Seriously. You look at the presidential candidates. On the Democratic side, we’ve got people pushing progressive policies, and people pushing liberal ones. (Which, as Nick Rivera said above, got lumped into the same party in the 30s and, on tops of that, were invaded by civil rights activists in the 60s.)

The candidates actually sit down and say ‘This is what we are going to do, and why’. Real policy positions that can be reasoned out from the muddle of progressivism and liberalism and even populism the Democratic party has become.

On the Republican side, there are the pro-24 side (That’s what I call them, they act like they’re in a TV show fighting terrorists), you have the social conservatives, and you have a libertarian. No ‘real conservatives’.

That all is really just rephrasing the premise of the article, but there is a reason for that: Real conservatives lost. They lost at the very start, and the onlyway they ever got into power in the first place is via the social conservatives, and had to immediately abandon any sort of fiscal responsiblity.

This is because conservativism is simply not something that the American people want. We want the government to look out for us in our dealings with business, we want the government to operate a safety net, we want the government to at least honestly look at pollution and global warming.

There are a lot of studies out there that show that general political positions are, indeed, a bell-shaped curve, but that curve is centered way to the left, that average people agree something like 70%-80% with liberal and progressive positions. On everything from the general principles like social nets for people and healthcare to specific things like abortion.

But I’m right there with you. I wish the Republican party would stop pandering to religious zealots and war fanatics and go back to the their ‘roots’, even though they never were actually that. I understand what it feels like to have your party hijacked (I am currently fighting the DLC, which is determined to lose the next election.), and I wish you the best of luck.

Of course, I have pretty impure motives, as I’m almost 100% certain that if the Republicans stopped the race- and gay-baiting and the beating of the war drums and all the crap that actually gets them elected and return to ‘conservativism’, they’d pretty quickly lose all power and finally go away.

But I’m on your side nevertheless. Let’s expose the fake-conservatives together, and then real conservatives can stand up in front of the nation and explain why they want to cut social security and whatnot.

There was a discussion here, about what it means to be moderate. My personal favorite iinncorporates the need to compromise. In essence, we have to recognize that other views must be allowed their due say and pursuant influence., Otherwise, we’ll end up with endless stalemates In compromise, purity is impossible.

When one pure ism wins to the exclusion of other views, the result can be a very destructive backlash.
.And the cycle begins all over again.

Advocating for one’s ideals is terrigic.Reognizing the value of compromise is better.

Where do you think I’m worng?

I don’t see why you can’t post it here Michael, your bona fides on this site are pretty well earned and conservative points of view I feel can be tolerated here just fine.

I agree.

MvdG’s article is as much an educational piece as anything else because it seeks to define a term whose meaning has become ambiguous in recent decades.

While the title of his post might suggest that MvdG wants to move the political center in a rightward direction, the article itself is actually more critical of conservatives for living up to their own “conservative” standards.

I know that I sound like a broken record when I say this, but I believe that the terms “conservatism” and “liberalism” have become almost meaningless in today’s political debates. Today’s “conservatism” shares only a faint resemblance to the conservatism espoused by Robert Taft and Russell Kirk during the 1940′s and 1950′s.

Just as fiscal populism eroded much of the meaning of the term “liberal”, neoconservatism and social conservatism have eroded much of the meaning of the term “conservative.” Neither Robert Taft (i.e. Mr. Republican) nor Barry Goldwater (i.e. Mr. Conservative) would be much welcomed in today’s Republican Party. Taft would be considered an isolationist or defeatist for his non-interventionist positions while Goldwater would be considered a libertine for support for reproductive rights and gays serving in the military as well as his blunt criticism of the religious right.

This is one of the problems of the big tent philosophy of the two major political parties. During the 1930′s, several disparate factions coalesced around their support for FDR’s New Deal despite the fact that they had wide differences in opinion on social, cultural, racial, and religious matters. Classic liberalism (as opposed to big government liberalism) all but vanished within the Democratic Party.

A similar thin has happened to the Republican Party over the last few decades. When small government conservatives allied themselves with big government conservatives (i.e. neoconservatives and social conservatives), the resulting conservative movement was no longer one that promoted the smaller government conservatism of mid-twentieth century.

The smaller government pro-free market conservatism is doomed in today’s conservative movement because big government conservatism and small government conservatism are incompatible with one another. A movement cannot maintain a constitutionally limited, fiscally sound, pro-free market country when that movement simultaneously embraces a curtailment of civil liberties and expansive executive branch power at home and militarism, interventionism, and nation-building abroad.

Ideals are excellent for setting a ship’s course, but the captain must be ready to veer left or right when an iceberg is straight ahead. He’d be wide to bend his conservative ‘true’ course in such a case.

That conservatism, as it is practised, should change according to the times also seems perfectly normal to me. Personal judgments and preferences always color how a philosophy is applied to real situations.

Think about a concept like democracy, something all political factions claim to hold as an ideal. Yet, it is democracy that produced our years of slavery and denied women the vote for many generations.

Ideals are abstractions that become realities only as they are put into practice. Fallible humans will always be subject to fallible modes of practicing their ideals. Conservatism is an abstraction.
It’s up to its its adherents to define it in practice.
That will never be uniform across large groups ior over time, IMO.

Ideals are excellent for keeping the ship steering in a certain direction.

But it’s been about 3 decades since there were any in public life.

Lol, true.

And SuperD, I don’t buy into the idea that the school systems are total crap. I and my peers are all middle class, I went to private school and they went to public school. WIthout exception they all did well in college, graduated, and almost all went on to do post graduate work. I think the schools could be better, but for those willing to learn the current system is not unable to facilitate them.

That argument has been made many times recently. I think that most conservatives have realized that they are too small a group to affect government or politics. The future of conservatism is finding ways to avoid the government and its heavy hand as much as possible.

Look at home schooling as a model of how conservatives will function in the future. Middle class parents wasted decades trying to get the public schools to improve and they finally realized that the schools were not going to improve. Thus, they would a way to improve their situation without really getting involved in politics.

I think the US is still chock full of morally decent, non-sloganeering, non-shouting “true” conservatives.

It’s just that they have the good sense to steer well clear of most everything to do with politics.

Also, I think, he lays a religious foundation for his worldview so he can claim the high moral ground when he excludes those he finds distasteful.

The writer you may be looking for is Nathaniel Hawthorne, though he is not overtly political.

By the way, in regard to the title of this post, be careful what you wish for. Contemporary conservatism has nothing to do with Kirk’s outlook.