And While We're At It

Let's give conservatism a rethink too:

Why, then, do we have so many problems identifying what conservatism is in American politics? There is an easy, though not simple, answer to that question: What we have come to call "conservative" or the Right is a group of principles whose definitional names have been invented by those who hate those principles.

Who gave us the terms "Left" and "Right"? The atheistic, murderous French Revolutionaries, who were themselves on the Left Bank of the Seine, and whose implacable enemies were on the Right Bank of the Seine. These monsters, overshadowed by the evils of other Leftists later, were quite prepared, by their own admission, to kill one quarter of the population of France - many millions of people - to achieve their revolutionary aims.

Who invented the terms "liberal," "conservative," "progressive," "reactionary," "revolutionary," "radical," and "moderate" in the sense that we use those terms today? Karl Marx and those who largely accepted the Marxian view of things created this lexicon of political shades. Marx, who influenced Lenin, Mussolini and Mao, has been allowed from the grave to give us those words that we use to describe our politics today.

Orwell presciently told us that language is the key to politics. He also warned us that the intention of those who seek power was to drain meaning from words so that we could not cogently grasp the enemy or his weapons. So we conservatives call ourselves "conservative" without any real notion of what that is supposed to mean. We consider ourselves on the Right in some notional ideological spectrum, without really knowing what this spectrum is supposed to represent.

Consider the silliness of words like "conservative" and "liberal," if we actually give those words their commonsense meaning. Which American would most conservatives view as one of their own? Thomas Jefferson would be high on the list. He supported states' rights; he dreaded an imperial judiciary; we believed that the government which governed least was the best government; he believed strongly in the American Dream (he is recognized as the father of American Exceptionalism); he also deeply revered Western Civilization and its contributors. Thomas Jefferson would be considered an arch-conservative on most issues today.

But what was Jefferson, if we use the ordinary meaning of the words we have been given to describe politics? He was a liberal, because he believed in freedom (the ordinary meaning of the word relates to Latin libera. He was a conservative, because he sought to conserve those traditional rights which Americans had possessed as subjects of the Crown under English Common Law. He was a radical, who wrote the transformative Declaration of Independence and who made the radical gamble on America implicit in the Louisiana Purchase. He was a reactionary, because he sought to "turn back the clock," when the British tried to redefine the status of colonials by depriving them of rights which Englishmen had under Common Law. He was a revolutionary, because he reached the conclusion that only a revolutionary war could do justice to the American cause. He was a moderate, because he sought a tranquil, limited, apolitical government.

What Jefferson "was" ideologically was defined by the particular events happening at the time and upon the context it which those events happened. Yet Jefferson was not inconsistent it his political views: he was very consistent. He did not change, but rather the meaningless terms to define his actions and words had to change to meet the consistency of Jefferson. It is not unimportant that Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers never used terms like "liberal" or "conservative" or "progressive." And, despite the fact that his Presidency came after the French Revolution, Jefferson never used the term "Left" or "Right." Jefferson, one of the most brilliant and learned political thinkers in history, never used the silly language that we do today to describe political thought.

Of course, I don't think of Jefferson as being particularly conservative, given his support for the bloody French Revolution.

Hamilton and the Founders' Anglophile wing were a lot more in keeping with conservative ideas and temperament in my view. After all, it's Edmund Burke we consider to be the ideological Prometheus of conservatism, not Robespierre or Marat.