On Saturday, something funny happened - I met a fan of my work. Being a conservative columnist is usually a thankless job with its fair share of hate mail, so naturally I was suspicious. But after chatting awhile, it was clear that this reader genuinely enjoyed my words and happily promoted my ideas to friends. Just as we were parting ways, the fan made a suggestion: "try defining what makes someone a conservative - then people can join us!" While I highly doubt that anyone will change their political beliefs because of my words, my fan's suggestion has plenty of merit. Many kinds of people call themselves conservatives, but have trouble articulating which principles unite them. To be sure, there is no exhaustive list of such principles - but here are three key ideas, borrowed from Russel Kirk, that can help you get yourself oriented.
At their core, conservatives believe in a moral order. To the conservative, good and evil really do exist, and old notions of justice and honor are what keeps society from falling into chaos. While conservative people do not necessarily need to believe in "souls", they truly believe that doing bad things makes you a worse person, and doing good things makes you a better one; in the conservative's mind, many of the issues that face society today are predicated on a lack of moral order. As social planners and do-gooders constantly dismiss the importance of personal choice and integrity, they end up trying to cure the symptoms, rather than causes, of social ills. Thus, the conservative believes that government actions and policy can really be moral or immoral, based on whether or not it imputes more or less responsibility to individual citizens.
Conservatives also believe that democratic freedom and security requires private property. All tyrannies across the globe have one thing in common: markets dominated by the government or its cronies that restrict access to land and investment. When people have the ability to acquire property and wealth on their own terms, they take better care of it and the prosperity of the nation grows. No central planner, regardless of intelligence, can invest nor innovate like a coalition of private citizens pooling their own resources together; competition breeds new ideas, and voluntary co-operation always results in higher yields than forced collectivism. Conservatives prize private enterprise over government involvement every time.
Finally, conservatives believe that while society can progress, people are imperfect and imperfectable. As radical ideas about the future and the advancement of technology have pervaded our culture, conservatives remain skeptical of any change in human nature: man is a self-interested creature, often using any tools and power at his disposal to get ahead, sometimes unjustly. Thus, conservatives are not nearly as shocked as their more liberal fellows at atrocities and corruption around the world, and while conservatives believe in checks and balances on political power, none of us believe that a day will come when corruption has ended. This is not to say that conservatives are simply grumpy, jaded people who can't wait to shoot down any idea of progress - they simply believe that "slow and steady" improvement is really the only pace for society, as radical change has almost always failed (see the French Revolution).
I honestly hope that these descriptions help people understand more about the philosophy which I espouse, and perhaps even help conservatives recognize one another. But the key to conservatism, unlike modern liberalism, is that it is a philosophy to be lived out, not an ideology to support. The best thing people who call themselves conservatives can do is to manifest these principles in their homes, churches, workplaces, schools, and neighbourhoods. Because at the end of the day, the ordered liberty we enjoy isn't based on government, but us.
