What is Conservatism?

 The Republican Party is the Conservative party, and I am a conservative.

What does that mean?  Conservatism is not an ideology as such but an approach to society and government based on certain principles.

Safeguarding the individual, protecting his rights as a human being, is the primary focus of government.  Those rights flow from his individuality – not his sex, race or ethnicity.

The individual thrives best in a family, in a community which inculcates into each member a sense of responsibility to the community and fellow humans in the exercise of his rights.  Without that, the society withers and so do the individual’s rights.

Human nature needs to be channeled by positive social forces including religion, tradition and the mores of the broader community.

Humans, by nature, strive to control and dominate.  The survival of a free society requires that limits be imposed on the reach of government.  “Power tends to corrupt,” said British statesman Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Respect for tradition does not require a refusal to change but it should serve as a caution.  Tradition exists for reasons that may, or may not, still be valued.

Human nature resists change – revolutionary in particular.  When change is deemed necessary, a “slow goes it” approach is far more likely to succeed than prompt implementation of drastic change.

Human nature prevents the perfection of man.  Utopian schemes, therefore, are always doomed to failure.

The Way Back

If The Sensible Conservative  is right that abuse of language is at the root of America’s dreadful polarization, reestablishing mores of acceptable verbal conduct must be the way back to civil times.

The object is certainly not to promote uniformity of thought.  Of course, differences of opinions will persist.  That’s human nature.  Rather the aim is to remove the personal attacks and nasty name-calling from America’s social and political conversations which are so corrosive to national unity.

The following thoughts are not polished but may be thought-provoking and that’s a start.

          *  What about public service campaigns promoting civility?  Such efforts had an impact on reducing the social acceptability of smoking, for instance.

          *   Media support – News broadcasters should start calling out both entertainers and politicians for using “inappropriate language”.

          *  Entertainers should announce that they won’t participate in the verbal swamp.  That will take courage.  Their popularity and financial prosperity may be at risk.  But maybe the response of their fans will be a surprise.  They, too, undoubtedly have been victims of the reigning culture’s nastiness.

          *  Sports figures.  Their success is anchored by their performance on playing courts and fields, not by the number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers they possess.  So the exercise of courage shouldn’t be so hard.  Countering Colin Kapernick, formerly  of the NFL, won’t some players “stand up” for America?

          *  Religion is no longer the same potent force in this culture it used to be (the rising millennial class is very secular), but one senses abdication of whatever moral authority it still possesses.  Speak social truth from the pulpit.

          *  When the Left absorbs the lesson that it, too, is damaged by the   practitioners of coarseness, it will join the fight and discourage those on their “side” who have previously received encouragement for their miscreant conduct.

          *  Businesses decide to halt the sales of offending products (containing “bad” language advertising it).  Of course, putting wise social policy ahead of profits is a hard-sell.  To be sure, in our mainly free economy, others will rush to fill the “need”.  But the proscription is a statement about social acceptability and that would be distinctly positive.

This list is certainly not definitive.  And perhaps not realistic.  Maybe this genie can’t be put back in the bottle.  But don’t we need to try for America’s future?