Conscience Of A Conservative Quotes

Social conservatism and neoconservatism have revived authoritarian conservatism, and not for the better of conservatism or American democracy. True conservatism is cautious and prudent. Authoritarianism is rash and radical. American democracy has benefited from true conservatism, but authoritarianism offers potentially serious trouble for any democracy.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds,

as the public grows more and more cynical, the politician feels less and less compelled to take his promises seriously.

In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience. He is free to discover his own potential and pursue his own legitimate interests, tempered, however, by a moral order that has its foundation in faith and guides his life and all human life through the prudent exercise of judgment.

The Transhumanist Party offers the most inclusive ideology for all ethnicities and races, the religious and the atheists, conservatives and liberals, the young and the old regardless of socioeconomic status, gender identity, or any other individual qualities.

But the framers were not visionaries. They knew that rules of government, however brilliantly calculated to cope with the imperfect nature of man, however carefully designed to avoid the pitfalls of power, would be no match for men who were determined to disregard them.

The polarization is such that the conservatives on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting. And the liberals on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting, and the two sides never get together and talk about it. The result is the tearing apart of the fabric of the body of Christ.

A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage,—the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men. And power, as Lord Acton said, corrupts men. “Absolute power,” he added, “corrupts absolutely.

Assume the best, Look for the good.

they propound the first principle of totalitarianism: that the State is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the State. It is clear that this view is in direct conflict with the Constitution which is an instrument, above all, for limiting the functions of government, and which is as binding today as when it was written.

Let us henceforth make war on all monopolies—whether corporate or union. The enemy of freedom is unrestrained power, and the champions of freedom will fight against the concentration of power wherever they find it.

the material and spiritual sides of man are intertwined; that it is impossible for the State to assume responsibility for one without intruding on the essential nature of the other; that if we take from a man the personal responsibility for caring for his material needs, we take from him also the will and the opportunity to be free.

the Conservative also recognizes that the political power on which order is based is a self-aggrandizing force; that its appetite grows with eating. He knows that the utmost vigilance and care are required to keep political power within its proper bounds.

The legitimate functions of government are actually conducive to freedom. Maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods—the exercise of these powers makes it possible for men to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom. But note that the very instrument by which these desirable ends are achieved can be the instrument for achieving undesirable ends—that government can, instead of extending freedom, restrict freedom.

The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery. Secondly,

The modern conservative movement was inspired by Barry Goldwater’s canonical text from 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Without demolishing religious schools (madrassahs) and minarets and without abandoning the beliefs and ideas of the medieval age, restriction in thoughts and pains in conscience will not end. Without understanding that unbelief is a kind of religion, and that conservative religious belief a kind of disbelief, and without showing tolerance to opposite ideas, one cannot succeed. Those who look for the truth will accomplish the mission. Mevlana Jalal ad-Din RUMI

Conservative evangelicals don't want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn't acceptable to God. Moreover, we believe the gospel isn't in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does.

Conservatives without conscience do not have horns and tails; if they did they would be easier to identify. Many of them can be quite pleasant, but at heart they are tough, cold-blooded, ruthless authoritarians. They are limited in their ability to see the world from any point of view other than their own, and they are narrow in their outlook.

I have little interest in streamlining the government or in making it more efficient, for I intend to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.

Freedom of association is one of the natural rights of man. Clearly, therefore, it should also be a "civil" right. Right-to-work laws derive from the natural law: they are simply an attempt to give freedom of association the added protection of civil law. I

Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

The Conservative approach is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today. The challenge is not to find new or different truths, but to learn how to apply established truths to the problems of the contemporary world.

In the main, the trouble with American education is that we have put into practice the educational philosophy expounded by John Dewey and his disciples. In varying degrees we have adopted what has been called "progressive education." Subscribing to the egalitarian notion that every child must have the same education, we have neglected to provide an educational system which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students and which will thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the future. In

Such, then, is history’s lesson, which Messrs. Acheson and Larson evidently did not read: release the holders of state power from any restraints other than those they wish to impose upon themselves, and you are swinging down the well-traveled road to absolutism. The framers of the Constitution had learned the lesson. They were not only students of history, but victims of it: they knew from vivid, personal experience that freedom depends on effective restraints against the accumulation of power in a single authority.

Thus, for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day's overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom.

Far too often the Internet is where the truth goes to die.

Bad information propagated by powerful people spreads like a contagion, infecting vulnerable people in its path.

[The Devil] "This legend is about paradise. There was, they say, a certain thinker and philospher here on your earth, who 'rejected all--laws, conscience faith, and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he'd go straight into darkness and death, but no--there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant. 'This,' he said, 'goes against my convictions.' So for that he was sentenced...I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I'm repeating what I heard, it's just a legend...you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be open to him and he would be forgiven everything...Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while, looked, and then lay down across the road: 'I dont want to go, I refuse to go on principle!' Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights--you'll get the character of this thinker lying in the road...He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking." "What an ass!" Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. "isn't it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years' walk!" "Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins." "Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?" "You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, lets say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun--all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore... "Go on, what happened when he arrived?" "The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds--and that by the watch--before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang 'Hosannah' and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it's a legend.

These moral conclusions are easy to make. The real problem is that many of us have been systematically taught in church to shut off our brains and conscience when we read the Bible. In fact, it is commonly taught that we are utterly incapable of making sound moral judgments on our own. Our hearts are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9, KJV). We are therefore admonished to “lean not on thine own understanding” (Prov 3:5, KJV), because “God’s ways are higher than our ways” (Isa 55:9).41 These verses are all marshaled to appeal to the narrative of unquestioning obedience, and are used to get us to not question moral atrocity in the Bible and instead defend it. The Bible says so; that settles it. End of discussion, end of thought, end of conscience.

All of which is proof that conservatives can have honest differences of opinion on policy matters, among themselves and with others—or be open to entirely new ideas—without being thought heretical.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Matthew 6:5–7; emphasis added).

Graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it. The cause is the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of union leaders.

Here we have, by prominent spokesmen of both political parties, an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government. There is no reference by either of them to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government. The government can do whatever needs to be done; note, too, the implicit but necessary assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done.

If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state. —PROFESSOR BOB ALTEMEYER

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past. The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

Perhaps most destructive of all, we haven’t ever had an occupant of the White House who so routinely calls true reports that irk him “fake news” while giving his seal of approval to fake reports that happen to support his position.

But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. This heightened level of aggressiveness has a number of psychological roots.

Hillary has described her yes vote as a 'mistake.' But the mistake was simply that she, like many other Democratic senators who couldn't imagine that a president would actually lie us into a war, gave George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt.

We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of public financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money.

Most important of all: in our anxiety to "improve" the world and insure "progress" we have permitted our schools to become laboratories for social and economic change according to the predilections of the professional educators. We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to so train the minds of the new generation as to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own day. The

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!

The socialist temptation is widely described by conservatives as the temptation to live off “free stuff.” But this is not so—the temptation is actually more complex. It is the temptation to annihilate one’s conscience by feeling justified in living off other people’s work.

The graduated tax is a confiscatory tax. Its effect, and to a large extent its aim, is to bring down all men to a common level. Many of the leading proponents of the graduated tax frankly admit that their purpose is to redistribute the nation's wealth. Their aim is an egalitarian society—an objective that does violence both to the charter of the Republic and the laws of Nature. We are all equal in the eyes of God but we are equal in no other respect. Artificial devices for enforcing equality among unequal men must be rejected if we would restore that charter and honor those laws. One

The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants.

But I am here concerned not so much by the abandonment of States' Rights by the national Democratic Party—an event that occurred some years ago when that party was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement—as by the unmistakable tendency of the Republican Party to adopt the same course.

La probité, la sincérité, la candeur, la conviction, l'idée du devoir, sont des choses qui, en se trompant, peuvent devenir hideuses, mais qui, même hideuses, restent grandes; leur majesté, propre à la conscience humaine, persiste dans l'horreur. Ce sont des vertus qui ont un vice, l'erreur. L'impitoyable joie honnête d'un fanatique en pleine atrocité conserve on ne sait quel rayonnement lugubrement vénérable. Sans qu'il s'en doutât, Javert, dans son bonheur formidable, était à plaindre comme tout ignorant qui triomphe. Rien n'était poignant et terrible comme cette figure où se montrait ce qu'on pourrait appeler tout le mauvais du bon.

in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.9

The same reasons apply to unions. Industry-wide price-fixing causes economic dislocations? So does industry-wide wage-fixing. A wage that is appropriate in one part of the country may not be in another area where economic conditions are very different. Corporate monopolies impair the operation of the free market, and thus injure the consuming public. So do union monopolies.

The Tenth Amendment recognizes the States' jurisdiction in certain areas. States' Rights means that the States have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in the areas reserved to them. The States may have duties corresponding to these rights, but the duties are owed to the people of the States, not to the federal government. Therefore, the recourse lies not with the federal government, which is not sovereign, but with the people who are, and who have full power to take disciplinary action. If the people are unhappy with say, their State's disability insurance program, they can bring pressure to bear on their state officials and, if that fails, they can elect a new set of officials. And if, in the unhappy event they should wish to divest themselves of this responsibility, they can amend the Constitution.

What if our national parks and monuments became places of conscience instead of places of consumption? How many more T-shirts can we buy, let alone wear, that advertise where we've been? How many different forms of recreation must we create to assuage our adrenaline to return home with a fresh idea gleaned while walking in new territory? As I have been visiting our national parks, I keep asking myself: Who are we becoming? In the end, it may be solitude that the future will thank us most for conserving- the kind of solitude born out of stillness....It is the kind of stillness that can still be found in each of our national parks where a quieting of the soul inspires creative acts.

In the case that upheld the second AAA, Wickard v. Filburn, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him—notwithstanding that the "excess" wheat had been consumed on his own farm. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That's easy, the Court said. If you had not used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that was transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution's clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture. The

Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.

If to a person religion means reading books and obeying every single word from it without the slightest bit of reasoning, then such perception would only bring destruction upon the person and the world. Also there are people who use the words from those books to justify their own filthy actions. Let’s take a conservative Muslim, for example. Say, the conservative Muslim male Homo sapiens (I won’t call such creature a human, regardless of the religion, since his action here shows no sign of humanity) is found to be beating his wife. Now, if someone says to him “this is wrong”, he would naturally reply, “this is a divine thing to do, my book says so”. Now, if a Christian says “my book is older, so you should stop obeying your book and start obeying mine”, there will come the Buddhist, and say, “my book is much older still, obey mine”. Then will come the Jew, and say, “my book is even older, so just follow mine”. And in the end will come the Hindu and say “my books are the oldest of all, obey them”. Therefore referring to books will only make a mess of the human race and tear the species into pieces.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

CNN and The New York Times are called fake news by some people on our side, while the president personally thanks infowars.com and its founder Alex Jones for “standing up for the values that makes this country great.” Jones, it must be noted, has rarely met a bizarre conspiracy that he didn’t fully embrace and is one of the most egregious polluters of civil discourse in America. He believes, for instance, that 9/11 was perpetrated by the American government and that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, in which twenty first-graders were killed, was a hoax staged by the government as a pretext to confiscate our guns. Those grieving parents that we all saw were—according to Jones—paid actors. It was disheartening to learn that in the days immediately following his election, as President-Elect Trump was receiving the well wishes of world leaders, he also took time to place a call to this man to let him know how important his support had been to the success of his campaign. Giving away one’s agency and becoming captive to such outlandish and vile alternative facts would be bad enough were one an average person, quietly living his or her life. But giving away one’s agency to such a confusion of fact and fantasy when one has power—well, that is truly dangerous.

Conservative foreign policy is in the business of shaping habits of behavior, not winning hearts and minds. It announces red lines sparingly but enforces them unsparingly. It is willing to act decisively, or preventively, to punish or prevent blatant transgressions of order—not as a matter of justice but in the interests of deterrence. But it knows it cannot possibly punish or prevent every transgression. It champions its values consistently and confidently, but it doesn’t conflate its values and its interests. It wants to let citizens go about their business as freely and easily as possible. But it knows that security is a prerequisite for civil liberty, not a threat to it. Where it can use a finger, or a hand, to tilt the political scales of society toward liberal democracy, it will do so. But it won’t attempt to tilt the scales in places where the tilting demands all of its weight and strength and endurance. It does not waste its energy or time chasing diplomatic symbols: its ambitions do not revolve around a Nobel Peace Prize. It prefers liberal autocracy to illiberal democracy, because the former is likelier to evolve into democracy than the latter is to evolve into liberalism. It knows the value of hope, and knows also that economic growth based on enterprise and the freest possible movement of goods, services, capital, and labor is the best way of achieving it. And it is mindful of the claims of conscience, which is strengthened by faith.

The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic—precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town.… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problems”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves—and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while de-emphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I've said this earlier but it's worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, 'I hope you will let it go,' about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to be almost darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president so brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check...without these checks on our leaders, without those institutions vigorously standing against abuses of power, our country cannot sustain itself as a functioning democracy. I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity - it is a choice - and somewhere deep down they must know that. Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or different immigration policy.

It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them. It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished. Yet human needing is historical, and who can predict what forms the needs of the spirit may take? There is a loss of nerve in the premature announcements of the death of the spirit, the easy condemnations of materialist aspiration in capitalist society. Western societies have continued the search for spiritual consolation in the only manner consistent with the freedom of the seeking subject: by making every person the judge of his own spiritual satisfaction. We have all been left to choose what we need, and we have pushed the search for private meaning to the limits of what a public language can contain if it is to continue to be a means of communication. We have Augustine's first freedom, and because we have it, we cannot have his second. We can no longer offer each other the possibility of metaphysical belonging: a shared place, sustained by faith, in a divine universe. All our belonging now is social.

Je crois que nous perdons l'immortalité parce que la résistance à la mort n'a pas évolué; nous insistons sur l'idée première, rudimentaire, qui est de retenir vivant le corps tout entier. Il suffirait de chercher à conserver seulement ce qui intéresse la conscience.

If we as progressives are going to reject violence and instead focus on mercy and social justice, then we need to have a developed hermeneutical rationale for our reading which can stand its ground against a conservative reading that seeks to legitimize violence in God’s name. What we need is an approach that can honestly face and confront violence in the Bible, and do so from the perspective of faith, and as the necessary outgrowth of a developed moral conscience.

But they had known exactly what they were doing, which was why they were always drunk out of their minds on the vodka stacked in crates right next to the bullets as they did it. Ah yes, the vodka . . . The prosecutor had already stated that a conservative estimate of 31,970 people had been killed. Paula was curious to know when he would reveal something she’d learned while interviewing a quartermaster who had supplied the killers with their food and drink. He reckoned that he’d delivered around thirty thousand bottles of vodka to the various killing sites: a bottle, in other words, for every single person that had died. How hard those killers had tried to obliterate their consciousness along with their consciences.

This development—moving away from the view that God causes evil (rape, famine, sickness, war), towards a view that such evil is demonic—can be seen much earlier within Judaism in the intertestamental book of Jubilees (ca. 100 BCE) which revises the biblical narratives found in Genesis and the beginning of Exodus. The book of Jubilees takes many passages, which in the Old Testament books are attributed to God, and instead states that these were in fact the work of “Mastema,” the prince of demons. For example, while Exodus says that God killed the firstborn children in Egypt (Exod 11:4), the later book of Jubilees instead attributes this to “the powers of Mastema” which literally means in Hebrew “the powers of Hate” (Jubilees 49:2). This illustrates the shift in thinking that was occurring within Judaism at the time which recognized the obvious moral difficulty in attributing acts of evil to God. We can see a similar revisionism as well in the canonical books of the Old Testament itself. 2 Samuel describes God telling David to take a census, and then punishing him for it: “Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah’” (2 Sam 24:1). David then subsequently recognizes that this was a sin: “David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord, ‘I have sinned greatly in what I have done’” (v. 10). God then punishes David for this: “So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time designated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died” (v. 15). This obviously paints a morally problematic picture of God, which is revised in the parallel account in the later book of 1 Chronicles, which instead states, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel” (1 Chron 21:1). Instead of God deceiving David and inciting him to sin, this is now presented as the work of Satan.

I’ve been to India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party anymore – liberalism’s infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists; we all have a good conscience. I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country; the local tribes support us; we are victorious; but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They though we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.

Some federal judges, including conservative judges, have quit in protest of federal drug laws and sentencing guidelines. Face-to-face with those whose lives hang in the balance, they are far closer to the human tragedy occasioned by the drug war than the legislators who write the laws from afar. Judge Lawrence Irving, a Reagan appointee, noted upon his retirement: “If I remain on the bench, I have no choice but to follow the law. I just can’t, in good conscience, continue to do this.”83 Other judges, such as Judge Jack Weinstein, publicly refused to take any more drug cases, describing “a sense of depression about much of the cruelty I have been a party to in connection with the ‘war on drugs.

Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare "transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it," U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts.

The conservative knows that freedom without any restraints may lead to oppression or anarchy, just as government without any restraints may lead to collectivism. But he believes the best and most effective restraint upon anarchic individualism to be obedience to moral law, the private conscience.

Underneath this veneer of a conservative moral conscience is a clear sense of fearful superiority.

First, the kind of situation Paul is facing here must not be confused with quite a different one. Suppose you are a Christian who, owing to your cultural background, has always engaged in social drinking. Now you move into a circle that is more socially conservative. Some senior saint comes up to you and says, “I have to tell you that I am offended by your drinking. Paul tells us that if anyone is offended by what you do, you must stop it. I’m offended; you must therefore stop your drinking.” How would you respond? This senior saint is simply manipulating you. He (or she) is not a person with a weak conscience who is in danger of tippling on the side because of your example, and thus wounding his weak conscience. Far from it. If he sees you drinking again he will likely denounce you in the most unrestrained terms. In his eyes, he is the stronger person, not the weaker. In other words, this case is not at all like the one the apostle had to deal with. Indeed, it might be wise to tell him, “I’m sorry to hear that you have such a weak conscience.” He will probably be so unclear as to what you mean that he may actually leave you alone for a couple of weeks.

Conservatism is not inherently moralistic, negative, arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous. Nor is it authoritarian. Yet all of these are adjectives that best describe the political outlook of contemporary conservatism. I make these observations not as an outsider, but as a conservative who is deeply troubled by what has become of a treasured philosophy. Conservatism has been co-opted by authoritarians, a most dangerous type of political animal.

There are, of course, innumerable subdivisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood – that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for much anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right; they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In

We will suggest he is led to these conclusions by a distorted view of the social and legal landscape. Where exemptions give believers an equal shot at living with integrity, Corvino sees favoritism. Where statutes give the occasional religious liberty claimant her day in court, he sees a teeming mass of claims about to choke the workings of government. Where a sprawling body of regulations sits, rife with exemptions for everyday secular purposes, Corvino sees a system of laws so necessary in its details that religious exemptions might be ruinous. In conservative professionals facing steep fines on conscience, Corvino sees new Puritans; and in their bureaucratic harassers, he sees freedom fighters. Down the path to exemptions he sees a slippery slope; when society doesn’t tumble, he imagines it stopped by legal barriers that aren’t there, because they aren’t needed. And at the horizon—where others search for harmony with the transcendent, their path cleared by freedoms of conscience and religion—he sees at best a socially useful mirage.

In short, there is a significant difference between appearing to have problems with impulse control and actually having impulse-control problems. And so in our own time, in a very different presidency, we would do well to examine anew the efficacy of unpredictability.

But in the tweeting life of our president, strategy is difficult to detect. Influencing the news cycles seems to be the principal goal; achieving short-term tactical advantage, you bet.

Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, blame them for our country’s problems. We knew all of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery. The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.

I kept that Armey-Archer T-shirt so that I could remember a time when Republicans thought about ideas and enjoyed those good-spirited and consequential debates. It seems that time is gone, replaced by a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier.

Our crisis has many fathers. Among them is Newt Gingrich, the modern progenitor of that school of politics. Any honest accounting of how we got to this new day has to reckon with Newt, whose talent for politics exceeded his interest in governing.

In the late 1990s, the conservative gadfly Roger Stone began to observe, not disapprovingly, that popular culture had become more influential than politics.

If principle is only defended when there’s nothing at stake, then it is probably not much of a principle after all.

Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball has made similar observations, and describes today’s Republicans as the “Daddy” party and Democrats as the “Mommy.

Research finds that authoritarian aggression is fueled by fear and encouraged by remarkable self-righteousness, which frees aggressive impulses.

• They travel in tight circles of likeminded people. • Their thinking is more likely based on what authorities have told them rather than on their own critical judgment, which results in their beliefs being filled with inconsistencies. • They harbor numerous double standards and hypocrisies. • They are hostile toward so many minorities they seem to be equal-opportunity bigots, yet they are generally unaware of their prejudices. • They see the world as a dangerous place, with society teetering on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence, and when their fear conflates with their self-righteousness, they appoint themselves guardians of public morality, or God’s Designated Hitters. • They think of themselves as far more moral and upstanding than others—a self-deception aided by their religiosity (many are “born again”) and their ability to “evaporate guilt” (such as by going to confession).

Nothing shows lack of conscience better than bold-faced lying.

Social Dominators—Leaders: • typically men • dominating* • opposes equality* • desirous of personal power* • amoral* • intimidating and bullying • faintly hedonistic • vengeful • pitiless • exploitive • manipulative • dishonest • cheats to win • highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic) • mean-spirited • militant • nationalistic • tells others what they want to hear • takes advantage of “suckers” • specializes in creating false images to sell self • may or may not be religious • usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Right-Wing Authoritarian—Followers: • men and women • submissive to authority* • aggressive on behalf of authority* • conventional* • highly religious • moderate to little education • trust untrustworthy authorities • prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own) • mean-spirited • narrow-minded • intolerant • bullying • zealous • dogmatic • uncritical toward chosen authority • hypocritical • inconsistent and contradictory • prone to panic easily • highly self-righteous • moralistic • strict disciplinarian • severely punitive • demands loyalty and returns it • little self-awareness • usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Growing up with migrant workers, I knew that they usually worked harder than we did. Sometimes my dad and my uncles would hire a few of my buddies from school to help with the harvest or the branding; they would last maybe a day or two and were often unreliable. But our Mexican migrant laborers worked hard, and we could count on them. Because of this experience, I have always said that I could never look at these migrants and consider them criminals. They were working to feed their families, and we simply could not have gotten along without them. So when during the 2016 campaign Jeb Bush committed a sin of candor by saying that people crossing the border did it as an act of love, well, that’s exactly how I felt, too. And I said so at the time. Having grown up with migrant labor and with the Hispanic community that was here long before we were, I knew that what Jeb Bush was saying was true. Among those who were raised in rural Arizona, it is much more difficult to summon the vitriol for immigrants that fuels so much of the politics in the age of Trump. Of course, Jeb Bush was savaged for saying what he said, just mocked mercilessly. But then, unlike his critics, he knew what he was talking about and dared to speak truthfully, which is both a rarity and liability these days. We have to return to the politics of comity and inclusion and reject the politics of xenophobia and demonization.

One of those outrages, presumably, was Joseph Smith’s vocal opposition to slavery, and the governor’s executive order was the culmination of years of anti-Mormon sentiment, spurred by what were perceived as Joseph Smith’s designs on taking over American civil society. A manifesto written and signed by hundreds of Missourians, including elected officials, had preceded the extermination order, calling Mormons “a pretended religious sect,” and “deluded fanatics.” Mormons, then, have had foundational and horrifying experience with some of these worst impulses of mankind and became both refugees and immigrants in our own land. And so when someone starts talking of religious tests and religious bans, we know better. Because we have seen this all before. When we say “No Muslims” or “No Mexicans,” we may as well say “No Mormons.” Because it is no different. That kind of talk is a dagger in the heart of Mormons. It is a dagger in my heart. Because we know firsthand that America was made great not by giving in to these impulses but by fighting them, and defeating them. Governor Boggs’s Mormon ban was officially on the books in Missouri for 138 years. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed long before it was officially rescinded in 1976.

political experiment struck me as bizarre when I was younger, but I have grown to appreciate the wisdom in it, too—the wisdom that says that before we are members of a party, we are people. Too often, labels prevent us from really seeing each other as such. Well, the Flakes listened in church, and we took this assignment to heart. There are to this day Flakes in town who have remained faithfully registered Democrats their whole lives and who are always up for a good argument at family gatherings. This enforced ecumenical spirit didn’t ever diminish my ardor for conservative policies or principles; if anything, it served to sharpen my arguments. But it did something else, too—it made me look for premises we could agree on.

Brigham Young himself had sent my great-great-grandfather, William Jordan Flake, and others down from Utah to colonize the area. Legend has it that after experiencing Arizona’s rugged and unforgiving terrain, some colonizers returned to Utah and told Brigham Young that there was nothing worth settling down there. But Brigham Young had instructed William Jordan to sell everything that he owned—including all of his land holdings in rich Utah bottomland. His exact words were, “Leave nothing to come back to.” And so he did, and he eventually would purchase the valley where Snowflake is today. Shortly thereafter he met up with Erastus Snow, the Mormon apostle who was overseeing the church’s colonization efforts, and they combined their names to give my town its name. My great-great-grandfather was a rancher, and he passed some of the land down to his son, James Madison Flake, and James Madison passed some of it down to my grandfather Virgil Maeser, who passed it down to four of his sons, the eldest of whom is my father, Dean Flake. And that land—the F-Bar Ranch—

list could be much longer. It is unpleasant to have to ask these questions. It is not easy to think about the current state of conservatism. But it is a conservative’s responsibility to do so. I certainly could never presume to answer those questions for Senator Goldwater, but for myself, I will resoundingly say no in answer to each. Emphatically: No. It was to advance and defend conservative principles that I first decided to stand for election and get involved in public life. At that time, our national political duopoly was well established, and I had a pretty clear notion of who my political allies would be in this endeavor and, conversely, who my political opponents would be. And for the most part that dichotomy has held—until now. It is political unwindings such as we are now experiencing that scramble alliances and undo parties. But if I find myself here having to defend conservative principles against threats to those principles from people on my own side, well, it won’t be the first time that that has happened.

Conservatives seek the wisdom of the past, not the worst of it,

An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well.”98 Are we on the road to fascism?

Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to state the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians.