"The Conservative Mind 2008"

Amid the flurry of right leaning commentators, pundits, and politicians scurrying off the boat, relinquishing themselves to the “light” of Obama, it makes a true Conservative wonder if they are staying the correct course by not giving in. Presently the Conservative movement is fractured. Some might even say it is in a coma on life support, with eager Progressive Rousseauians impatiently waiting to pull the plug. The final chorus in a long standing war of ideologies that has lasted for the better part of three hundred years.

The progenitors of conservative values would hardly recognize the shell that their ideal has become; disorganized, reactionary, corrupt, angry, and sullen. Not one hallmark of its greatness to be found. To return from this, one has to look at the minds that produced and nurtured this philosophy into what it was before it took a wrong turn. Men like Burke, the Father of Modern Day Conservatism, Alexis De Tocqueville the bridge between Burke and the modern days, Lord Acton, and Russell Kirk, author of the Conservative Mind.

Burke and Kirk shared a very common kindred belief in liberty with order. Russell Kirk wrote in The Roots of American Order that: America is not only the land of the free and the home of the brave, but a place of ordered liberty. Burke’s take was this, “The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” Both men felt that humankind’s independence should be measured by the way it affected those around them and that man’s rights are rooted in the Divine. Not some mad rush to make every abstract idea a right in humankind’s quest for social and economic egalitarianism like we see on the Left.

Burke aspired to the noble belief that liberty was given to us by God and that religious principles were the core behind a civilized and law abiding society. On Burke’s view of God and society Kirk wrote, “To Burke, it was "man's greatest good and established order to be the fundamental of civilization." ” It provided the civilizing underpinning of society, regardless of the individual's particular denomination.” De Tocqueville, resonated their sentiment, “For the Americans, the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other." For them, Christianity is not a set of "sterile beliefs bequeathed by the past" but beliefs "living in the depths of the soul."

All of these men, despite their differences in nuances, understood that the tapered system of radicalism created a need for equivalence and that in the end would destroy true individual liberty, as we are seeing in present times. For the time being though, Conservatives are sequestered to a mutated version of their original philosophy. The talk is of individualism, responsibility, and God. But seldom do you see many in the leading ranks actually practicing this philosophy. It is here that we must make a stand for our fundamental beliefs, this is not about God and guns as the Left’s caricature would make you believe. And make no mistake this is not "governance from the pulpit," the Divine serves as a moral compass in our endeavors to live and govern in a civilized society.

Finally, you must understand there is no greater equality in the world other than in the eyes of God. Because of that you are given those divinely inspired natural rights and liberties. But there is a price for this, and that is respect and protection of your fellow human being's natural rights and liberties as well.

-CT