You Know It Makes Sense

30 May 2009

The right to swear is integral to being a true conservative

Both sides, I believe, are missing the point, and if either of these extremes are allowed to prevail it will not only keep the Republicans out of office longer than they deserve but, far worse — as in Britain — it will lead to the dilution and corruption of the best, noblest, most honest and effective political philosophy that history has yet devised.

There’s a perceived wisdom about conservatism that it embodies a weary realism bordering on cynicism. ‘Neither conservatives nor humorists believe that man is good. But left-wingers do,’ as P.J. O’Rourke puts it. But for once, the great P.J. is only half right. Sure, it’s true that conservatives do not share left-liberals’ romantic delusions about the ‘blank slate’ and the perfectibility of man; sure it’s also true that conservatives accept, far more than liberals do, the need to constrain man’s dangerous tendencies through law and order and a powerful military. Where I think that conservatives are selling themselves short is in failing to acknowledge their philosophy’s underlying optimism.

The reason I am a conservative is not, as my left-liberal friends’ caricature version so often has it, because I’m a closet fascist who loves making rules and bossing people around. Quite the opposite. I’m a conservative because I believe that we are, every one of us, so magnificently special and delightful that only under the most extreme of circumstances should our most precious possession of all — liberty — be stolen from us by the overweening state. This, when you think about it, is a much more generous response to the messy human condition than that of left-liberals. In their ugly, begrudging, bossy weltanschauung, man is so utterly incapable of doing the right thing that the only way to create a fair and just society is for a higher agency (big government) to steal half his money and spend it as it sees fit, while micromanaging his behaviour with all manner of pettifogging social regulation.

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paul C

May 29th, 2009 10:26am Report this comment

Nicely put, James

Rob Slack

May 29th, 2009 5:46pm Report this comment

I am writing this to see if it makes it through. Almost (if not all) I have ever tried to post has vanished into the ether. No bad language or personla comments (possible wrong on the last point). Am I banned?

Wayland

May 30th, 2009 9:08pm Report this comment

Yeah, I like that sort of conservatism. Beats the fascist Labour government we have now. What a shame that there is not a party or candidate I can vote for who thinks like this.

Richard L

May 31st, 2009 9:53am Report this comment

Nicely argued, very thoughtful - and spot on. A Libertarian view in the old, true sense of the term.

Jeremy

June 3rd, 2009 8:24pm Report this comment

I'm glad you wrote this piece and I think that what you had to say needed saying. After many years of Labour and the EU I can see how things, people, modes of dress and behaviour have become increasingly standardised and conformist. These things are the result of big-state monitoring and regulation and are, or course, essentially anti-conservative. Conservatism to me is about the autonomy of the individual. And that is about freedom of thought and expression. The freedom to dress as you please and to think as you like. And also the freedom to disagree with the majority, the state and whatever the fashionable orthodoxies of your day may be. Conservatism is not about big-state blueprints for the masses. It is not about uniformity and conformity to the state's idea of what you - and by extension all of its citizens - should be, should wear, should think and should say.

But then - like yourself, I imagine - I am an English conservative. The American variety has never struck me as being true conservatism.

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