As Common Sense University continues our series – Back to Basics – we will attempt to clarify certain misconceptions about what it means to be a Conservative; or to be more specific what Conservative Principles are. Many books have been written and published on this subject, it is therefore not easy to confine such a task into a relatively small article and we shall waste no time on what the term ‘Conservative’ means in today’s world of 24-hour news cycles with an over active punditry. Instead we have elected to share some informative which we obtained from a website called conservative-resources.com. There they have identified six key conservative principles:
1. Belief in natural law
2. Belief in established institutions
3. Preference for liberty over equality
4. Suspicion of power – and of human nature
5. Belief in exceptionalism
6. Belief in the individual
The belief in natural law means conservatives belief in a higher order of things: Good versus evil, justice and injustice, rights and responsibilities, they are not subjective concepts to conservatives and a vast majority believes that these natural laws originate with God. At the root of the definition of conservative is a belief in the importance of virtue.
The belief in established institutions is based on conservative’s passionate love for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and consider them the work of profound genius. But it also includes a deep respect for cultural institutions of church and family. In today’s world where faith and family values are under constant attack in the media, true conservatives maintain that these institutions are critically important for the spiritual well-being of humankind and dislike any attempt to disparage and destroy them.
The preference for liberty over equality is not easily understood since they are often used as synonyms. Yet there are not, by definition, one cannot have both as equal values, we can either be equal or free but not both. Therefore Conservatives prefer liberty over equality.
The Suspicion of power – and of human nature principle was best expressed in former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural address when he declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. From time to time we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-government, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
The fifth and sixth principles are closely related in that belief in exceptionalism and belief in the individual are logically linked together. Conservatives recognize and firmly belief exceptionalism because they do not think that perfect equality exists or can ever be developed. The exceptional individuals among us are not just lucky at the expense of other people, to the contrary, conservatives believe that exceptional people lift us up and have mostly improved our lives. It is therefore quite logical that conservatives have and always will strongly believe in individualism. Quoting former U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater: “Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being or by a collective of human beings.”
While most conservatives believe in all of these principles to varying extents, individually though, they see the world as inevitably dominated by just two or three principles. We are talking here about such specialized definitions of Social conservatives versus Fiscal conservatives or even the Libertarian conservatives. We will keep it simple and not try to differentiate between these groups since it is our objective in this series of articles to highlight the differences between conservatives and liberals.