Dakota Beacon

Campaign season arrives earlier and earlier, or so it seems. Before a person settles on a candidate, it is wise to understand one’s self and the motive behind the support for their candidate.

Understanding one’s motives also helps sort through the many Republican candidates, the conservative grassroots insurgency and the mainstream Republican establishment’s rejection of that insurgency. The Republican establishment is famous for compromise and bipartisanship in search of independent voters. How soon they forget that it was the conservative appeal to the independents that won the 1994 and 2010 US House takeover by the Republicans and, earlier, the Reagan presidency. Forgotten, too, are campaigns such as that of conservative Senator Mark Rubio of Florida who beat Republican establishment heavy favorite Governor Charlie Crist.

The noun “conservative” signifies guardian or defender and expresses the essential motive of a conservator. Those who slander and excoriate as ignorant buffoons those people who identify themselves as conservative kick dirt in the face of their own conservative heritage.

A true conservative is not an ideologue. Conservatism is a disposition. Napoleon first applied the word “ideology” to leftist zealots of the French Revolution and their crazy abstractions that almost ruined France.

A conservative, on the other hand, is 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. Politically correct speech, mandated alternative energy, subsidies, health and dietary restrictions and the plethora of safety regulations come to mind.

In their inmost being, conservatives understand that to truly live is to be free from oppression and regulation to the greatest extent possible, especially from an overbearing government. That is why our founders subscribed totally to limited government. That is also why most people unconsciously aspire to conservatism even if they don’t vote that way. Constraining and molding human existence into a narrow and uniformly unnatural society for utilitarian purposes and egalitarian outcomes is ideological in the liberal progressive sense.

Conservatives respect the wisdom and thinking of their predecessors. They grow skeptical of proposed wholesale revisions of societal norms and structures. In other words, the essence of conservatism preserves the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Natural law significantly developed our legal and political practices and remains integral to the moral standards for judging individual and governmental 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 the British political establishment.

Twentieth century youth, led by progressives, migrated steadily toward secularization dominated by a material existence in which spiritual life in the western tradition meant little. Progressives in various forms influenced youth movements from a traditional to a revised social order. The effect gradually eliminated the conscious sound understanding of civics, family and traditional education from generations of youth.

It is possible that much in our culture is still worth protecting, conserving and reviving.

With this template in mind, liberals and other progressives are easily identified. More challenging are the interlopers using conservative rhetoric that compound confusion. Moderates willing to compromise, independents anxious for acceptance by the ruling class in Washington, DC, and those comprising the professional political order must be identified and dealt with for whom they are by conscientious voters.

The Republican establishment is deathly afraid of conservatism’s virtual rise. They view the conservatives as a threat to their continued hold on power.

Thanks to great thinkers in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries like Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Cardinal John Henry Newman followed by twentieth century thinkers like William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol and Russell Kirk, conservatism’s roots and virtues are preserved and being proclaimed to a new generation.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).