The British Conservative Legacy and the Current American Con Job

The Cons of the present day offer a far different version of conservatism than the English progenitor of conservatism, Edmund Burke. Conservatism today is all about ideology; in fact observers of the American political scene often hear arguments among conservatives about which one or ones are the most ideologically "pure." Burke based his belief in the superiority of conservatism on his conviction that it rejected ideology, thus making Burke the originator of the first modern "conservative" argument which appeared during his tenure in British politics from the 1760s to the 1790s. Burke's topic of focus was the French Revolution which spawned the first political movements of the left; liberalism, socialism, and communism. Burke's response to the political developments on the left was to propose conservatism as a counterweight to theories that he and his fellow countrymen saw as dangerous developments in the course of political thought and practice. In his book Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke based conservatism on tradition and actual experience which he proposed provided the only legitimate means to produce practical political systems of governance. Since the French proposed to base their politics on abstract ideas such as liberty, equality, fraternity the result for the French could only lead to chaos and disaster. Burke's theory demonstrated a long period of historical development that gave rise to institutions that bore centuries worth of experience. For Burke, this orderly process gave the British people a constitutional system ruled by an elected Parliament and divinely established monarchy that harmoniously ruled together. Burke, distrusted the the French Revolution's chaotic "innovation" of governance and his jeremiad was to convince his fellow countrymen and French sympathizers that they could not trust such an unnatural system of government as proposed by the French.

It was Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France who said: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." The duty of the politician was to ensure equilibrium between "[t]he two principles of conservation and correction." It was the duty of government, in Burke's view, to oversee a continual process of compromise; "sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil."

Our current discussion of conservatism in America begins at the conclusion of the Second World War. It was during that period that a significant bifurcation occurred in American conservative thought. There were those American conservatives who adhered to Burke's ideal ( for identification purposes this group will be referred to as the Burkeans) that civil society must be replenished by its reactions to changing conditions in society. The opposite view held (by a group that shall be herein referred to as the traditionalists) that America's only hope for survival was in its ability to eradicate all vestiges of the welfare state from the operations of American government. It is obvious that it has been the cons who have pledged to turn back the hands of time to return to an idyllic paradise where state welfare did not exist. They wanted to overturn New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s. And the means that the traditionalists chose to undertake their cleansing of welfare from the practices of American government was through the use of the politicization of civil warfare.

The traditionalists were populated by a large group of former Marxists who bypassed the Marxist dialectic and replaced it with the idea that politics consisted of no more than an absolutist struggle between good and evil. The traditionalists represented all that was good while evil was represented by social programs; socialized medicine; big labor; activist Supreme Court justices, the media elite; tenured college and university radicals; experts in and out of government who held contrarian views to traditionalist dogma.

As a nation, America has just emerged from a period of political history that lasted for more than a quarter of a century that began with the Reagan presidency continued with the Republican Revolution that was lead by Newt Gingrich and secured the House for a Republican majority. It was the heyday of the cons attempts to kill the New Deal and replace it with free market capitalism. Their attempts for the most part ended in miserable failures but they were able to inflict considerable damage on the structure and legal foundations of the American system of government. A monumental task stands before us as Obama and the Democrats attempt to undo the rot that the Republicans have allowed to enter into America. It's a task that will take a considerable amount of effort and time to rectify.