Conservative No More

Why the word "conservative" has no meaning

To “stand athwart history, yelling, “STOP!”

William F. Buckley announced the birth of National Review with those words. Sort of of a mission statement. To stand athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” I can think of no better definition of “conservatism.”

If Buckley is too pithy for you, try this extended quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.¹

The reader will find no conflict between Buckley and Chesterton on this point. To stop history is to leave the post to rot.

The other night, an old friend accused me of not being a conservative. I agreed with him. He was shocked. “But that’s your entire identity,” he said.

And it was. I wrote a book called The Conservative Manifesto in 1993 that was a featured alternate selection of the Conservative Book Club in April and May of 1994. Even in high school my friends mockingly called me, “Mister Conservative.”

It might be, however, that I never was a conservative. Rather, it’s possible that conservatism seemed the best expression of what I believed. Professing myself “a conservative” might have been a bit of self-deception, for, even then, there were neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives and other hyphenated conservatives. Which sort was I?²

As Buckley lamented in Up From Liberalism, there is no sure definition of conservatism and its boundaries. It is not a place on a map or a chapter in a book. Attempts to define conservatism always piss off one faction claiming to be conservative. Thus, the Birchers hated Buckley and Buckley hated the Randians, and the Randians hated the Republicans, and the Republicans hated them all. My little book of 120 pages was an attempt to lop off the modifiers and expose conservatism in its barest, unfestooned essence. And it presented the boundaries of conservatism that I still hold today, as well as the prescriptions I would still endorse, such as withdrawing the United States from the United Nations, replacing the income tax with a flat tax, and prohibiting use of US troops outside the United States except in Congressionally declared war where the lone objective is the unconditional surrender of the enemy.