Posted on 12/18/2004 9:04:13 PM PST by CHARLITE
I have been watching with amusement as the left has been vainly struggling to describe American conservatism, in a sort of know-your-enemy exercise, in order to attack the ideology due to their monumental loss at the polls last month. The amusing thing is that none of them seem to have the first clue what American conservatism even is.
They lack the first idea how different American conservatism is in comparison to the concept in other countries. They think that conservatism is some “new” phenomenon ginned up by a sly class of demagogues and liars to lead the “stupid” public by the nose. They believe all sorts of silly, self-serving nonsense that does not even approach the facts. And it continually leads them astray and feeds that conservative movement, giving it more and more votes every year in this country. (We thank you very much for your arrogance, by the by)
In the first place, America has always been a conservative country even when we didn’t necessarily consider ourselves as having a “conservative” Party. We have always leaned to conservative values as a nation. Family, country, capitalism and personal liberty are all conservative ideals. We have always relied chiefly on the business community and less on government. We have always been highly religious even though that religion has taken many denominations. We have always revered our traditions.
Our nation was founded on business, even before the first state government or English approved governor took power, business made the rules in the “New World”. Also, such businesses came from disparate countries setting the precedent that Americans owed nothing to any single European nation. Class did not exist unless you made it yourself by dint of your personal efforts and your accumulated wealth. Government was secondary. Peerage and privilege was meaningless to a people who were carving out a world from a wilderness with their own hands. This led Americans to jealously guard their work from the intrusion of government.
Additionally, from the first few colonies of settlers in this country religion was a prime motivator for colonists who came here. We all know the story of the Puritans who arrived on these shores and why they came here in the first place. They came here for religious freedom because Europe was oppressive. Other religions similarly came here and flourished. Later, when American government began, religion was specifically protected on the whole and each section of the country developed its own distinct religious vein. There was no single national religion though most of the new states had state religions in the beginning. The Federal government scrupulously avoided codifying any particular religious strain into National law but nearly every founding father wrote their speeches with references to God and religion and used religious terminology in the daily lives. Many claim that Washington was not religious, for instance, but he always attended church, talked about God’s hand guiding the USA and prayed for God’s providence repeatedly. Hardly a man who believed in nothing, and certainly nothing like a man who believed in the deism that many modern historians want to claim he espoused (no self respecting deist would believe that God interfered with the toils of man on earth as Washington did).
This religious diversity translates to more Americans claiming religious beliefs today than in any other western country. Who today can imagine European politicians mentioning God in their political speeches? But, in America, even the left of center pols use religious terms in their speeches because they know the people by and large want to know their politicians are believers in something other than raising taxes.
This country has also had a long standing distrust of government and what could be more uniquely American? Conservatives in other western countries, the traditionalists who scowl at the modern, are all for government power, they just want it used differently than the left of their world. The chief American feeling is that private concerns can always do “it” better and that government does nothing but ruin what ever it touches.
Therefore, we have fought taxes since the beginning. We kicked out the English over taxes. We had three major tax revolts in our own country, one of which made the government recall General Washington from retirement to put down the revolt, and even the Civil War had an element of a tax revolt over the high tariff. We have always had the lowest tax rates in comparison to European countries and still we angrily denounce taxes in our fair land. Few European countries have such tax issues. Most Americans say we are heavily over taxed, most Europeans say that things are just right.
American patriotism is also something that those Europeanesque, anti-conservatives haven’t the first clue about. Americans are generally proud of their Founding. It is taught reverently, millions of school children go to see Washington every year, we celebrate our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Nearly every year more and more books come out about the Revolution and the founders’ ideas, we even name our streets and schools after them. Can you imagine a Frenchman discussing with evident pride their revolutions? Not in a million years. Americans love their patriotism and their Americaness. In Europe they are currently doing their best to eliminate any national sentiment in favor of a new, unified Europe. An American will always be an American and nothing else, but a European is now a “European of German birth”, or French birth or from whatever “region” he hails.
So, these leftists are toiling from misconceptions about what causes or what the roots of American conservatism are from word go. American conservatism is not only wholly different from the negative conservatism of Europe but it is deep rooted. I have seen that even a clear minded European will look upon our politicians and sometimes have trouble telling them apart because, to Europe, even our version of leftists look rather conservative. Conservative and American are one in the same regardless of Party.
There is no accident that America never had either a viable Nazi or a viable Socialist Party? Both ideologies are far too radical for an American to bother with. Americans are smarter than that. They know that such absurd creeds are wholly against everything America has always been. They know that such ideas will destroy what we have spent the last 500 years creating.
Certainly the modern conservative power movement is rather new being started in the 1964 election between Goldwater and LBJ. But this was not a “new” concept but an energized one that arose in response to the failures of Democratic overreach since the F.D.R. era and the socialist disasters that had began to befall the country. Goldwater opened the door for conservatism to gather its forces to beat back such anti-American socialism as an official Party movement. Reagan held that banner aloft and gathered the troops under it and changed the balance of political power. The failures of socialism in America pushed the innate conservatism inside Americans to the forefront.
Now, many on the left have said there is no “cogent philosophy” behind conservatism. But there is a corresponding lack of cogency to leftism, as well. Any large political movement must contain many and sometimes seemingly antithetical groups gathered together for the big purpose. These groups all know that the Party in which they reside is the only place their ideas will even get a hearing much less a chance at implementation. So, they take half a loaf, push for the Party and hope for the best. That’s politics. We all know that any group that is so single minded about one issue (making them solidly based ideologically) simply cannot garner enough votes in a democracy to ever win anything. They will just not have enough appeal to enough people to win the day at the ballot box.
But American conservatism is a “cogent ideology” and it is the very basis of the nation itself. Self determination, business, small government, strong defense, personal religion, these are it’s tenets.
So, warble on ye ignorati. We conservatives love to see it.
Comments:indguard@mindspring.com
you do find some of the most interesting articles. hat's off.
Great article.
Since maintaining the appearance of being an ignorant redneck with a roomful of guns causes liberals to scream so delightfully, I wouldn't THINK of letting them find out that I'm capable of intellectual reasoning...
I agree...I almost always find that if it's a great article there's a good chance CHARLITE has posted it!
But you left off the bibles. Didn't you mean "guns and bibles"? :o)
"The Ignorati"
Oh, yet another gem of an article. Great content, and the new catch phrase I'll be hurling at the libs is obvious.
This one fact stands out from the rest, and it's something Europeans don't understand about Americans.
America has a Communist Party, and it even had a Nazi Bund at one time, but radical groups never amounted to much here. Europe, on the other hand, is the home of Socialism and all of the government "-isms" of mankind.
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