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February 22, 2005
Conservatism: My Definition
Jonah Goldberg wonders about the true definition of conservatism:
Moreover, to expect normal Americans to accept philosophical denominations whole is entirely unreasonable. Heck, we can't even get most of NRO's readers to agree on what's conservative and what isn't, never mind the writers.
My own definition of conservatism has two necessary, but possibly not sufficient, conditions:
1) There are no perfect humans. (Call it original sin, if you're so inclined.) Therefore since no one is perfect, any group, government, plan, organization, corporation, army, diplomacy or battle plan also cannot be perfect.
2) The rights of the individual are more important than the rights of a (any) group.
From 1) we get the time-tested tactic of the left: Set up a utopian strawman, and blast away at the U.S. when it doesn't measure up to perfection. A perfect example is the Abu Ghraib scandal--a localized outbreak of military lawlessness in a poorly-led outfit gets extrapolated onto the entire U.S. military operation in Iraq. Naturally, the exemplary conduct of combat operations in regard to preserving civilian lives, along with the massive rebuilding efforts, is ignored.
The second of my conditions follows from the self-evident superiority of judiciously regulated free enterprise capitalism to the stifling, or murderous, confines of socialism and communism. It applies equally to the more current battle between "cultural" Marxism--the Chomskys, Zinns, and Churchills of the world--and the ideas of the Founders.
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