with the TPP or the Alphabet soup agreements? Or increased immigration of any kind which destroys the Anerican social fabric?
I would like to addto your sentence “ Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.” I agree and would add that even that change should be within the parameters and under the umbrella of the Natural Law, as came to us through the Founding Fathers and back to the Common Law of England and further to Aquinas, the Greeks and Romans, especially Cicero. Further we must make those changes at the same time rejecting the French Revolution’s stepchild of that English Natural Law, with emphasis on rights without responsibilities, and license rather than a freedom to choose among various goods not evils.
We will have change and it will be to social conservatism or we will lose our country. No one can flim flam the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.
Let me harmonize with the two of you in a slightly different way.
I am big into social conservatism. It’s the reason that I held my nose and voted for Romney, because at least he was slightly better on social matters than Obama was.
But at the moment, I recognize that if any socially conservative principles are going to survive at all in this nation is to address all the Nationalist issues that are coming up in this election. If we fail to get immigration under control at the very LEAST, then in the long term, we lose on every social issue.