First of all, welcome . . .

To this point I have successfully resisted creating a blog, for the simple and good reason that there is no a priori reason for me to assume anyone will be interested.  Time will certainly tell.

In the spirit of our Founding Fathers who, in declaring the Colonies independent from George III, considered it both prudent and necessary to enumerate the motivations for their Declaration, I am similarly constrained.

As the title of this blog suggests, it is my contention that conservatives cannot ultimately meet with success in preserving the Republic without a solid intellectual base out of which all positions and policies issue.  We must begin, once again, to think correctly before we can presume to be acting correctly. And since conservatism is the politics of reality, genuine conservatives must recognize certain realities of our lot in life.

First of all, we must recognize that conservatism will never triumph in the sense of final victory over our collectivist opponents. Why? Liberalism is the politics of the utopian dreamer who imagines a better earth as being attainable if only everyone would see things their way.  The liberal actually believes he is better than he is as a human being, that he has in him the ability to act contrary to his nature.  He will outlaw greed or self-interest by this or that policy, thinking that he has advanced heaven on earth by the stroke of a pen.  Of course, the liberal cannot repeal human nature, and is constantly taken by surprise when his plans are thwarted.  If he taxes corporations to provide for a class he favors, he is shocked to find that capital flees the jurisdiction to wherever it is better treated and tax can be profitably avoided. The genuine conservative knows this, but can never ultimately triumph, because every generation believes it is smarter than its predecessor and is willing to repeat the same failed policies.

The conservative must therefore maintain a constant vigil against collectivist dogoodism which constantly ignores human nature, history, and reason.  But conservatism can never really triumph in the sense of total victory.  Liberals shall always, alas, be with us. Some of them are talented enough to be elected, meaning that they are sufficiently intelligent to couch nonsense as sense and promise hope’s triumph over reality.

Second, it is high time that genuine conservatives (as opposed to the ‘neo’ species) understand that we should not be defenders of the Second Amendment if we are then going to repeatedly persist in shooting ourselves in the foot, politically.  We must realize that nominating a candidate on the Republican side who is demonstrably not a conservative, and then attempting to pass him off as one is a sure recipe for mediocrity (at the minimum) and outright betrayal of conservative virtues (at the margin).  In this past election, we should each find the people who voted for McCain in the primaries and caucuses and personally thank them for electing Barack Obama and securing a near-insurmountable majority in Congress. 

And finally, conservatives must clean its own stables, intellectually, as its first and most important action.  When George II championed “compassionate conservatism,” genuine conservatives should have been horrified, not merely because it was redundant, but because it ceded moral ground to liberals who, in lying to the citizenry, wrapped themselves in the flag of “compassion” while impoverishing them financially, socially, and culturally.  George Bush thought he was onto something substantive, when in point of fact, it was sheer nonsense.  And when Mr. Cheney said that “Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” genuine conservatives should have taken that man to the woodshed (or invited him on a hunting trip).  Reagan would have been horrified to hear such a thing, and mystified to understand how anyone with more than a two-digit IQ could ever come to such a silly conclusion. Where were you, Fox News? Some conservatives did wince a bit, in articles and on talk radio.  But Mr. Cheney should have been roundly condemned for his remark, not only because it was a lie, but because it reflected an astounding lack of principled conservative thought.

Again, welcome….