Rei Murasame wrote:This. Well said. Without understanding that, it would be impossible to understand the weirdness which is America. Conservatives in the US are trying to conserve a strange combination of radical liberalism and low-church dissenting protestantism.
This is why we need to settle on coherent definitions of ideological labels. For me "conservatism" when spoken of in an American context simply means this, which is why I often describe it specifically as "American conservatism" although I consider the "conservatism" therein to be purely vernacular. However what conservatism means to me in an academic sense is a philosophy believing in the organic unity of society and importance of social institutions in governing behavior and also the importance of tradition in maintaining social institutions.
Thus conservatism for me is often linked with a defense of monarchy and high church ecclesiology in either a Roman Catholic or high church Anglican tradition. It is accepting of differences in social class while at the same time respecting noblesse oblige, the idea that the upper classes in some sense owe something to the lower classes and also a skepticism of laissez-faire capitalism wherein it threatens the established social order. To the true Tory big box stores and the loss of blue collar manufacturing to unskilled overseas labor are an abomination and not something to be celebrated as paragons of the free market. It is a tradition favoring the paramount importance of the nation state and is thus skeptical that multi-culturalism or mass immigration can ever work. Such a tradition simply does not exist in any meaningful form in America.
The peculiarity of American conservatism is relatively new, ironically considering conservatism seeks to preserve the old. Please note old line American conservative
Peter Viereck's thought as opposed to modern conservative thought. Now in the past American fundamentalism was historically populist and somewhat anti-big business in its orientation, think William Jennings Bryan. Then after the Scopes trial it became intensely skeptical of "worldly" affairs such as politics. I remember some older fundamentalist relatives being in this tradition wherein all political action was looked on as corrupt and any political engagement beyond simply voting as a civic duty was viewed as futile. There was a saying among old line fundamentalists that trying to engage in politics was like polishing the brass on a sinking ship.
Somewhere along the line William F. Buckley and his crowd came along wherein they attempted to synthesize traditionalist conservatism and economic libertarianism. This was merely a marriage of convenience in which it was seen that the two united could oppose communism abroad and fellow travelers on the left at home. However over time this marriage of convenience was forgotten and people began acting as if the two went hand in hand all along. However the key difference was these early fusionist libertarian-conservatives were often high church Christians or even Jews (like
Frank Meyer, although Meyer later became Catholic).
Then in the 1970s populist preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell came onto the scene disturbed by changes they saw in the culture. They wedded themselves to this fusionist conservatism and soon became the dominant voice therein and so it was that the new politically active low church fundamentalism, economic libertarianism and hawkish foreign policy (again this aspect of conservatism entered due to fears of communism but later extended to future threats) became linked. The Ronald Reagan campaign crystalized this as Reagan relied heavily on taking evangelical support from Carter. The irony is that Carter may have been the most deeply religious president ever well versed in Christian theology whereas Reagan himself was certainly a Christian (of the Presbyterian persuasion, ironically mainline Protestant) it animated him much less than Carter.
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