What Does It Mean To Be A "Conservative?"

The Emergence of "Progressivism"

The “Progressive Era” in American history conjures up for many people memories of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts, the enactment of child-labor laws, and reforms to ensure food and workplace safety. Yet along with reforms like those, which most Americans supported, was a vastly expanded role for government and a loss of individual liberties. In his best-selling book, "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning," author and columnist Jonah Goldberg has described excessive and unconstitutional measures taken by the Wilson Administration. Using the emergency of wartime, the Wilson Administration fired the opening salvo in a campaign that is still being waged for large, powerful and centralized government.

Many influential “progressive” thinkers in that era of American history saw World War I as an opportunity for fundamental political change. The human suffering and economic destruction caused by the Great War in Europe and the world-wide economic crisis that became known as the Great Depression would soon sweep away most eighteenth and nineteenth century notions about the sovereignty of the individual and a government that is of, by, and for the people. Seizing the opportunity provided by the Great Depression, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly made permanent, and dramatically built upon, the big-government excesses of the Wilson years.

Among American progressives it became not only acceptable but fashionable to admire what Lenin was imposing in Russia and Mussolini’s Fascists were experimenting with in Italy. Here at home, the great number of new government agencies and programs advanced by the Roosevelt Administration intruded into every aspect of American life and commerce. We ask today how 100,000 Japanese-Americans could have been forcibly housed by our government in internment camps during World War II. President Gerald Ford answered that question best with his observation that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Government at all levels continued to grow throughout the twentieth century in the United States, and at mid-century there was little that fundamentally separated our two major political parties. Indeed, some critics ridiculed the Republican Party by accusing it of promising “less of the same.”

The flame of classical liberalism, which was the foundation of modern-day conservatism, had been bestowed across the ages through the five historic cities chronicled earlier in this series. Yet while seriously jeopardized in the twentieth century by the advancing winds of progressivism, the flickering flame was not completely extinguished. At mid-twentieth century, progressivism or modern-day liberalism was at its peak, but the tide was turning.

Senator Robert Taft made an unsuccessful attempt in 1952 to challenge the big-government orthodoxy of the Republican Party and return it to the ideals of limited government respecting freedom and individual rights. National Review Magazine, which catered to the philosophies of many influential conservatives, was launched by young William F. Buckley, a resident of Camden, SC. And a former Democrat and union official named Ronald Reagan began giving speeches about the important need to restore Constitutional government in the United States. Indeed, the tide was turning.

What Does It Mean To Be A "Conservative?"

Conservatives Treasure the Tried and True

In reflecting on conservatism, also referred to as classical liberalism, some historians have commented that the American Revolution is one of history’s only revolutions to actually succeed, while revolutions in France and later in Russia were catastrophic, resulting in murder and tyranny. Edmund Burke, who had championed revolutionary America’s cause in the British Parliament, understood the difference and in his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), strongly opposed that revolution even before its murderous Reign of Terror began. The difference between the two revolutions for Burke goes to the heart of what it means to be a conservative.

Burke revered history as well as those institutions that have been tested through the crucible of time. For Burke, the American Revolution was fought not to impose a new order of untried ideas, but to secure rights that had evolved over centuries, from those individual rights provided by the Magna Carta in 1215 to the breaking of the absolute power of the monarchy accomplished through Great Britain’s “Glorious Revolution of 1688.”

Burke was not opposed to change, but he venerated natural change that evolved through time and human experience. The French Revolution, on the other hand, sought through bloodshed and legal decrees to suddenly impose new rights and a new social order that had never before been known in France. The results of radical change in France, like those imposed later by the Bolsheviks in Russia, were disastrous.

In our own country, the nineteenth century was filled with the classical liberalism that was championed and handed on by America’s founders. But in the twentieth century powerful movements in America and throughout the world rejected classical liberalism and began to assert the rights of the collective over those of the individual.

Communists set the collective at war with the rights of the individual; Nazis set the needs of race and nation against individual rights; and fascists and the architects of the welfare state set the material needs of society in conflict with the rights of individuals. Reversing the idea of our founders, they asserted the idea that individuals should serve the state, rather than the state existing at the pleasure of individuals to protect their rights.

It is no accident that those who would overturn the social order and radically change our nation today downplay the teaching of history, ignore giant historical figures, and even distort its lessons. We see references to the efforts of “dead, white men” in attempts to eliminate our religious roots, and to distort the story of America’s discovery and the role of our founding fathers.

By imposing on people ideas that were radical, untried, and alien to human experience, humanity experienced during the twentieth century a century of despotism, depression and war, with approximately 265 million people killed by their own governments. Many believe that the carnage exceeds all previous centuries combined. This barbarous history, so recently experienced, makes clear that Burke was a wise champion for older truths. Indeed, many of these older truths were from the Bible, the world’s greatest chronicle of individual salvation history. It is quite natural then that so many champions of today's conservative movement obtain their world view in transcendent Scriptural truths that have withstood repeated tests from generation to generation.

Perhaps no figure more embodied the spirit of Burke and conservative respect for the tried and true than South Carolina’s own “cast iron man,” John C. Calhoun. He spoke to his time and ours when he warned that “It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.”