What Kind of Conservative Are You? A Comparison
“I believe that conservatism cannot save itself…. But if conservatism is going to be worth anything, it must bow the knee to Christ. It must repent and be born again.” - Christ Over All
But if conservatism is going to be worth anything, it must bow the knee to Christ.
I must be misunderstanding something. “Isms” cannot bow the knee to Christ. And “worth anything”? Do only distinctively Christian things have worth? The Bible doesn’t teach that.
I also think it’s premature to say conservatism cannot save itself. I mean, it’s obviously not a thing that will have eternal usefulness. So of course it can’t eternally save itself. As a political philosophy, though, it’s only dead if you define it in terms of some idealized point in history. So, again, of course, we’re not going back to pre 1960s constitutionalism (or pre 1860s constitutionalism either!).
But conservatism is about conserving, so it can take many forms in many times an places. I hope I live long enough to see it start to recover from Trumpism.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Trump has certainly demonstrated a number of negatives, among them jumping into things without thinking, acting like a bull in a china shop, and Muhummad Ali levels of narcissism (“I’m the greatest!”), and I’m sure there are plenty of other big ones.
However, for conservatism to actually “conserve” things, it has to be willing to exercise power and sometimes fight to get back to where we want to conserve. Much of conservatism in the last 60 years has been willing to give away the farm in the name of being irenic and proper, even to the point of allowing conservative principles to be overrun. Trump has been willing to be the one to actually fight and claw things back, in some ways even more than Reagan. (One of the lesser well-kept secrets about fighting — even when it’s done properly, it can get ugly. We can’t be willing to give up principles to avoid that, any more than Lincoln did in 1861.)
I’d love to see a Reagan-type conservative with the will to actually do things and exercise power (not just talk) to get back to where we want to be, no matter which area it is in. If such a candidate arises, I’d be ready to vote for him or her. Trumpism has had some good sides as well, and any conservative coming along who wants to lead the movement and be a transformative leader will definitely need to be ready to evaluate the Trump years properly without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Dave Barnhart
The right battlefield needs to be chosen. The exercise of power can conserve a subset of practices and outcomes. It can’t preserve a way of thinking, and it’s the real values, convictions, and principles that have the most impact on practices and outcomes over time. You can only do so much by the exertion of power.
And what if in the exertion of power, we betray the very values, convictions, and principles that are the lifeblood of the conserving?
That’s doubly damaging because not only are we gutting ourselves in order to wield a particular kind of power (by far, not the only kind), but we are ensuring that there is no ‘self’ to benefit from the exercise of power. The analogy gets messy, but my point is that the values and beliefs are in many ways not only essential to keeping conserving efforts alive, but they are themselves the outcomes—the things to conserve.
Where we seem to be at the moment is kind of “power = essential; values and principles = optional.” What I’m saying is that the thing most worth conserving is itself the belief that “values and principles = essential; power = optional.”
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I’m having trouble coming up with an alternative I like to “optional.” (I.e. optional in the sense that we could exercise it, but never have to.)
I agree that principles and values have to be essential. However, what I’m saying is that sometimes, the exercise of power is not exactly optional either if we want to protect the values and principles. That “necessity” is stronger than “optional,” but not “essential” in the sense that we always have to exercise power. We don’t always have to exercise it, but sometimes, it absolutely is essential.
We aren’t in the same situation as the colonists in 1776, or as Lincoln in 1861. However, if we aren’t willing to fight, exercise power, or what have you, for what we believe, we’ll be there before all that long.
Dave Barnhart
Discussion