Recently we've been bombarded with a slew of wonderful pop political phrases. Among those phrases is the 'compassionate conservative'. Now when I first heard this, I took it to mean that someone was a conservative who, among other tools, uses empathy and sympathy in his or her decision making in the government. Sounds good, right? Then I started hearing politicians referr to themselves as compassionate conservatives, but the problem is that these people were not conservative! Imagine how confused I was when President George W. Bush started putting himself in that group. Here was a man who went to a preemptive war, someone who believes strongly in centralized government, someone who has done some very suspicious things in the name of national security to our freedoms, and someone who wants to try to keep homosexual people from getting right because of his personal religious beliefs. Now whether what he has done is right or wrong is for another thread (i.e. NO BUSH BASHING PLEASE), but the idea that people like Bush are conservative is very much wrong. They use a label that a lot of people identify with and use it to carry out acts that are basically the opposite of what the label represents.
(This next part is cut/pasted from one of my posts on another thread) I think it may be time to revisit what a conservative really is. Recently the trend of conservatives is to basically act liberal.
There are five ingredients necessary for conservatism. These are fundamentals:
-The first necessary ingredient for a conservative is a belief in smaller government. Particularly at the federal level. Statism is Leftism--an all-powerful, centralized government. Conservatives oppose this, embracing state's rights and a smaller, less centralized federal government. This is the foundational cornerstone of conservatism.
-The second necessary ingredient for a conservative is a belief in national sovereignty and isolationism. Conservatives do not believe in foreign aid or foreign entanglements. They revere American sovereignty. Yes, conservatives do believe in a strong national defense--but national defense as mandated by the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine. An invasive military empire is not mandated. Therein lies a crucial difference.
When Woodrow Wilson tried to get the US into the League of Nations, conservatives opposed him. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressively lobbying to get the US into the Second World War, conservatives opposed him. Conservatives have scorned the UN. They are not practitioners of global military interventionism. Conservatives believe in defense of our national borders, not aggression---and real security based on not meddling in the affairs of other nations. Conservatives believe in "Fortress America"...not Pax Americana.
-The third necessary ingredient is a belief in the Rule of Law---beginning with the Constitution of the United States. The Bill of Rights is essentially sacrosanct. A conservative does not believe in a "living Constitution".
The only way a conservative would ever alter the Constitution would be by constitutional amendment. He would never seek to override it with power-grabbing legislation. The passage of the USA-Patriot Act--an Orwellian abomination, all the way down to its namesake--established pretty firmly just how many conservatives are left in Washington DC.
-A fourth necessary ingredient to conservatism is a belief in traditional values. It is here that politics over such things as Roy Moore's Ten Commandments come into play. However, traditional values, are, by their very nature, regressive. It is true that there is no constitutional separation of church and state, as commonly stated, but there is also Freedom of Worship, and a generalized restriction of government authority. Therefore no allowances exist for the federal government to dabble in the religion business one way or the other. Real conservatives, being strict constructionists, would protect the religious rights of the individual without exploiting Christianity for seizure of power.
-The fifth necessary ingredient to conservatism is adherence to principle. The stubborn instinct to stand firm on issues, rejecting political expediency, in other words. Conservatism cannot exist without an ideological backbone, because one of the most basic philosophies behind conservatism is preservation of tradition. Traditions cannot survive in the absence of principles.
I get a little sick to my stomach when people mention Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Bennett, George Will, or a bunch of other people on Capitol Hill as conservative. Facism is not conservatism, capitolism is not conservatism (while it can compliment conservatism, it never overrides. The corporation is not more important than the Constitution), a theocracy is not conservatism, and neo-conservatism isn't conservatism.
A rose by any other name....
