Is there any doubt anymore about the essence of conservatism? It is love of the state and its leader above all else, above family, above community, above country, above God, and certainly above liberty.

————–

He perfectly represents the military state, the police state, and the corporate state. He perfectly embodies the conservative philosophy, as it has always existed, minus some mislabeled aberrations within tiny niches of the conservative movement during various short deviations in the 20th century.

————–

Now, I know plenty of libertarian folks, and libertarian-leaning folks, who continue to call themselves conservatives and who don’t love the state, who do in fact love family, community, country, God and liberty more than the state. I don’t mean any offense to them, but I strongly and respectfully disagree with their self-applied label. Just because I love vegetables doesn’t mean I’m a vegetarian—except, perhaps, according to Brad Edmonds’s funny lexicon—and just because you have some values that conservatives claim to have doesn’t mean you’re a conservative. The bottom line, in my view, is whether or not you love the state. If you do, you’re a conservative. If you don’t, you’re a liberal or libertarian. Everyone in the middle, including the socialist left and the protectionist paleo right, is just confused. ~Anthony Gregory

What is Mr. Gregory’s proof that the “essence of conservatism” is love of the state? Michael Savage and other talk radio fools have been queueing up to support the latest NSA program. Well, these people would do that, and almost all of them have no idea what conservatism is or what it would mean. Michael Savage has of late eschewed the label conservative and taken up that of nationalist (which Savage certainly is). In Mr. Gregory’s unfortunate judgement, liberals are less enamoured of the state than conservatives. Perhaps Mr. Gregory means liberals from the 19th century. Most left-liberals today have a certain love for the state; they are more prone to be suspicious about the military, but not because they do not in some sense love and believe in the state. They were perfectly willing to make the same lame and incredible justifications when one of theirs was in power, as Mr. Gregory knows full well. Obviously, the frauds who masquerade as conservatives today are very much like these left-liberals in much of domestic policy and are as far removed from genuine conservatives in their enthusiasm for secret surveillance programs and the security state as can be.

If conservatism in this country has anything to do with constitutionalism, and it does, conservatives will not be supporters of “the military state, the police state and the corporate state.” In the 19th century in Europe and America, it was liberals who took the apparatus of existing states and turned them into far more invasive mechanisms of regulation, centralisation and “rational” legislation. Conservatives typically opposed such uniformity and homogenisation and the forces of consolidation that are always embodied among the Freisinnigen, Red Republicans and their heirs. If Mr. Gregory finds today’s nationalists obnoxious and offensive, he is welcome to join the long tradition of conservatives from Burke to Metternich to Jefferson Davis who rejected various incarnations of nationalism and consolidation. But that would require him to recognise that there are legitimate as well as illegitimate governments, a move that libertarians at LRC are never going to make. So it is much easier to write off an entire political tradition that, unfortunately, he does not seem to understand very well.

So Mr. Gregory and, presumably, the others at LRC mean no offense to the good conservatives (who are really libertarians) when they equate conservative with “lover of the state,” because those good folks who think they are conservatives and don’t fit into this definition aren’t conservatives at all. How generous. In other words, embrace the most radical rejection of all public authority or you either love the state (i.e., you are a conservative) or you are confused.