{"id":1539337,"date":"2025-06-02T03:20:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T07:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1539337"},"modified":"2025-06-02T03:20:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T07:20:00","slug":"what-is-american-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/what-is-american-conservatism\/1539337\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is American Conservatism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Is American Conservatism?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Roger Kimball via The Epoch Times,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTo be deceived about the truth of things and so to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Plato,\u00a0The Republic<\/em><\/p>\n

Let me start with the genus. What is conservatism? The answer? It is cheerful allegiance to the truth. This is especially true of conservatism\u2019s American variant. Conservatism in America has some distinctive features, traceable mostly to two things: the Founders\u2019 vision of limited government supporting individual liberty and the historical accidents of newness, on the one hand, and geographical amplitude and separateness on the other.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Although it may sometimes seem that conservatives are constitutionally averse to cheerfulness, writing works with titles such as\u00a0Leviathan<\/em>,\u00a0The Decline of the West<\/em>,\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>, and\u00a0Slouching Towards Gomorrah,\u00a0<\/em>by habit and disposition, I submit, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than\u2014than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since the people and policies that are called \u201cliberal\u201d are so often conspicuously\u00a0illiberal<\/em>, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works.<\/p>\n

Indeed, when it comes to the word \u201cliberal,\u201d Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0he was a liberal, that is, a partisan of ordered liberty and the habits and institutions that nurture it. (Is that another definition of conservatism?) In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called\u2014perhaps John Fonte\u2019s marvelous coinage \u201ctransnational progressives<\/a>\u201d is best, though the old standby \u201cLeftists\u201d will do\u2014they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.<\/p>\n

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor than leftists.<\/strong> Has anyone ever accused Elizabeth Warren of having a sense of humor? How about Rachel Maddow? Or Jamie Raskin?<\/p>\n

The nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that \u201cthe essence of Toryism is enjoyment.\u201d What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that \u201cGod made the world and saw that it was good.\u201d Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quantity of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a moral affront. Being soberly realistic about mankind\u2019s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Conservatives, that is to say, are realists. Like Plato, they recoil from the prospect of being fundamentally out of touch with reality.<\/p>\n

In a word, conservatives are not \u201cwoke.\u201d They strive to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde\u2019s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, just as they prefer to call \u201caffirmative action\u201d what it really is: \u201cdiscrimination according to race or sex.\u201d Ditto about taxation, which they describe, accurately, as \u201cgovernment-mandated income redistribution,\u201d and \u201cIslamophobia,\u201d which is a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible \u201cmulticulturalists\u201d colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.<\/p>\n

At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation. Thus, one follower of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida declared that \u201cunproblematic prose\u201d and \u201cclarity\u201d were \u201cthe conceptual tools of conservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as an unacceptable challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Creeping multiculturalism intersects in poignant ways with a subject that is always at the center of concern for conservatism: change. Granted, change is a great fact of life.<\/p>\n

But an equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one adapts more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. \u201cWhen it is not necessary to change,\u201d Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, \u201cit is necessary not to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recognize that \u201cchange,\u201d like its conceptual cousin \u201cinnovation,\u201d is one of the primary watchwords of the modern age. But the great conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0in November 1955, that a large part of the magazine\u2019s mission was to \u201cstand athwart history, yelling Stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile\u2014the smile meaning \u201che wasn\u2019t really against change, innovation, etc., etc.\u201d But I believe Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made\u00a0National Review,\u00a0<\/em>in its first decades at least,\u00a0unzeitgem\u00e4sse<\/em>, \u201cuntimely\u201d in the highest sense of the word.<\/p>\n

Back then,\u00a0National Review<\/em>, as Buckley wrote, \u201cis out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and Henry Steele Commager are in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The late Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In an essay called \u201cWhy You Should Be a Conservative,\u201d he rehearses the familiar scenario:<\/p>\n

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. . . .<\/p>\n

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a \u201creform\u201d proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, \u2018reform.\u2019<\/p>\n

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that \u201creform\u201d so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that what he described as \u201cthe melancholy, long, withdrawing roar\u201d of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating \u201cremnant\u201d of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them\u2014but then so did that enabling remnant.<\/p>\n

Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a \u201csaving remnant\u201d large and vital enough to become \u201can actual power\u201d that could stem the tide of anarchy. As I look around at our present discontents, I hope more than ever that he was right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 06\/01\/2025 – 23:20<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/what-american-conservatism<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Is American Conservatism? Authored by Roger Kimball via The Epoch Times, \u201cTo be deceived about the truth of things and so to harbor untruth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1539338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1539337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1539338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}