Ten Conservative Principles

Russell Kirk

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives' convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles.

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word "conservative" as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.") A people's historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives' convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims. In various editions of my book The Conservative Mind I have listed certain canons of conservative thought -- the list differing somewhat from edition to edition; in my anthology The Portable Conservative Reader I offer variations upon this theme. Now I present to you a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine. In fine, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era. The following ten articles of belief reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays.

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.

Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.

It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society -- whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society -- no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention -- a word much abused in our time -- that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions -- why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke's reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to he gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription -- that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity -- including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man's petty private rationality.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent -- or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: "the ceremony of innocence is drowned." The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.

Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities, puts strongly the case for private property, as distinguished from communal property: "Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled." For the institution of several property -- that is, private property -- has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one's labor; to be able to see one's work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one's property to one's posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one's own -- these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction -- why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.

For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one's fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good -- so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone's hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite -- these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

Such, then, are ten principles that have loomed large during the two centuries of modern conservative thought. Other principles of equal importance might have been discussed here: the conservative understanding of justice, for one, or the conservative view of education. But such subjects, time running on, I must leave to your private investigation.

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

Russell Kirk. "Ten Conservative Principles." adapted from The Politics of Prudence (ISI Books, 1993). Reprinted from the article in Catholic Education Center. Learn more about Russell Kirk by visiting the Russell Kirk Center. For more than forty years, Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America's leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk's 1953 book The Conservative Mind "gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement." Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio. His books include The Conservative Mind, The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, The American Cause, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, Redeeming the Time, The Politics of Prudence and Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales.

Up From Conservatism

Reid Buckley

America needs a better Right than this GOP can provide

Way back in the early 1950s, when I was in my twenties, a favorite pastime was to take the first sentence of that day’s lead editorial in the New York Times and, putting the newspaper aside, deduce the rest of the commentary. If I was unable to draw that deduction from the first sentence, I went to the second sentence. If I failed again, I betook myself outside and chopped half a cord of wood in expiation of my obtuseness.

The acceptable thinking of those days—the conventional wisdom; the Walter Lippmanesque by way of Ed Murrow liberal cant—was so predictable that it was easy, young and callow as I was, to anticipate at breakfast what that evening, at cocktails, the earnest pillars of society in my flossy northwestern Connecticut town would be pontificating. They seemed all to have graduated from Princeton or Dartmouth, from Smith or Vassar or Sarah Lawrence. They wore Bendels and Bergdorf. The pearl necklace and the regimental striped tie were their signatures. Oh, their solemnity! How avid their desire to be respectable. They could oooh and aaah over a Picasso yet fail to gain a single insight into the evils of modernity. They could listen to the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich and learn nothing about Joe Stalin. I fled to Spain.

This is what I fear establishment thinking among conservatives is becoming. Dull. Derivative. Predictable. Lacking in zip and sting and mordancy—in the agenbite of inwit. And sometimes also emptied of libertarian principle.

We conservatives have our own New York Times, our own cathedral of acceptable right-wing wisdom, the Wall Street Journal. Paul Gigot is the latest in a distinguished line of chief editorial writers, and he is almost always informative. During the dispiriting demarche of the George W. Bush administration, moreover, he displayed the sterling virtue of holding the feet of Republicans in the Congress to the fire of conservative principles, which that unprincipled breed of nincompoops didn’t enjoy, and for which they paid in 2008. But scanning the editorial pages of the WSJ or papers from the several erudite conservative and libertarian fonts, I often feel that I can play the old game: I can foretell from the first couple of sentences where that editorial or op-ed or conservative think-tank essay is going—what tried and true and trite right-wing lessons can be gleaned from it. Reading the National Review and American Spectator issues on the electoral defeat this past fall impresses one with how so many good, well-meaning, and intelligent commentators are able to miss the point.

I cry within myself, where is the inspiration? Where is the audacity? And I wonder often whether the young radical today reading conservative publications does not suffer from the tedium that suffocated me as a young man reading the liberal press.

Tell me quickly: what is new in conservative political thinking since 1955? Can you come up with a single tenet that rises fresh to the mind in treating vicissitudes that were undreamed of back when my brother founded National Review—the worldwide torrent of the Internet, bursting through ethnic, national, and ideological barriers, maybe reducing all philosophies of government to chauvinism; or the impact of economic globalization, which snatches some Third World peoples from penury but as suddenly dumps them back into it; or the acceptance of infanticide and euthanasia by a majority of the American people, upon whom, according to populist conservative creed—descending from Ronald Reagan, intoned from all platforms—we conservatives exhort ourselves to depend; or the religious and imperial irredentist menace of Islamic terrorism, which threatens a 100-year war of civilizations? What have conservatives to hurl at these urgent historic challenges other than the same bromides? For 40 years, smug, snide right-wingers have made merry mocking Greenpeace fanatics and ecological doomsayers without learning a blessed thing about the precariousness of the ecology and the effect of human action (not to speak of avarice) on it, as when we promiscuously exfoliate the rain forests or condemn yet one more green acre on the southeastern shore of New Jersey to the desolation of heedless urban development. We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the antics of idiots and the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers that their hysterical rhetoric obscures. The climate is most probably changing, and the human impact on it should be studied.

When last did you hear a conservative spokesman deplore yet another six-lane highway, yet another fast-food alley, yet another graceless subdivision, yet another Super Wal-Mart or Lowe’s that sucks the life out of small village businesses, yet one more onslaught against neighborhood and nature that is masked under the name of progress? Unless it is a bridge in Alaska from nowhere to nowhere, you will not hear the deepest red-dyed congressman denounce the progressive uglification of our natural inheritance, as though beauty is of no concern. Have you flown recently from Newport News to Boston at 25,000 feet on a clear day and gazed down upon the horror of American civilization? What man hath wrought! What we have done to this beautiful land? Dear God, forgive us! But when last did you hear a conservative oppose a new mall because it is ugly, an affront to the eye, accustoming thousands of human beings to dehumanizing blows against the aesthetic sense until it is benumbed? The good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparably joined. One cannot damage one without doing harm to the others. Those who fail to comprehend this are morally in error on the dialectical front, though they may be personally virtuous.

Not all development is bad, not all logging is reprehensible, and some eyesores cannot be avoided. Industrialization, which provides surcease from want, can neither be stopped nor should it be. But within the hysteria and exaggeration of political activists, mostly of the Left, too often supported by cooked science, there is often a kernel of legitimate concern, be it economical, sociological, aesthetic, or environmental. We conservatives have shut our ears.

How stupid. Full 480 moons have my brother James and I bemoaned this cretinous yet apparently incurable kneejerk conservative response to abuses of nature, real or alleged. Indifference to environmental damage is not only saddening, it’s a deplorable exhibition of urban-bred removal from reality. This should be our cause, for pity’s sake, not theirs. Too many conservative solons were city-born, methinks, and would be terrified to spend a single night in the wilds of Central Park, where a screech owl might whistle at them.

On most of the political issues, George Will makes one think. My brother Bill’s columns were classically inquisitive and inimitably analytical. Bob Tyrrell and P.J. O’Rourke are puckish. Ann Coulter is our very own Shirley MacLaine in terms of wackiness (though not quite so weird). Yet have we not slipped behind the phenomenology of the postmodern, post-Christian world?

Are we not perhaps talking too much to ourselves? Are we not writing too much for the applause of our fellows? Is any of us—with few exceptions—saying anything that we have not heard before, and are we not—all of us—submitting intellectually to conservative political correctness and the inertia of the modern super state?

Perhaps I have been living too long as a semi-recluse in the rural South. Maybe I spend too much time on my tractor. I am a temperamental maverick—which can also be boring and is often a cheap, posturing, faux-cynical attitude. But I become ill at ease when anything I may say is politely received. I am not proposing that 21st-century conservatives be clinically half mad, like Mr. Dean or doddering Mr. Byrd of West Virginia or the several unforgettable conservatives of the past whom I was lucky to know—say Fritz Wilhelmsen, of the weeping left eye and the radical, impious, universal intelligence, or Willmoore Kendall, who never lost a polemic but could not keep a friend. In their lunacy, there was a rare precious brilliance. Nor am I suggesting that conservatives must once again be deemed by society as uncouth, though I feel that it ill-becomes true conservative independence of spirit to feel comfortable in the Rose Garden, in the private chambers of the speaker of the House, in a big corporation boardroom, in dining rooms where finger bowls are served before dessert, or in any other center of establishmentarian power and complacence.

Please understand me, I am not holding that there is a Euclidian equivalency between boorishness and independence of mind, between the social outcast and genius. But the persecuted Church is oft the true Church. The worldly Church is too often the corrupted Church.

So with the conservative movement. We must ask ourselves: is there in the thousands upon thousands of pages of conservative scholarship being ground out every year sufficient original critical thinking about conservative premises, conservative social and political principles?

I am not asking this question rhetorically. I don’t know the answer. What is certain is that I do not find the post-Reagan/Buckley revelatory iconoclastic vision I seek in the pages of any conservative journal today, though I glimpse snatches of it in a Daniel Henninger or a Charles Krauthammer, and I am deeply respectful of such as Michael Novak and Roger Scruton. Charles Murray possesses a rare original mind, but we cannot claim him as our own—would that we could. Has there been published in conservative literature a single scholarly tome as provocative as Brent Bozell’s essay in National Review over 40 years ago on the tension between virtue and liberty, an ideological dilemma that has never been bridged, but only, under the Soviet threat during the Cold War, glossed in the interest of unity? (Bozell’s famous essay was, in essence, a carefully reasoned restatement of Plato’s dictum that money does not come from virtue, but from virtue comes money and every other good of man, including personal freedom. The sole justification for freedom, in Bozell’s view, is that freedom permits human beings to act virtuously in the sight of God, to do God’s will, not theirs. In those early days of the renaissance of the conservative movement, when all allies were precious—and a precious few—this reasoning put him at odds with libertarian conservatives and was thus, for its divisiveness, respectfully read though not pursued. But the argument has been vindicated by the solipsistic permissiveness of the sexual revolution of the New Left under the aegis of libertarianism.)

I wonder—I am nagged by the doubt—has the disheartening failure of the conservative movement on the domestic front, dating from the second Reagan administration, been anywhere sufficiently acknowledged or analyzed by our great conservative institutions of scholarly learning? Has sodomy become the groovy kinkiness in our society? Is prayer ever to be restored to our schools? Are the unborn in America never to be safeguarded? And our infirm or derelict elderly—are they now to be at the mercy of the avariciousness of their heirs or the parsimony of the state? Will ever an amendment to the Constitution win through defining the Republic now and forever as Christian bred and born and deliberately affirmed at the founding, putting the quietus to secularists, who seek to desacralize society as well as life?

Recall heroic General Armistead pinning his hat on the tip of his sword and—thrusting the blade high, yelling to his brave men to follow—charging through the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, at once to fall mortally wounded. That’s been called the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Did the high-water mark of the 20th-century conservative movement of the United States take place back in December 1995/January 1996 when—in what might as well have been a railroad car’s tobacco-sodden men’s room, among the cuspidors—squat, puffy Newt Gingrich stonewalled smooth, sleazy Bill Clinton?

Judging from the political deportment of the Republican Congresses and the White House in domestic matters since that time, has anyone had the audacity, courage, and honesty to tell the bald truth—which is that the Republican Party has failed the cause to which my brother Bill and so many other brilliant souls—Frank Meyer, Jim Burnham, John Chamberlain, to mention just a few—gave unstintingly of their lives? Is any establishment conservative organ today declaring unequivocally that conservatives who have any respect at all for the political philosophy they profess must forswear the Republican Party and on many major issues break ranks with government-trusting (and agnostic) neocons? Or is that fresh young mind this minute deciding that whatever the right wing says about anything is tired polemics from which candor and the imagination have long since leaked out?’

When I ponder the future of American culture, I wonder, first, whether in the future there will ever again be respect for truth in this Republic or whether we conservatives, like the vainglorious Greeks 2,500 years ago, are so tainted intellectually and corrupted philosophically that we have lost the capacity for critical thinking about ourselves, relying on euphemisms in place of truth.

Today we are trespassing on vital conservative and libertarian tenets without compunction. Here are three.

1. We Americans have turned our backs on the founding ideal of small government. The polecat is out of the bag: charming neocon Fred Barnes published a book candidly calling George W. Bush a “big government” conservative. With the president’s blessing, Republicans in the hallowed halls of Congress fattened a monster state and empowered it at every turn without pausing to consider whither we are going, what we are doing, or what the consequences may be to the Republic down the road. Democrats have now succeeded on a platform that leans ever more toward the corporate state. Must we not ask ourselves: is small government out of date? Is that battle lost to the tides of historical forces and to the rampant march of technology?

2. Though reluctant, Republicans have submitted to the takeover of the economy by the federal government, a foray into the corporate state from which we may never recover. Yet to my knowledge no conservative voice has articulated the ringing indictment that such highhanded action merits, and the American people have submitted meekly. As I write, events on this front are raging more quickly than inflation can destroy an economy.

3. Putative conservatives in the White House and in the Republican Congress plunged the country further into debt through legislation such as the farm bill and the new Medicare entitlement paying for prescription drugs, in the meantime bowing to the perpetuation of established entitlements. Yet no conservative voice was raised to bring up first principles by showing why Social Security et al. are inimical to the rationale for republican government and must be phased out or subjected to radical reform. Many conservative voices have written scathingly about the financial woes of the present Social Security administration—which are apocalyptical—but to my knowledge none has yet proposed that Republicans abandon the New Deal-era concept all together.

In my opinion, such candor is necessary. It may be understandable—no less disgusting—that our politicians do not have the stomach for it. But independent conservative intellectuals are keepers of the flame or they are burnt cartridges. It is insufficient that our conservative organs and think tanks denounce the fiscal lunacies of Social Security while never explicitly grounding themselves in political science, never declaring that we must abolish Social Security as it is currently conceived. Tant pis. One has to suppose they are afraid of sounding anachronistic, of talking themselves into irrelevance, of being disparaged as freaks from the lunatic fringe. But that prudence, that tactical wisdom, seductive as it may be perceived, submits without a fight to the accommodationist politics of the Nelson Rockefeller/Dwight Eisenhower GOP of the 1950s and ’60s. Those politics are every bit as craven, mistaken, defeatist, and unworthy today as they were back then. My brother’s National Review was born to stand athwart history, not to tickle the teats of the belly of the beast Leviathan as it strides over us.

On the political level, then, what will be the future of American civilization as far as we conservatives are concerned? Why, of knaves and charlatans on both sides of the aisle driving the Republic headlong into a metastatic colossus of a state in which the citizen has been reduced to a hapless serf; in which blunt, honest language has been euphemized out of existence; and in which a bland and servile acceptance of the inevitability of Big Brother is the received wisdom.

Where are our Friedrich Hayeks of The Road to Serfdom, our Eric Voegelins of The New Science of Politics, our Russell Kirks of The Conservative Mind? Where is our philosopher? Meantime, on the practical front, what can conservatives do? The very first thing is to dissociate from the Republican Party, which has become an albatross around the neck of integrity.

Reid Buckley is founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking and author, most recently, of An American Family: The Buckleys.

Carbonations

David Warren

It is often cold in January, at this latitude, so it is perhaps unfair to mock the global warming alarmists at this time of year. That it is an exceptionally cold winter, right around the northern hemisphere, after an exceptionally cold one, right around the southern hemisphere, after an exceptionally cold one, right around the northern -- is perhaps worthy of note. But this is only by comparison to recent years that were warmer.

The average temperature on the surface of the planet is obviously dropping at the moment (as the Google-searcher may quickly determine through innumerable links to environmentalists trying to explain this away), but that is still anecdotal. The weather works on heat differentials, after all, not on arbitrary statistical averages; and both overall, and regionally, there are cycles within cycles within cycles. Choose 1970 as your base year and we have "long-term global warming." Choose 1940 instead and we have longer-term cooling. Choose six million years B.C. and you will see that we "ain't seen nothin' yet."

Both Barack Obama in the U.S., and Stephen Harper up here, are on the cusp of announcing ambitious new "climate" plans founded upon last decade's laughably "settled climate science." They may be chastened by the economic downturn, and even by the progressive disintegration of the global warming lobby, but the bureaucratic machinery to fight "global warming" is a very great ship, and it is too late to steer her off the shoals. The only new thing will be the excuses.

The current excuse is that governments are on the verge of legislating millions of new "green jobs." This imposture will work only as long as people refuse to devote the necessary four minutes to thinking the matter through.

The only way to reduce energy consumption is by penalizing it in some way; generally by driving up prices, but occasionally by ham-fisted legal action. Driving up prices does not save jobs, at least, not in that part of the economy responsive to market forces (which generates the taxes to support the rest). It can only cost jobs -- as energy itself, and energy-intensive products, are priced out of reach to those whose wealth is diminished. That wealth is diminished, like a candle burning at both ends, by inevitably higher taxes at one end, and inevitably higher prices at the other.

A great deal of theatrical flatulence has been directed against the drivers of SUVs, and other stage villains of the global warming propaganda. It is as reasonable to attribute excess CO2 generation to Al Gore's 191-megawatt mansion in Nashville, or to the footprint of Barack Obama's inauguration party (575 million pounds of carbon, according to the U.S. Institute for Liberty, equivalent to 60,000 years of fossil-fuel burning in a house like Al Gore's).

Arguments that hose the reader with a large number of de-contextualized facts are used by all sides in all contemporary debates, but especially by the side that benefits less from context.

Cars, regardless of size, and how they draw their power, are a big issue, and so is heating and air conditioning. Vladimir Putin's sick little power game with Ukraine and Europe, in which he has cut off Russia's supply of natural gas to them in the middle of a wickedly cold winter, should help bring home, at least to the Europeans, what energy is used for. It is used to cook food, and to avoid freezing to death; or to provide alternatives to walking ten miles to work. These are the job-rich activities that "government action" will restrict and curtail.

And while the penalties against energy consumption may eventually lead to technological innovations that increase efficiency, so would any kind of prospective shortage. The difference is that when the government wades in, it distorts investment in new technologies, by making the leading criterion for them, how to satisfy government regulators. It is pure coincidence when this also reduces energy use, overall. The usual effect is to transfer the burden -- from efficient gasoline engines on the spot to distant coal-fired electricity generating plants, for instance.

The myth that a government can somehow "create" jobs or wealth has been deeply inculcated, not only by governments but by the many vested interests that profit from the transfer of other people's wealth to themselves, through mixed-economy shell games. Governments take wealth that was created elsewhere and "spread it around," in the U.S. [recently elected] President quaint but accurate phrase. Don't be fooled: this is also what thieves do.

Here Comes the Sun King

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

The last was a cold night. There was no snow on the ground and yet, the leafless trees, the dry grass and the quiet landscape gave me that absolute sense of winter. Looking out of my window I thought that winter is truly filled with hope. We face the cold days and nights knowing very well that the wonders of spring are there, silently waiting to emerge and fill the world with life.

I find a parallel when I contemplate our current political and economic landscape. Americans have never seen it so bad. Winter has set over our land, a hard season has come upon us. We went through bleak times before. It was not easy after the Civil War, or during the Great Depression. But even then, there was a certain dignity and a sense of moral order. We were poor only for a season. We were deprived only of material things. Days of glory were ahead of us. Days of enormous sacrifice to be lived with courage. We faced them the best we could, instinctively knowing that we had a deep reservoir of greatness, the inheritance of our forefathers, the great men who gave us a free nation under God.

I was lost in those thoughts when I opened the Bible in this passage of the Gospel According to St. John:

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said, "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?" This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me." When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came, not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus also to death, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus. The next day a great crowd who had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!" And Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it; as it is written, "Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on an ass's colt!"

The force of John's words and the barren cold landscape outside my window seemed to have something in common. I decided to meditate on that strange parallel and I found a small treasure of hopeful thoughts. Lazarus was alive at the table, after being dead in a tomb. There is the miracle man, recovered to have supper with his family, his sisters, his friends. Jesus is there too. Life is good.

Lazarus has two sisters, Martha and Mary. One can see in both of them the generosity of the grateful. Industrious Martha is taking care of the banquet. Repentant Mary is pouring a pound of precious perfume on Jesus' feet. Finding nothing worthy of touching the feet of her Master, Mary uses her own hair to wipe the precious ointment. This exquisite form of communion remains only hers to this day. No one was ever able to repeat that act this side of Heaven. The perfume fills the room with the sweet fragrance of the oriental nard. One can imagine that the moment was perfect for all reclined at the table: Lazarus is alive, Mary is back at the feet of the Lord, and Martha is busy serving everyone. Life surrounds Jesus in this miniature image of Heaven. Yet not all are happy. The Iscariot—the traitor—laments the loss of the costly ointment. Of course he can't say "Why didn't you give me the money!" He needs a better motive other than his own greed. So he uses the poor for an excuse, saying: "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?"

John—the divine—annotates for posterity the real motivations of Judas: the Iscariot is a thief and a liar. He coveted the money and the whole heavenly image of a room filled with the free gift of life, escapes his senses.

I had a small snippet of a revelation while reading that passage: we shall always have the poor with us, and the poor can always count on scoundrels to use their plight as an excuse to get riches or power. The French revolutionaries launched the terror that killed way more poor people than rich and noble men. Lenin and Stalin killed many millions of poor mujiks. Castro's dungeons are filled not with filthy rich capitalists but merely with filthy poor men and women, their freedom stolen by traitors and liars.

Jesus has disciples to this day but so does the Iscariot.

Along with Judas there are others contemplating the scene. The religious leaders of the day are jealous of the life-giving power of the Galilean Teacher. They plan to kill Lazarus, their hearts unmoved by his resurrection and the moral renewal that Jesus instills in otherwise lost sinners like the repentant Magdalene. They want to snuff the life out of Lazarus and Jesus. Over the whole happy scene of this last public supper of Jesus, there looms the shadow of the Cross erected by envy and hate.

The following Sunday, the poor of Jerusalem will acclaim Jesus as their King. He comes among them riding the colt of an ass, a humble understated way to say "I am poor, I am one of you, I belong to you."

I thought that our country was for a while a happy place under God, where people gave life in many different ways. This land gave us the firmness our feet needed to walk straight, her soft tilled soil caressed our hands. The sun raised and set many times over her fertile plains where these new, imperfect but ever improving brotherhood of man dared to set an example of hope for all the world. Life was given in many forms: as hard, dignifying work given generously in farms and factories, while many busy loving hands like Martha's, fed and cared for millions of families at home. The land of plenty had many generous wombs ready to believe that there was an even better tomorrow. Under God there was life and there was plenty. When we were call to give our lives in distant shores, we were willing to do it because we knew instinctively that our freedom was worth the sacrifice. We had been given much and we were willing to give much. That was real hope. Hope was an everyday affair. With hope we dared to live. With hope we were willing to meet every challenge.

Still, not everyone was happy. In time a new kind of people started to emerge in the midst of all the accomplishments of the American experiment. They had always been with us, but they were not like us. You see them everyday, everywhere. Little by little they managed to convince a good number of us that there was something wrong with America. There is always a bit of truth in every lie. Yes, America was never perfect. Nothing in this world is perfect. However, America had (and still has) the ability to perfect herself and emerge stronger after every trial and tribulation. We could do it because we were—like the Magdalene—"under God" always looking up to the perfect ideal that God is. Always striving to be His worthy sons and daughters in spite of our imperfections.

The disciples of the Iscariot are never very original. Two thousand years later they still use the poor as an excuse to achieve the same goals: to reach power to dominate and plunder... the poor. Neither the French Revolution, nor the Third Reich or even less, the Bolshevik Revolution were able to end poverty. They instead ended the life of many poor people. They did that because they are enemies of life and in every society known to man, life and creativity have been the privilege of the working classes. The rich families of Italy, Ireland or France are not the composers of their great folk musical heritage, or the creators of their traditional cuisines. Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts failed to create what perhaps is the most enduring American contribution to the human heritage: that business of poor Negroes and Jews (and now everyone else's) we call "jazz". Life is the product of poverty. The rich and powerful can only collect it and, in rare occasions, enjoy it.

The poor that received Jesus in Jerusalem were not deceived by any smooth talk. Instead they recognized in Him the shrewdness and wisdom of the simple peasant. That simple wisdom is gained not in any school but in the daily contact with the divine things: sun, sea, rivers, wind, and the fertile soil of our mother earth.

The political and religious leaders of that time, with the help of the Iscariot, conspired to take the life of Jesus to prevent Him from becoming King. Christ's act of giving life to Lazarus offended them the most. It is not a coincidence that our leaders today have decided to be enemies of life. They imagine that somehow they can perpetuate their control by murdering the poor in the womb or even after birth or late in life. When Jesus said that we were not going to have Him but that we would have the poor in His stead, he revealed a profound truth: that the poor can be agents of life just as He had been an agent of life. It is the poor, the working men and women, who make a nation come alive by creating and sustaining the culture in every generation. The poor don't need to be saved, they are the saviors and the creators because God is made manifest in them. May be that is why the political left has decided to kill the poor in the womb. A policy of "better dead than poor" seems to be a growing consensus among the political class.

In the days to come, we will see the forces of darkness in action. There will be a serious intent to crush life by soiling our Constitution with increasingly wicked laws designed to facilitate the work of the ungodly among us. Expect persecution. Prepare for true sacrifices. It is all part of a redemption process. We will have to face hard choices. Many will be lead astray and seduced by the promises of the enemies of life. But the wicked shall not prevail.

After the ordeal we will receive Our King one more time. We will see the sun shine again over this generous land because we trusted in Him and He will not abandon us to the designs of our enemies. Be ready to fight for life. Be ready to give life and shine like a star in the next American Renaissance.

Here comes the Sun King. Come Lord Jesus and bless our land.

Dealing With Punks

David Warren

In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)

Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.

But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. "I've got bad news for you punks," he declared, loudly. "I am not a liberal." Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver's declaration than by the punks' behaviour.

In my humble opinion -- shared with all those with some elementary understanding of the art of policing -- the leading cause of anti-social behaviour is permission. People, and young punks especially, will do things that even they know are malicious because no one will stop them.

The worst possible conditions exist, as today, when the surrounding society is befogged with idiotic, decadent notions, such as the idea that the punks are themselves "victims" of some material deprivation, when what they have in fact been deprived of is the iron fist of the law.

We see this phenomenon writ large in Gaza, where the punks are organized into a terrorist militia called Hamas. It is unnecessary to consider their Islamist ideological credentials, only to witness their deeds. These are people who were under the impression that "society" -- by analogy "the world community," and the diplomatic draughtsmen of innumerable "roadmaps to peace" -- had granted them permission to wing thousands of rockets gratuitously into Israel.

And that world community is now the more astounded when Israel replies, in effect, "I am not a liberal," than it ever was by the incessant pounding of the Qassams. We have the spectacle of the suits at the United Nations running about declaring truces that both Hamas and Israel will ignore. Hamas is still winging rockets; Israel has declared no intention of stopping until the rockets stop.

As Claudia Rosett, the leading journalistic investigator of UN perfidy, has been documenting for some years now (in her weekly Forbes.com column and elsewhere), the punks of Palestine have benefited from a level of permission that amounts to direct encouragement.

Since the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (that was supposed to bring an enduring peace), Hamas has been able to consolidate its political power over the enclave, while consolidating Gaza's economy around just two industries: terrorism and foreign aid. There is no other economy in Gaza, and there has been no credible attempt to build one.

The UN Relief and Works Agency has acted as the great enabler. Set up in 1949 as a temporary agency to house, feed and resettle fewer than one million Arab refugees (Israel received an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees from around the Arab world), UNRWA has grown by bureaucratic persistence into a vast, permanent welfare organization for the 4.6-million descendants of its original "client base" -- and for their descendants, into the indefinite future. It provides for them with a staff and budget several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet.

That UNRWA does not operate in a vacuum, but has instead woven itself into the regional matrix, is evident from the history. The agency's camps, which have grown into permanent settlements, are distributed not only through Gaza and the West Bank, but around Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Arab governments in each of these jurisdictions absolutely refuse to naturalize these permanent residents, almost all of whom were born on their soil, on the claim that they must rightfully be "returned" to the territory Israel now "occupies." Thus UNRWA facilitates the use of these so-called "refugees" as a dagger pointed at Israel's throat.

Moreover, almost all of UNRWA's staff is locally recruited Palestinian, and thus the entire operation is open to subversion to the ends that they decree. For instance, this week, as the Israelis have alleged, the use of a UN school as an arms cache, use of the building as a defensive fortification by Hamas gunmen, use of its inmates as "human shields."

There are root causes of the current conflict, going, as all agree, right back to the foundation of Israel (by the UN) in the late 1940s. The continued existence of UNRWA is the principal one, creating the conditions for Islamist terrorism to flourish, and it is time that root cause was addressed.

War is Hell

David Warren

Perhaps we might start by noting that war is hell. Notwithstanding correspondents who believe the contrary (I have several who call me a "chickenhawk" from time to time), I have long known this. I learned it from a grandfather, and father, who both fought in wars. As a very young man, I saw what they meant in e.g. Vietnam. I have had some further taste of wars, and the aftermath of wars, in my peregrinations; I have had the experience of being in danger.

Yes, it is unfortunate that wars occur, as they have been doing since time out of mind. Yes, it is unfortunate that freedom must be purchased with blood. But I have seen nothing with my own eyes, and will see nothing to persuade me that peace must be purchased at any price.

What has happened in Gaza is horrible. It is not even necessary to look at the sentimentalized atrocity pictures, which are the specialty of Gaza's freelance photographers, to understand how horrible. Of course we condemn war, and do so most effectively through literature and art. But it is trite to condemn war without qualification -- when everyone knows that war is hell. And, trite moral posturing is itself an evil.

Moreover, in the case of recent Israeli operations in Gaza, it is not enough to justify them, by mentioning the (literally) thousands of rockets Hamas has been pumping into every Israeli town within their range, expressly to massacre the defenceless. This, and this alone, necessitated decisive Israeli action. A government has a solemn duty to protect its people from gratuitous acts of violence. The Israeli government is unambiguously justified in taking whatever measures are necessary to make the rocketing stop. Hamas carries the entire moral responsibility for putting the people of Gaza in harm's way.

But we should not stop at justifying Israeli action. As their allies against a common enemy—against Islamists who consider the West to be their ultimate target—we should be offering our help and encouragement for the completion of the stated Israeli task: the complete annihilation of the Hamas organization. For by no other means can peace be obtained across the Gaza frontier.

An organization that persistently declares Israel has no right to exist, and persistently acts upon this premise, cannot be negotiated with. The Israelis have the material means to destroy Hamas, and therefore the moral imperative to do so.

Israel also has the misfortune to be defending herself today in a world that is lost in moral fog. The predictable, asinine resolution from the United Nations ("both sides stop shooting right away") is, alas, representative of public opinion in many Western countries. We are nearly incapable of making hard decisions, let alone sticking to them. We did not cry, "Both sides stop shooting right away," on D-Day. The correct response was, "Onward to Berlin."

My particular fear is that, again, as in 2006 against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israelis will succumb to the pressure of international blathering. From what I can see, I cannot even be sure they were determined not to repeat the mistake of going half-prepared into battle. Such actions as avoiding the house of the Hamas "prime minister," while demolishing the surrounding compound, telegraph more pulled punches. They suggest Israel intends to negotiate, in the end.

Again: it is wrong to negotiate with such an enemy. It leaves him to fight another day, and then another. It thus condemns people on both sides to additional death and destruction down the road, while depriving them of the peace and order that can come only from a definitive resolution of the conflict. Moreover, it plays into the hands of an enemy whose strategic purpose is to wear Israel down.

The Western doctrine of just war, echoed in the articles of international law, moreover demands that the Israelis finish what they've started. It doesn't say "never fight," as the ignorant suppose. On the contrary, it says if you must fight, be sure to win; that victory should be achieved as promptly and humanely as possible, while observing the various formal conventions. To those who refuse to observe the conventions, it offers no quarter. Those who, for instance, fire rockets at civilian targets while themselves masquerading as non-combatants are entitled to no consideration, as prisoners of war or otherwise. Those who use civilian "shields" are responsible for their fate.

These principles are humanitarian. You don't "attrit" a cancer, then await its regrowth: you root out every speck of it. In the long run, the Germans were better off for the destruction of Nazism; and the Palestinians would be, for the destruction of Hamas. If they don't know this now, they will know it later. For those who cannot live peacefully with their neighbours must be stripped of the power to disturb them. The compulsion to live peacefully can then lead towards the habit of living peacefully.

The sad truth is that these precepts are not well understood in Gaza at present. They must therefore be inculcated. Those who truly want peace, will pray for an unconditional Hamas surrender.