New Gallup poll finds that more Americans (40 percent) identify themselves as conservatives than liberal or moderate. I suppose that’s good news, but I’m skeptical. What do people mean by “conservative” anyway? If I were asked this question in a poll, I don’t know how I would answer. The straightforward answer is, of course, yes, I’m a conservative. But if “conservative” is shorthand for “I support the Republican Party and its policies,” then I’m at best inconsistently conservative. Would that make me a moderate? Maybe, according to this measurement — but I can, and would, make a case from philosophically conservative principles for taking stances on certain issues that, by conventional measure, would be labeled moderate or liberal.

The problem with this is that you risk turning into one of those people who ends up saying, “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me.” Around about 1970, a certain generation of robust liberals of the 1950s and early 1960s vintage realized that what constituted liberalism had changed so much that they were now on the political right. Hence neoconservatism. It would have been strange for them to keep insisting that they were the “true liberals.” Standards change.

At the same time, it’s lazy to assume that what constitutes conservatism (or liberalism) is whatever the positions of that side’s loudest partisans say it is. Our media culture rewards articulate spokesmen who take more or less extreme positions, though (important caveat!) within the mainstream. Every political school or tradition needs to re-examine its first principles, and to reconsider its own policies and positions in light of both those principles and changing conditions.

That’s stating a banality, of course, but it’s frustrating how quasi-theological so many of us on the Right are about what constitutes true conservatism. Kirk said conservatism is “the negation of ideology,” by which he meant … well, here:

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.

There’s more to this, of course; follow the link for more. I wonder about Kirk’s statement that it’s “almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such,” in light of the Gallup poll. If 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative, my question is the same as I started this post with: What counts as a conservative, anyway?

I ramble. It’s Friday afternoon. Over to you…