Conservatism--A Default Position

Conservatism is fundamentally a default position. It is the bedrock belief of millions of people in rural and small-town America who never lived in a big city, never went to college, never traveled abroad, and almost never even knew a liberal. It is the original default belief of the great mass of ordinary Americans.
People rarely become conservative. They start-out conservative. One almost never hears about somebody coming from a liberal family, going off to college, and coming back a conservative. One frequently hears the opposite. Young people go to college, are exposed to mind-opening ideas and bright fellow students, and come back with liberal thoughts that drive their conservative parents crazy. It happened to me.

For this reason, I believe that conservatism is not really a political philosophy. It is the absence of philosophy. It is the failure to imagine a better world, the failure to desire change, the unwillingness to examine one’s prejudices and limitations. Men like Edmund Burke did not propose any new way of thinking. They simply spoke-out against movements and ideas that altered the status quo. Burke’s greatest work was his critique of the French Revolution.

It is true that there has developed a group of so-called conservative intellectuals, men like William F. Buckley and George Will. But these people do not expound some new philosophy. They simply justify the regressive, recalcitrant, and reactionary positions created in response to the ideas developed by liberals. This is best exemplified by today’s Republicans in Congress. They have no program or plan. Their only position is one of opposition to virtually everything proposed by the liberal Democrats and the President.

This explains why conservatism is so popular with so many people. One of the two great political parties in America is built on conservatism, and frequently, as now, the more conservative the politicians of that party are the more popular they are. People are conservative because they do not like ideas that upset their picture of the world and how it should be. One example is the issue of same-sex marriage.
Most people over 50 years of age grew up in a world where marriage was solely between a man and a woman. That was the default position. Nobody ever questioned it. The majority of people believed that homosexuals were deviant people whom one avoided. Nobody spoke about homosexuals except to make jokes about them. It was unimaginable that such people would actually want to get married to one another. Suddenly, people saw on television that gays wanted to get married. It was a tearing-apart of the fabric of the cosmos, a violent challenge to all that is normal and accepted. It made conservatives deeply uncomfortable. Although they tried to think-up practical reasons why same-sex marriage would somehow harm the establishment of heterosexual marriage, their real opposition was simply based on the shocking newness of the idea. They felt that it was making a mockery of the sacred institution of marriage. They also believed that same-sex marriage would somehow legitimatize homosexuality which they had always been led to consider a moral deviation and a sin.

Liberalism is always a process of new thought. Liberals refuse to accept the old ways of thinking. They are the iconoclasts who question all of the old values, old beliefs, old religions, and old mores of society. True Liberalism is never a default philosophy. It is always an intellectual exploration and adventure. For this reason, it is mostly the philosophy of educated people, urban people, and broad-minded people. Because liberals support the rights of the poor, blue collar workers, union members, minorities, and immigrants, these people agree with the politics of liberals. But such people are, for the most part, acting out of self-interest, not on the basis of political ideology.

Conservative opposition to governmental programs to help the poor is not based on some carefully crafted ideology. It is based on reaction to the duty of paying taxes and upon animus toward poor people. It also has a strong racial or ethnic basis. Conservatives prefer all of the old ways of doing things, such as confining charity to private giving. There is no philosophy behind this way of thinking. Similarly, there is no theological thinking behind the fact that conservatives support religion and wish to see prayer in schools and religious images in public places. It is simply that they wish to retain the traditional way of permeating public life with religion as opposed to liberals’ preference for separating church and state.