America Needs a New Conservative Movement: some guidelines

What passes for political conservatism today is reactionary libertarianism favoring the wealthy and powerful through authoritarian rule.  The nation needs an authentic conservative movement to balance political decision making, but this isn’t it.  A more authentic conservatism was once self defined as modern day Jeffersonian belief in small government, imposing few regulations on business and private  property, but providing for a robust defense leveraged against the least possible spending on social welfare.  Low rates of taxation were axiomatic. Conservative performance wandered far from its professed beliefs but nevertheless were firmly held.  Conservatives envisioned an America of independent small businesses, family farms, and self reliant people whose property and liberty were secure. It was a Thomas Kincaid vision of a land that never was but remembered as if it had been and could be again.

In the real world of America as it is, the vision has been enthusiastically endorsed by voices of big business because they see it as an all you can eat buffet just waiting to be gobbled up; a reality that has been acted out episodically whenever oligarchs have managed to gain control of public policy.

Daily reality seems to keep the conservative ideal just out of reach for the masses. Yet with enough money one can live in the right neighborhood, or better yet, gated community.  Crime, street crime, not the bigger crimes called white collar, are portrayed as  growing, out of control everywhere.  Addressing problems of social and economic inequities is seen as a ploy to strip rights and privileges from some in order to give them to others who have not worked for them.  Only stern application of old time Puritan ethics can keep taxes from becoming confiscatory, the national debt ruinous, and nanny state socialism from emasculating the American people. At least that’s been the trajectory since the Reagan administration, a trajectory that has led to today’s corrupted far right conservative movement aspiring to what can only be called neo-fascism.  

A new conservative agenda would protect the rights and liberties of every American who desires to be as self reliant as they are able by fiercely regulating the anti competitive instincts of big business, evenn breaking them up if they become too monopolistic.

A more robust conservative ethic would expect local problems to be solved at local levels, with national problems needing national solutions. Issues having no regard for state boundaries such as health care, environmental protection, essential social welfare services, national infrastructure, and the protection of rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution, the least of these being the current popular beliefs about the second amendment, would be handled on a national basis.

A renewed conservative movement would retain the cautiousness that is its hallmark knowing that liberals can be tempted to leap before they look, and fail to calculate consequences accurately.  Too much centralization of government authority can be as dangerous as too much centralization of big business indicating caution best be shown. Conservatives know that the little guy can too easily become a pawn in a game played by the rich and powerful, so they must question what any course of action will have on that little guy. Sadly, recent decades of conservatives have played the little guy for a fool while big business interests called the shots. It’s time for conservatives to conform deeds to words.

Conservatives like equilibrium, especially social equilibrium.  They will always be uncomfortable with rapidly changing demographics, liberal immigration policies, and demands for less inequity in society.  It means disequilibrium that is unsettling will need to be tolerated until a new stasis can be found, and who knows what that will look like?

It’s not that conservatives dislike change; they’re fine with it if they can understand its need, purpose, and ways in which cherished American values will be strengthened.  In other words, they want some assurance that the new equilibrium will not create new inequities that will likely disfavor their primary constituencies                           

that always include the upper middle class.  The value this kind of conservatism adds to American democracy is its caution, requiring liberals to prove their case and restrain their ambitions in order to achieve a workable compromise.  It infuriates liberals who want to get on with it as quickly as possible, but it also leads to a more manageable pace of change that doesn’t end with change so abrupt that it paralyses needed systems of social and economic life.

America very much needs, and does not have, this kind of conservative movement.  While seldom producing effective executive leadership, it’s the kind of conservatism that’s at its best when serving as the loyal opposition.