Defining American Conservatism

Jonah Goldberg takes a stab at bottling the essence of American conservatism -- quite successfully, I think. Here's a taste, but you should go read it all:

One of the problems with the term “conservative” is that unlike, say, “socialist” or even “progressive,” it can mean wildly different things in different cultures. Samuel Huntington made this point in his brilliant 1957 essay “Conservatism as an Ideology.” A conservative in America wants to conserve radically different things than a conservative in Saudi Arabia, Russia, or France does. Even British conservatives -- our closest ideological cousins -- want to preserve the monarchy, an institution we fought a revolution to get rid of. In the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the ones who wanted to preserve and defend the Bolshevik Revolution.

America’s founding doctrine is properly understood as classical liberalism -- or until the progressives stole the label, simply “liberalism.” Until socialism burst on the scene in Europe, liberalism was universally understood as the opposite of conservatism. That’s because European conservatism sought to defend and maintain monarchy, aristocracy, and even feudalism. The American Founding, warts and all, was the apotheosis of classical liberalism, and conservatism here has always been about preserving it. That’s why Friedrich Hayek, in his fantastic -- and fantastically misunderstood -- essay “Why I am Not a Conservative” could say that America was the one polity where one could be a conservative and a defender of the liberal tradition.

That puts into words something about the American Left which has always burned my britches: they love to steal the cloak of patriotism and wrap themselves in it. Defining themselves as classical liberals -- which they most certainly are not -- allows them to seize the moral high ground, posturing as the protectors of the downtrodden, the spiritual descendents of the Founders, when they are in fact petty tyrants who crave not freedom for all but power over the lives of others.

These smug, self-righteous aggrandizers of personal power love nothing more than smirking at we conservatives and making waspish comments about subjects which they believe, in their arrogance, we lack the intelligence to comprehend. The recent history of the Democrat party is laced with this sort of pompous behavior, which invariably results in disaster. Allow me to present an example from my recent reading.

In 1965, one of Robert McNamara's undersecretaries was visiting Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were beginning to deploy SA-2 surface-to-air missiles around Hanoi, which would significantly increase the risk to American pilots. When one of General Westmoreland's staff, an air war planner, pointed out to this lefty underling that it might be a good idea to plan strikes against those sites before they became operational, the arrogant ass who had never seen a day of combat sneeringly replied: "Surely you're not stupid enough to believe they'll actually shoot them at our planes? It's political posturing by the Soviets, nothing more. They're just there for show."

By the end of 1965, dozens of American planes had been shot down by SA-2s, yet the Johnson administration still refused to give permission to retaliate. When they finally did so more than a year later, there were hundreds of operational SAMs in North Vietnam, clustered around every priority target in the country. The rest, as they say, is history. Except for the dead pilots, of course. There is no history for them, only an early grave. They are the real victims -- not of external communist aggression, but of internal socialist incompetence. Today, the descendents of those incompetents still spit on the graves of the men who died due to the poor decisions of their predecessors. They wipe the spittle from their lips and believe themselves moral heroes. There is much mutual back-slapping about how "right" they were about Vietnam.

And the dead pilots are still dead, unable to tell their side of the story.

A refusal to acknowledge limitations combined with an unjustified faith in their own perceived intelligence is the fatal flaw of the American Left. Hand them the reins of power for too long and they'll have half of the country in gulags. They are the political equivalent of eight-year olds with packs of matches: given the opportunity, they will happily set the Constitution on fire just to watch it burn. It is why we as American conservatives -- the defenders of true liberalism -- must fight them every day, tooth-and-nail, without respite. It is a never-ending battle, the price we pay for seeing clearly. It must be its own reward, for losing brings only enslavement to the collective.

Proselytize, donate to campaigns, volunteer, or support organizations who share your goals --- but most of all VOTE. Don't cop out by sitting at home and claiming that "none of the candidates deserve to win" or "I don't support the views of either of them." That's nihilistic tripe and intellectually lazy. Political listlessness is the best friend of the Leftists. It plays right into their hands and allows them to win by default. If we are destined to lose this fight, so be it. But I am a United States Marine, and I will not placidly accept whatever fate the petty tyrants of the Left choose to shovel in my direction.