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Everywhere In Chains

One of the difficulties conservatives will have in assessing where they have gone wrong is the sometimes bizarre ideas they have of what conservatism means. For example, here is Rick Moran in an otherwise spmewhat sensible post decrying ideology and calling for self-criticism: Classic conservative principles are timeless; immutable tenets that have inspired great changes […]

One of the difficulties conservatives will have in assessing where they have gone wrong is the sometimes bizarre ideas they have of what conservatism means. For example, here is Rick Moran in an otherwise spmewhat sensible post decrying ideology and calling for self-criticism:

Classic conservative principles are timeless; immutable tenets that have inspired great changes in government over the last 400 years and spoken passionately and plainly to the needs and hopes of ordinary people. Since the end of World War II, those classical principles have informed a devastating critique of the welfare state, presenting a reasoned and logical alternative to statism and dependency. Conservatism has stood for human liberty based on the fundamental idea of natural law; that from his first breath, man is born free.

But conservatism has gone off the rails, becoming in some respects a parody of itself.

The notion that man is born free is an idea that is well-suited for parody, because it is plainly not true. I’m not sure how repeating a false idea as one’s core principle is going to do any good. Moran’s passage is as concise a statement of the view that conservatism=classical liberalism as I have seen in a while, and if this is what movement conservatives are trying to get back to I am not sure why they are bothering.

400 years? With respect to cultural and religious patrimony, that is far too recent, and with respect to political philosophy it is entirely anachronistic to speak of conservatism 400 years ago. Liberty is an artifact of civilization, as even one famous non-conservative of the right knew, and it is not something that comes naturally. Men were not born with liberty, but had to earn it, work for it and struggle to retain it. It can be lost or diminished, and it is so far from the natural state of man that it is difficult to state strongly enough how wrong it is to say that “man is born free.”

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