Dakota Beacon

The latest manifestation of vestigial conservatism comes in the form of the Tea Party movement.

The noun “conservative” signifies guardian or defender, the essence of a conservator.

Leaderless at the top with a grassroots groundswell from below, friends and neighbors, good citizens all, sense their government has gone awry. Their impression, evidenced by increased government intrusion, is that liberty is slipping away and freedom is at stake.

Tea Party attendees question whether they are welcome in the Republican Party and know they are not wanted in the Democrat Party. Their sentiments are neither rock ribbed Republican nor progressive Democrat.

Those who liable and excoriate as ignorant buffoons people who identify themselves as conservative kick dirt in the face of conservative heritage.

True conservatives are not ideological, but principled. Conservatism does not provide its adherents with an ideology. Conservatives loathe ideologies.

Systems for perfecting human beings and society are repugnant to conservatives. They know that elitist tools for forcing such systems on an unwilling public are authoritarian by design.

To truly live is to be free from oppression and regulation to the greatest extent possible, especially from an overbearing government. That’s why our founders subscribed totally to limited government. Constraining and molding human existence into a narrow and uniformly unnatural society for utilitarian objectives and egalitarian outcomes is wrong.

Conservatives respect the wisdom and thinking of their predecessors. They are very skeptical of a wholesale revision of societal structures and norms.

Stated another way, the essence of conservatism is the preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Natural law is significant in the development of legal and political practices and integral to moral standards for judging individual and government conduct.

Edmund Burke first articulated modern conservatism in his work “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” His book distinguished between “conservation” on the one hand and “innovation” on the other. The American Revolution was, in fact, a conservative reaction to innovations by British parliamentary radicals.

The chaos from which we have been thus far preserved looms as a menace before us in the twenty-first century.

Throughout the twentieth century generations progressed steadily into secularization for which material existence is everything and spiritual life in the western tradition means little. The progress was characterized by movement from a traditional to a revised order. The effect was to increasingly eliminate from consciousness a sound understanding of civics, family and traditional education.

The Tea Party movement is an uprising against government social and fiscal abuse. These people see inalienable rights of Americans slowly strangled and many average citizens at the grassroots perceive it, too. Trying to stifle the movement, liberals, progressives and fellow travelers behave as only radicals can. They violate established order, govern against the will of the people and discount a yearning for freedom.

It’s possible that much in our culture remains worth protecting, conserving and even renewing.

Those who pronounced the eclipse of conservatism at the beginning of the twenty-first century are deathly afraid of conservatism’s virtual ascendancy. Thanks to great thinkers like Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Cardinal John Henry Newman followed by contemporary thinkers like William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol and Russell Kirk, conservatism is once again rising.