The Unchanging Principles of Conservatism Defined
4th November 2019
This is an attempt by the Heritage Foundation to update the classic Sharon Statement formulated 60 years ago at Bill Buckley’s place in Sharon CT as a cornerstone document for the Young Americans for Freedom.
Across the years there have been many attempts, of which this is only the latest, to convert the conservative perspective into an ‘ism’, i.e. an ideology with a doctrine of faith, a political program, and a desired end-state toward which all adherents are supposed to work.
The problem with such attempts is that ‘conservatism’ isn’t an ideology, like socialism or fascism, but rather an aspect of ones personality, a way of looking at the world and its activities; hence any search for the ‘unchanging principles’ of ‘conservatism’ is doomed to failure, and such laundry-lists as these are anything but — they devolve into time-and-location-dependent opinions that certainly arise out of the reactions of conservative people to current events but cannot legitimately be termed ‘unchanging principles’.
So why do they thrive? Because conservatives, consciously or not, realize that ‘conservative principles’ are time-and-location-dependent and hence give rise to different appreciations of what is or is not ‘conservative at any particular time or place. Hence these ‘definitions’ are (a) a pre-emptive defense against criticism by other putative ‘conservatives’ that the defining group Aren’t Really Conservative and (b) a stick with which to beat other purportedly ‘conservative’ groups that the defining group think have strayed from the True Faith.
This has certainly happened historically — the defenestration of the John Birch Society and the Ayn Rand Objectivists from The Conservative Movement by Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd are famous examples. Fringe groups are cut off from the desired core of True Believers because unbelievers might think that the Faithful are actually tainted by beliefs that might be derogatory. This is the basis of the impulse for everybody and his dog to call their enemies ‘Nazis’, which they rarely are but which is a useful tarbrush to use in modern political discourse. So, like the poor, definitions of what is or is not True Conservatism will always be with us.