“Men, I still think, ought to be weighed not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.” – Coleridge.
The philosophical Conservative: “The man who works out a consistent and timeless generalization applying to the behavior of men in politics.”
This quote comes from Crane Brinton, courtesy of my dog-eared copy of Russel Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which includes the other two definitions Brinton distinguished; the conservative of the dictionary, who accepts things as they are, and the conservative who, contemptuous of his changing times, idealizes the past.
The Left, be they either the dogmatic or the pragmatic genus– the latter being a rhetorical narrative designed by the dogmatic left to confuse people into thinking that the Progressives are not actually all a bunch of commie-pinko wealth-levelers obsessed with socialist/Marxist redistribution, would like the majority of people most likely to be fooled by the word pragmatism to think all conservatives are the sort that are contemptuous of changing times, and idealize the past.
On the contrary. Most of us are…”The man (or woman) who works out a consistent and timeless generalization applying to the behavior of men in politics.”
Put another way, evil exists in all mens hearts (yes, women too) and without a moral or at least limiting counterweight (which no government of man will ever provide or sustain willingly) even the most well meaning public servant, left unchecked, can find a path to tyranny, and that history has already taught us every lesson we need to know to prevent it.
Democrats would like you to think that modernity requires progressive ideas to deal with modern problems. But science tells us that human nature has not changed in 70,000 years. The Chess pieces may have iPods, MRI’s, Online-bill pay, and the board may come in hundreds of new colors, heated squares with GPS and surround sound, but the pieces themsleves…they all still move the same way.
Conservatives do not desire old ways. They do not even desire things to stay as they are today. Conservatives view the arc of human history as a series of warnings. That human nature does not mix well with government. In large enough quantities, even under the best of intentions, it always ends in poverty and tyranny. But a small central government, with authorities enumerated and limited, a Republic with powers properly separated, has proven to be the best hope for securing the rule of law, property rights, and individual liberty, and the greatest equality of opportunity in the scope of human experience.
Conservatives are not looking backwards. We understand that the only way to move forward is to secure the ground so that everyone who chooses to can move forward. Progressives, on the other hand, are looking backward to the era of aristocracy, of a privileged bureaucratic class that makes laws to which they are not beholden. Of a superior elitist central government, untouchable by the common man who must not only pay for it, but bears the yoke of its regulatory weight; a man who cannot move forward without the government’s permission, on ground the central planners will take from him at the slightest provocation.
