American Conservatism
“What I envision is not simply a melding together of the two branches of American conservatism into a temporary uneasy alliance, but the creation of a new, lasting majority.
This will mean compromise. But not a compromise of basic principle. What will emerge will be something new: something open and vital and dynamic, something the great conservative majority will recognize as its own, because at the heart of this undertaking is principled politics.
I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean — and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it — it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.
I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.
When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.
When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing — he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.
When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education — he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.
When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.
Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way — this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.
The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations — found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.
One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.
Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a s8mall group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right — those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.
Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles. If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word may have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.
Reagan
Created by our Founding Fathers using empirical evidence, the study of human behavior and the true nature of man over the entire history of existence, not an era, or the past decade. The Founders accounted for the actions of man from inception. Combined with their own wealth of personal experiences the Constitution of the United States was perfected. Our founding document the legal document that governs American citizens, is the longest governing Constitution in recorded history. There are no other Constitutions that have created more prosperity, allowed for more freedom, or endured longer, not one.
American Conservatism is quite literal in how it sounds. Conservatism derived from the word conserve and American describes our National Identity, Conservatives are trying to conserve or preseve the values, beliefs, and traditions that were the experienced and well thought out ideas of men who were bound to the highest degree of logic, reason, and rational thought, and their ideas were still argued, debated, and deliberated over with the utmost scrutiny and finally codified and cemented in our Constitution.
Conservatives are protecting in promoting our proven Capitalist Free Market economy, based on the ability for rational economic actors, acting in their own self interest, needs, and desires, informing themselves so they can negotiate fair prices for goods and services they wish to aquire in the most efficient way.
Government intrusion by regulations, subsidies, trade barriers, and unreasonable labor laws distort the market from producing origina ideas, invention, g compensation. When politicians like Bernie Sanders, who is an economic illiterate talk about the 1% and income inequality they’re talking about issues in large part they have created. Sanders claims to be a Democratic Socialist that’s fine, but the history of democratic socialism is in communism. It’s the tired old tactic all leftists use, semantic infiltration.
Americans adherence to a Creed so many peoples of different ethnicities, races, and parts of the world have contributed to and been protectors of our Common Culture and enforced a commitment to a Civil Society. Moored to the Constitution our culture is based on rational thought, intellectual curiosity, logic, the nature of man, The English Language, A Dissenting Anglo-Protestant Christianity, Moralism, Individualism, Work Ethic, and The Rule of Law. American Conservatism is the proven belief system that is truest to America’s founding principles.
Our unique National ethos, at least by comparison to other nations that have dared to formally state one, is responsible for unprecedented success regarding morality, economics, and a freedom the rest of the world has never experienced.
Carlos David Aguilar
In 1782 the French-born American farmer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur recognized this with his famous image of America as a country in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” The “Melting pot,” we’ve all come to know as our national motto.
New Americans were asked to dissociate themselves from the cultural imperatives of their country of origin, shedding their previous identities before assuming their American one. The 1795 code for citizenship lays out some of the formal requirements.
I do solemnly swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, or (B) to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law…
America is not a nation of immigrants, it is a nation of citizens that to this day still display and adhere to the culture that was created by America’s first settlers. America was settled before it was immigrated to.
Immigrants from all social and economic classes were attracted to that culture and in some instances left very comfortable lives, fortunes, and family to become Americans.
Understand, when you hear what has to be the country’s most overused cliché, “We are a nation of immigrants,” what comes next is usually a shallow understanding of how our culture, creed, and identity were formed. The qualities, beliefs, and values have been consistent the last three centuries, resulting in America’s unprecedented success.
Carlos David Aguilar
Prior to 9/11 American identity had been suffering. Simulated ugly Americans did not respond to the question what are you with any type of competence or affirmation to their national identity. Instead articulated some national, racial, ethnic, and gender identities popularized by Hollywood and Cultural Marxists in Academia and the mainstream media.”
Samuel P. Huntington
Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, and Political Correctness are some of the weapons and tools of Leftists that have been trying to undermine the American government and our culture since the early 1900’s. With 9/11 in the recent, but what seems to be a very distant past Americans seem to be falling back into an Identity crisis.
Our National Identity suffers from a lack of leadership buy a President who does not know what it means to be an American, nor does he care to. Barack Obama is like no other leader we’ve had in this nation’s history and it’s not because of his skin color. Barack Obama has his own personal identity issues that he has harbored and remain unresolved since his early formative years spent in Hawaii.
So where does our unique culture come from, what are the tenets, and what do we need to do to maintain it.
Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the forebears of much of what we still see today in regards to culture. They put Locke’s philosophy of the mind Tabula-Rasa, a blank slate without preconceived ideas with which to work and put into practice by creating a new society based on predominantly English political and social institutions, arriving in the largely untouched and unpopulated land of the eastern coast. As settlers they enjoyed the right to create a new society populated with their values, beliefs, and traditions creating a new culture. Before the revolution the English and Dutch settlers considered themselves as founders, settlers, or planters of their new colonies, not the immigrants that came later.
The essential elements of that culture can be defined as the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, work ethic, and the English language. British traditions of law, Justice, and limited government. The Legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.
Out of those initial tenets over the 18th and 19th centuries an American Creed developed. Our principles of Liberty, equality of opportunity not results, individualism, representative government, and private property were hardened. Subsequent Generations of immigrants assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers, contributed and sometimes modified our culture, but never Fundamentally changing it.
Up until 1965 that Anglo -Protestant culture, the political liberties and the economic opportunities it produced, is what attracted immigrants to America and they gladly assimilated in hopes of greater freedom and prosperity, which more often than not became their reality.
Carlos David Aguilar
Advertisements
