What is a conservative?

Quite an interesting question, isn’t it. The word gets tossed around a lot — a whole lot — without anyone really letting people know what they mean. Think about it: can you come up with a good definition what what a conservative believes?

Although it’s easy to brand certain areas of belief conservative, there has to be something that undergirds it all. That is to say, it’s not just enough to assume that a conservative is pro-life or pro-family; you need to tell my why a conservative is pro-life and pro-family.

Well, I think this little document sums it up partly when it says,

A person who values the role of tradition and established institutions, such as religion, in society. In American political terms, a conservative generally favors economic freedom while including the role of society in cultural or social matters. Individualism and personal responsibility are stressed by conservatives. About a third of Americans identify themselves as conservative. Conservatives oppose a large, powerful federal government while favoring balanced budgets and low tax levels. They also tend to support the death penalty, school choice and gun rights, while opposing abortion and gay marriage. American conservatives are viewed as on the political right.

But that’s at once too little and too much: American conservatives are hardly representative of conservatives worldwide, and that’s not really what conservatives are about.

I think the right wing is really about resistance to change. It’s true, when you think about it. Not any and all change (though you could say that the Amish are the true conservatives), but change that re-shapes the basic values that aid societal function. Things like resting abortion makes sense in this paradigm, because killing ones children is destructive to society. Homosexual marriage doesn’t accomplish one of the purposes of traditional marriage: procreation.

But we err if we assume that conservatives are individualistic — I think that conservative individualism undermines the very foundation upon which the philosophy is built (at least from a secular perspective). In fact, conservatives of all people should be the least individualistic group around, in that they value the outcome of personal decisions on the social strata when consider holistically.

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to be a secular conservative. But I digress.

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