You have a choice: accept the reality that you are willing to compromise your principles that adhering to traditional values is fundamental to what you believe, which forces you into hypocrisy; or accept that you'd rather be a racist then compromise anything. You can't get around that. It's the problem with any ideology. They're all man-made and flawed. They have a position for everything, except they can never account for every situation.
If the principles and values of tradition, are held without compromise, then you must accept that conservatism does not hold that rights are part of the equation. Conservative theory on rights is that they are inherited. They're not the product of reason or any contrived theoretical formulations. They're inherited. If Edmund Burke is the "father of modern conservatism", as is claimed by conservatives including Russell Kirk ( The Conservative Mind), Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Dr. Lee Edwards (The Heritage Foundation) Yuval Levin ( author of The Great Debate; Burke v Paine) conservative talk show host Mark Levin ( author of A Conservative Manifesto), and the Heritage Foundation; which is the most significant conservative "think tank" in America, then they are accepting Burkes vision. This is traditional conservatism.
"You will observe that from Revolution Society to the Magna Carta it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to posterity — as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right." - Edmund Burke.
So what we think of when we talk about rights for Burke, first of all, they're not human rights or natural rights for him, they are the rights of Englishmen. They're the result of a particular tradition. The idea that there could be universal rights doesn't make any sense to Burke. It's not an intelligible question, as far as Burke is concerned. What rights would we create for all people in some abstract setting? It doesn't make any sense to him. And those rights, above all, are limited. Again, just as our knowledge of the world is limited so our rights, in the normative sense, are limited.
"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions." – Burke
We have a right to be restrained, a very different notion than a right to create things over which we have authority, a right to be restrained.
"Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights." - Edmund Burke.
And there you have a justification for the denial of rights to certain people.
So we have a right to be restrained. We have a right, most importantly, that others are going to be restrained, and that our passion should be controlled is something that he insists is an important part of what we should think of under the general heading of what it is that people have rights to. This is from the acknowledged "father of conservatism". He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defense, the first law of nature.
"Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty; he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it."- Burke
For Burke, once we've made the transition into civil society, we cannot go back. There is no turning back. We are part and parcel of this system of entailed inheritances and that is the human condition all the way to the bottom.
If you are a conservative then you accept the ideology of conservatism. If you are a catholic you accept the tenets of Catholicism. You can of course "cherry pick" the parts you like and dump the parts you don't, but if that's the case you can hardly call yourself something that you aren't as laid out by the people that have already defined and established the doctrine you claim as your ideology, without being a hypocrite in the process. Paul Ryan for example is one of the Super hypocrites in congress. Paul Ryan claims to be an Ayn Rand apostle. He even gave the Keynote address at the Atlas Society convention. But Paul Ryan also claims to have rejected Ayn Rand’s atheism. He claims that when he found out later in life that her philosophy was an "atheist philosophy" he rejected her in favor of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Later in life? How much later could that have been? I read Rand when I was young and I knew she was an atheist from the start) Ayn Rand's philosophy is rooted in the concept of strident individualism. She wrote a book titled The Virtue of Selfishness in which she claims that any thought of self-sacrifice was abhorrent and should be purged from our being. Self-Interest was at the core of everything she was about. She addressed it in every page of dialogue (or more accurately, monologue) in her books.
"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism men have to reject." ~ Ayn Rand.
Ryan claims to be a Catholic, and as a solid Catholic I'm sure he accepts the fact of the canonization of Aquinas. He certainly claims to follow his teachings. He named Aquinas specifically as his inspiration. Catholics pray to Saints. Aquinas is high on Ryan’s list of all-time great Saints.
In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, "Man should not consider his material possessions his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need." ~ Thomas Aquinas
That's probably as socialistic a statement as you'll find anywhere. In fact it sounds like communism, but of course Paul Ryan is totally opposed to socialism, and therefore couldn't possibly accept Aquinas based on that comment. But, he’s a Saint. You don’t choose what you like and don’t like about a Saint. Thomas Aquinas is a Saint who Ryan actually prays to. So he prays to a Saint that holds a position that he completely rejects. In Roman Catholic practice, the saints are revered, prayed to, and in some instances, worshipped, and Ryan is a Roman Catholic. Apparently although he claims that Aquinas is his guy, he doesn't believe in what he says. Ryan is a phony and a hypocrite. You can't worship the author of The Virtue of Selfishness, and claim to worship the religion that is based on self-sacrifice at that same time. I use Ryan here just to illustrate what a hypocrite looks like.
If you agree with the conservative ideology, then you are operating from the Burkean philosophy. Otherwise you're practicing some bastardized version without any operating or organizing principle. You aren't really a conservative. You're some hybrid thing that relies on "floating foundationalism". Floating Foundationalism comes in many different varieties. But its basic move is to accept some statement or theory—paradigm, linguistic framework, form of life, belief or what have you—without justification, and to then use it as a foundation upon which to justify everything else. In so doing, Floating Foundationalism retains the demand, the purpose, and sometimes even the logical structure of justification. But it leaves the foundations themselves floating in mid-air. It acknowledges that justification is ultimately grounded upon something that is itself ungrounded and, is therefore, irrational. But it advises us not to question these things, but to ‘commit’ ourselves to them instead—and to proceed as if nothing has changed.
So...you're left with a dilemma. Do you subscribe to the conservative ideology with its canons and principles that are used to justify itself, (of course they haven't yet justified the canons and principles themselves...but that's really more floating foundationalism). If you do, then you value tradition as both Burke and Kirk have stated as part of the canon of your ideology. And you conserve and preserve and maintain the existing institutions that have been passed down to you. And you recognize that rights are inherited and not the product of reason or any contrived theoretical formulations. You also believe that the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. If you don't, then you aren't a conservative. You’re a person with a “grab-bag” philosophy. You’re what is called an Identity Philosopher.
Identity philosophers, may say that ‘truth’ is meaningful and that it means correspondence to the facts. They may even acknowledge the existence of the foolproof criteria of their ideology, by which to determine whether or not a statement is true. But they believe, and this is what makes them identity philosophers, that they owe their primary allegiance to some group to which they belong. The thrust of their attack against truth is not that we cannot know what is true. It is that truth is but one value amongst many, and not the one that counts most for building a just society. They believe that when it comes to a choice between truth and solidarity, it is solidarity that counts—so that we are not merely justified in misrepresenting the truth, but that it may actually be our duty to do so if the solidarity of our community hangs in the balance. But no one, I hope, would accuse identity philosophers of tolerating or respecting the views of others.
If your principles and values for tradition are part of your ideology, and you are not willing to compromise them under any condition, including the truth as it corresponds to fact, and a movement presents itself that challenges those very principles and values for tradition that you embrace, you have only two choices. You can either compromise your values and principles for the sake of the rights of others, which makes you a hypocrite proving that your values and principles can be compromised. (So why hold them in the first place if they can be compromised. Isn't that just grandstanding for the sake of your ego?) OR...you can resist that movement, regardless of how just or moral the cause may be, rather than compromise your values and principles because solidarity with the group outweighs all other arguments.. which in this case, makes you a racist for denying others the very rights you enjoy, for the sake of a set of values that you can't demonstrate as being true. Of course since you believe that rights are inherited and not the product of reason or any contrived theoretical formulations, you can use that to justify yourself to yourself, which is circular reasoning since your ideas can never be used to justify themselves. You can even go to the extent of restraining the rights of others since your ideology tells you that "the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights" which offers yet another justification. Conservatism is big on justifications. So which is it? Your ideology leaves you with only one option: Hypocrite or racist?
Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense. Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their defenders to articulate conservative values.
The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the existing institutions of the time, and conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense ideological and social conflict.
The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only considered to be 3/5’s of a human being, now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea, is a direct challenge to a long held social concept. It denied the idea of white supremacy as legitimate. It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to extreme lengths to perpetuate it.
The idea that a person that could have been your slave at one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. White supremacy as an institution is renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law itself including those that proposed it and passed it.
Thus, hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the conservative.
Letting go of the past is difficult to do. An entire race of people becomes an easy scapegoat for one’s own failures. Hate is passed on from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children to hate.
The cure for hate is education, so every attempt to keep schools segregated was an important factor. Every attempt to de-segregate schools was resisted. Integrated schools are a way of leveling the playing field and a sign of equality and equality is a challenge to the social fabric. The more narrow the view point, the more ignorant the person becomes and the easier it is to promote fear and fear promotes hate. Fear always promotes hate.
It’s often claimed by Conservatives that it was the racist Democrats that were the problem in the south. They were those that formed the KKK, and stood in the way of civil rights. And that’s partly true. They were racist and they were Democrats. But the issue wasn’t with the party. It was with the ideology that drove the party. There were certainly Northern Democrats that held a totally different view. So simply making the claim that Democrats opposed Civil Rights, is merely a way of sidestepping the truth and ignoring the fact that it was a conservative ideology at work that blocked civil rights legislation. If it was all about the party, then why would African/Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic and actually occupy high positions within the party, including the White House itself, and being major voices in shaping policy?
The explanation for this can be found in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, in 1964.
Martin Luther King Jr. was not a Republican. Or a Democrat. King was not a partisan and never endorsed any political candidate. In a 1958 interview, King said
“I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses … And I’m not inextricably bound to either party.”
King did, however, weigh in on the Republican party during his lifetime. In Chapter 23 of his autobiography, King writes this about the 1964 Republican National Convention:
“The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.
Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
King is making it clear that the party is irrelevant. It’s the ideology or philosophy that matters. A political party is nothing more than a platform or vehicle for the ideology or philosophy to further its ideas. The Republican Party adopted and fully embraced conservatism as its defacto ideology, and that has made all the difference in why minorities of all stripes or colors reject them today.
Conservatives make the specious argument that it’s the Democratic Party that is historically racist, in order to distract from the fact that those Southern Democrats held conservative views, especially on matters of race. During that time in our history, both parties were populated with both conservatives and liberals. The fact that the Republican Party could be home to opposites such as Goldwater and Rockefeller proves that point, as much as a Democratic Party that was home to Strom Thurmond and Robert Kennedy.
Today we have parties that are home to conservatives; the Republicans, and to liberal/progressives; the Democrats. There is a stark division in thinking.
In his lecture on The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement given to the Heritage Foundation in 2003, Dr. Lee Edwards cited Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind as providing the central idea upon which American conservatism is essentially based, calling it ordered liberty.
Dr. Lee Edwards is Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics. As Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, Lee Edwards, Ph.D., is Heritage's in-house authority on the U.S. conservative movement.
A leading historian of American conservatism, Edwards is the author or editor of 20 books, including biographies of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and Edwin Meese III as well as histories of The Heritage Foundation and the movement as a whole. He’s a conservative by any definition of the word, and qualified to speak on the subject of Conservatism.
In his book; The Conservative Mind, Kirk devotes Chapter 2 to Edmund Burke: “Burke and the Politics of Prescription”, calling Burke, the “father of modern conservatism in the British-American tradition”
Building on this; Kirk described six basic “canons” or principles of conservatism:
1. A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
2. Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
3. Civilized society requires orders and classes;
4. Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
5. Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
6. Society must alter slowly.
Edwards states that “the work established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name.”
Lest we minimize the writings of Kirk, we should point out that one of his biggest supporters was “Mr.Conservative”, President Ronald Reagan. Reagan said this of Kirk:
“As the prophet of American conservatism, Russell Kirk has taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation. From . . . Piety Hill, he reached deep into the roots of American values, writing and editing central works of political philosophy. His intellectual contribution has been a profound act of patriotism. I look forward to the future with anticipation that his work will continue to exert a profound influence in the defense of our values and our cherished civilization.”
—Ronald Reagan, 1981
For several years Russell Kirk was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing. Dr, Kirks conservative credentials are established. He is a conservative. He is qualified to speak on the meaning of conservatism.
If Russell Kirk, was the guiding influence for Ronald Reagan, and as William F. Buckley describes as an icon of conservative thought even today, and Kirk rests his political theory of conservatism on the ideas of Edmund Burke, than we know that Conservatism is rooted in traditionalism. Burke was a traditionalist Conservative, and his views on holding tradition as his guide are well known, as are his views that rights are not the product of reason or any contrived theoretical formulations. They are inherited rights. In Burkes view, rights are not part of the equation. Conservative theory on rights is that they are inherited. They're the result of a particular tradition.
As shown above, in Burkes own words;
“Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights." - Edmund Burke.
And there you have a justification for the denial of rights to certain people.
The conservative is left with a choice: My ideology states that rights are inherited and not the product of reason or any contrived theoretical formulation. That is a value that I hold. It’s a principle that I accept, and I never compromise my principles and values. When a movement involving rights challenges my values and principles, do I compromise those values and principles to accommodate the challenge? If I do, then I prove that my principles and values can be compromised making me a hypocrite. Why would I hold values or principles that I’m willing to compromise? That would render them as meaningless. OR… do I resist that challenge for equal rights by people of another race, that lays claim to the very same rights that I reserve and enjoy for myself? If I do, I’m rejecting that claim as valid based on a set of values and principles that although they set out to justify my resistance, cannot be demonstrated as true, and I do that for the sake of denying those rights based on a racial difference. So, I have a choice to make. Should I be a hypocrite, or should I embrace racism?
This illustrates the problem with ideological thinking. When we embrace an ideology, we fail to recognize our own fallibility. We could be wrong. We fail to recognize that all ideologies are man-made and as such must also be fallible constructions and prone to error. You can’t create an infallible product from a fallible source. We allow the ideology to provide us with the answers to every situation. The heavy lifting of actually thinking for ourselves, has already been done. All we need to know is the ideological position on any given situation. No thinking is necessary. It’s already been done for us.
It’s been said that the Conservative knows he’s right, and the liberal knows he could be wrong. Which approach is closer to the truth? There is no logical or rational justification for racism. Those that embrace it, are irrational. An ideology based on justification, cannot logically or rationally justify racism. Why would we, as a people, want irrational people running the government of the United States?
The racist impedes all our efforts to progress as a nation beyond pettiness and irrational fear. What possible reason could one give for denying basic rights to anybody that isn’t based on ignorance, fear, and logical fallacy?
Conservatism is an ideology, and like all ideologies it’s foundationalist. It’s based on a set of assumptions and justifications. “ I believe this, because of that”, without ever justifying “that”. When Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke describe the ideology and offer “canons” or principles that justify conservatism, they fail to justify the justifications. Those are left hanging in the air as assumptions without justification that supposedly prove the theory. You’re asked to accept those assumptions according to some authority. But the fact that the truth (or reliability) of this statement (or faculty, or person) is accepted without justification means that we attribute to it an authority that we deny to others. The authority here is the assumption itself. Its true because it says it’s true, which of course is an exercise in circular reasoning.
The reason that conservatism fails, like every other ideology, is because it’s based on assumptions and justifications for those assumptions which lead to more justifications for the next set of assumptions, and on and on into the “black hole of infinite regress v the dogma of the ideology.
The only way out of this black hole of reasoning is to stop the justification process and say, I believe it because I believe it, which is circular reasoning and a logical fallacy. The person that clings to a logical fallacy, knowing that it’s a fallacy is simply irrational. His belief is more important to him then the truth. But then…being an Identity philosopher, truth is just another value, and not the most important. Solidarity with the ideology is always the first priority and truth only gets in the way.
Conservatism fails if for no other reason than it's an ideology based on justifications but it can never justify it's own justifications.