And Rightly So

February 25, 2008

In my last column, I argued that conservatism wasn’t just an alliance of convenience among a handful of disparate groups (libertarians, war hawks, and culture warriors) who are poised to rend our movement into competing constituencies. In this column, I want to talk about a fundamental insight that, in one form or another, informs the thinking across a broad spectrum of conservatism.

If the original leftist insight is, "Things don’t have to be the way they are; they could be better," then the original conservative insight is, "Yes, but don’t forget, they could also be worse."

Conservative insistence that we should hold onto "the permanent things" isn’t simply temperamental timidity, unexamined prejudice, or irresponsible nostalgia. It’s -- among other valuable things -- healthy humility before the accumulated wisdom of the human race.

That humility is a great strength of the conservative movement, even just on the practical political side. Dan Flynn’s much-anticipated forthcoming Conservative History of the American Left (which will be a Main Selection for us in April) demonstrates the high cost that the Left has always paid for disdaining the wisdom of the past. The American Left has repeatedly crashed and burned because Leftists were constitutionally opposed to learning anything from the mistakes of earlier generations of Leftists.

Even those on the Right who probably respect the past the least -- the neo-est of the neocons and those libertarians who value liberty above anything else -- have never been so abysmally foolish as not to trust anyone over 30.

Both of our Main Selections -- Grover Norquist’s Leave Us Alone and Al Regnery’s Upstream -- are animated by conservative respect for the past. Regnery gives us an informative and inspiring history of our own movement. And Norquist draws on the experience of a lifetime in political activism -- from the Reagan era through the first elections in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall to current-day Washington -- to show how conservatives can win again.

But deeper than practical political advantage is the value of understanding that human prosperity, freedom, and happiness are never going to be assured by scientific discoveries, political schemes, or newly invented ideologies. Instead, those goods depend on respect for fundamental principles that we learn from the inherited wisdom of mankind.

Conservatives are for private property not just because we want to keep what we have but because we believe in God-given rights. We’re for free markets not simply because some of us hope to become rich -- and not just because of the conclusive evidence that "planning" destroys wealth, either -- but because we know that men are meant to be free. We defend marriage and fight pornography not only because "studies show" that traditional families shape healthier children, but because we know that sex is for more than pleasure. We’re patriots not out of chauvinism but because we see that it’s right to love your country and because we believe that the principles on which America was founded are real, universal principles. And we’re opposed to the scandal that is modern education not just because we don’t want to see young people incompetent in math and reading but indoctrinated in Leftist politics -- but also because we don’t want teachers ensuring that the next generation is unacquainted with "the permanent things" that they could be learning about from the great thinkers of the past.

Carl Middleton’s wonderful Great Quotations That Shaped Western Civilization, is an introduction to those things.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com