Slogans won’t get us to the place we need to be as conservatives fighting for the hearts and minds of the nation.
Yesterday, I asked a question for anyone who cared to respond, to wit, “what is conservatism?”
Most of you responded with what I would have said if asked; free markets, less government, individual liberty, respect for the constitution, founding principles, etc.
All of this is quite correct. But I think the best place to begin in search of clarity is with Russell Kirk, author of the 1953 classic “The Conservative Mind” and later in 1989 “Prospects for Conservatives”.
Kirk, in the 1989 work, is pithy about it. “In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and the Old Night.” (The latter phrase, I think, refers to Milton’s description in “Paradise Lost” of the devil’s fall from heaven.)
Kirk then goes on to note that “The conservative public man turns to the constitution, custom, convention, ancient consensus, prescription, precedent, as guides—not to the narrow and fantastic abstractions of ideology.” In other words as Kirk puts it, the conservative turns to “right reason and moral imagination”.
Finally—at least for this post anyway—Kirk reminds us that while conservatism flourished in the 1980’s, “Ballot-box victories are undone in short order, if unsupported by the enduring art of persuasion.”
And then he makes this remarkable point in the very next sentence. “A political movement that fancies it can subsist by slogans, and by an alleged “pragmatism” presently is tumbled over by the next political carnival, shouting fresher slogans.”
Amen.
The key here is the “art of persuasion”. I think we as conservatives are failing at this miserable, particularly with educating the next generation. In fact, even as Kirk was writing about the growth of conservatism in 1989, he offered a warning that conservatism could backslide just as it had grown in the 80s. “Yet could the tremendous conservative successes in public opinion, during recent years, conceivable cease? Might the wave of democratic opinion begin to sweep back again, an ebb-tide, carrying out to the great deep much American flotsam?” Kirk answers his own questions this way:
“Yes.
From what cause?
Stupidity.”
Seems like he knew what things would look like in 2017. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Slogans won’t get us to the place we need to be as conservatives fighting for the hearts and minds of the nation.
We must be committed to do the hard work of reasoning in an environment largely resistant to reason.
The most powerful question in any debate directed to those who make “begging the question”—the assuming of a conclusion before it is proven—the central feature of their argument on any question is this. “Does that make sense to you?”
Conservatives must ask THAT question frequently of modern liberal arguments in the coming days, months, and years ahead if we are to reengage America in a meaningful way. And when we ask that question, we must then point to “the permanent things” and do so persuasively with “right reason and moral imagination”.
Time to get busy, don’t you think?
Scott Lingamfelter is the delegate from Prince William County.
