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June 10, 2004
This article explores something that has always puzzled me---American conservatism. After acknowledging the fuzziness about what American conservatism is they say:
"But stand back and compare Ronald Reagan's very American brand of conservatism with its counterparts around the world, and you can identify a clear mainstream. There has been, to put it bluntly, nothing like it anywhere else.
American conservatives have been exceptional in two ways: in the ideas that they espouse and the movement they have created. Mr. Reagan typified both. The best way to think about the ideas he preached....is as a reformation.
Mr. Reagan...combined renewal with heresy. The established faith that Mr. Reagan's generation of American conservatives reinterpreted was classical conservatism (the conservatism whose most eloquent prophet remains Edmund Burke), and the heresy they introduced was classical liberalism (the creed of the Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill).
Traditional conservatism was based on six principles: a suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; unashamed patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; a pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism; and elitism. This was the creed that Burke shaped into a philosophy in the 18th century--and that most famous conservatives, from Prince Metternich to Winston Churchill, understood in their bones. Mr. Reagan's conservatism exaggerated the first three of Burke's principles and contradicted the last three."
Reagan took a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. He replaced hierachy with entrepreneurism; pessimism with optimism and elitism (the educated "clerisy" of Coleridge and T.S. Eliot) with the populism of talk radio, precinct meetings and tax revolts.
It is very American.That is its strength:
"The fundamental fact about American conservatism is not just that it is conservatism but that it is "American." Reaganism has survived in so much better shape than Thatcherism because it went with the grain of American culture, tapping into many of the deepest sentiments in American life: religiosity, capitalism, patriotism, individualism, optimism."
Finally we have an emphasis on American rather than universal. However, there is no menton of what American conservatism means in international relations. Does it mean empire?
Is this Reagan conservatism still the conservatism of the idea labs, such as the American Enterprise Institute and The Weekly Standard?
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