Once upon a time, it was easy to spot a conservative. In the long ideological battle over the role of government in this country, conservatives were the ones who supported fiscal restraint and opposed a greater role for government. And behind that position was a fairly well articulated philosophy that stretches back to Edmund Burke and beyond.
That philosophy centered on a recognition of the sinfulness and lack of perfectability of mankind, and a resultant reluctance to embrace too much change too quickly. If a liberal is a person who says “this is all there is? We can do a lot better, let’s push to improve our society,” the conservative is one who says, “whoa, we’ve come a long way, civilization is delicate, let’s not screw the whole thing up by forcing things.”
- Even if you conclude, as liberals have, that the conservatives push stability, fear of government, and fiscal restraint too far, you have to admit that those are important values and at some point they must kick in and become operative principles.
- Even if you think Keynesian pump-priming and government borrowing to invest in the future are the way to go, you recognize that the government cannot engage in deficit spending forever.
- Even if you advocate great change to our institutions, you recognize that it can be dangerous to sweepingly rewire our institutions overnight.
- Even if you are a firm supporter of a big-government welfare state, you realize that individual freedom must be preserved, that bureaucrats given too much power will abuse it, and the government must be subject to checks and balances at all levels.
- Even if you think that human beings are highly maleable, educatable, and capable of improvement, you recognize that such improvement takes place only slowly, over the course of generations, and cannot be imposed overnight via revolutionary fiat.
In short, a core of true conservative values are important values; the dispute is over when those values should kick in and how they match up against other values – whether freedom for the individual and fear of big government should prevent us, for example, from providing aid to the poor, or protecting the environment.
But the question for liberals has always been whether conservatives are citizens of good will who in good faith balance legitimate values differently, or are merely representatives of the powerful, out to protect their interests against incursions by those who seek to continue improving our civilization through the equalization of money and other forms of power.
In the past few years, the question seems to have been settled pretty definitively. At least for the conservatives who hold power, and the majority in the GOP who marched with them in lockstep through the first Bush Adminsitration and beyond.
In recent years, one development after another has stripped clear the fig leaf of supposed philosophical conservative concern over big government, fiscal laxity, and radical change, and exposed the Republic party as a naked instrument of power, fighting to expand the privileges of the powerful and reduce the power of average people.
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