I'm still interested in urging liberals and progressives to engage conservatives on their basic principles as well as on issues.
I've spent the last year reading a lot about conservative principles and feel that their being wrong on basic principles is what ultimately makes them wrong on issues.
I've prepared an essay using words and ideas taken directly from the icons of intellectual conservatism, such as Buckley, Willmoore Kendall, Stanton M. Evans, etc. and shaped these into an analysis showing the contractions and confusions among their basic principles. I think liberals might use these examples to undermine conservative arguments. I offer this information to liberals who may not be that familiar with the basic tenets of conservatism.
(I had trouble putting up the full nineteen pages and shall try to put the essay up in chunks).
BEFORE HANNITY AND COULTER
If men are not inherently depraved the whole edifice of conservatism collapses!
If morality has not declined since the 9th century the whole edifice of conservatism collapses!
Conservative Are Wrong On Their Fundamental Principles
In almost every progressive blog I’ve seen progressives are confronting conservatives on the issues. I have a different interest. I believe conservatives are wrong on the issues because their core principles are contradictory and wrong. Conservatives can and should be defeated in a debate about their core principles.
I spent a year reading a lot of information about conservative principles. I learned a lot and was astonished that conservatives so readily incriminate themselves - though, of course, they don’t see it that way. I think that most of today’s conservatives don’t know a lot about their core principles, and that could include Hannity and Coulter; and perhaps a lot of progressives also aren’t aware of the core conservative principles.
My sources for this essay are primarily the icons of conservative principles: Burke, Kirk, Buckley, Kendall and others. I did look at books by Coulter, Hannity, Bennett and Malkin but found them to primarily be ad hominem assertions which lacked any intellectual credibility.
I present here a much condensed version of what I have learned in hopes that it will profit other people who are interested in debating conservatives at the level of basic principles.
The text ascribed to authors by italicized indentation should not be construed as verbatim quotations. Rather the text is representative of an author’s attitudes and thoughts, culled from his writings. Some are quotations. Many are not.
Belief In A Transcendental Moral Order
By their own declaration belief in a transcendental moral order (also called natural law) is the one fundamental conservative belief upon which all other beliefs are based. The Transcendental Moral Order is like the Ten Commandments, a spelling out of how God wants mankind to behave. Here is John Hallowell’s three principles of natural law.
_(1) there exists a meaningful reality, an orderly universe independent of the knower;
(2) man can, by use of his reason, discern the nature of reality; and
(3) knowledge of what man should do in order to fulfill his human nature is embodied in what has traditionally been called the law of nature or the moral law._ [John Hallowell]
Probably the most common wording of this fundamental believe is the phrase "objective moral order."
Conservatives Only Think They Know God’s Will
The problem for conservatives is to produce a believable account of how men, living in a secular world, can know with some specificity what the actual content of the Moral Code is. Hallowell cited reason as the vehicle by which God’s moral code is perceived. Russell Kirk throws open the window to admit almost any other way of perceiving God’s will.
Objectively speaking, natural law, as a term of politics and jurisprudence,may be defined as a loosely knit body of rules of action prescribed by an authority superior to the state. These rules variously (according to the several differing schools of natural-law and natural-rights speculation)are derived from divine commandment; from the nature of humankind;from abstract Reason; or from long experience of mankind in community.[Russell Kirk, Heritage Lecture #469]
As you might expect conservatives can’t agree among themselves what God’s will is. Brent Bozell and Frank Meyer, for instance, largely agree that God’s purpose for Western Civilization is to promote Christianity. But they disagree on whether God’s purpose in government is to promote virtue or liberty.
The purpose of politics is the promotion not of freedom but of virtue.[Brent Bozell]
Freedom is the ultimate political end. Virtue is none of the State’s business [Frank Meyer]
They can’t agree.
Politics Is Ever The Subject
It is important to realize that while conservatism can be an attitude or perspective about the world, it is still always about government; government is assumed, even when Libertarians insist that no government is the best way to organize our relationships with one another; government is either the text or the subtext; and for Traditionalist conservatives government as the earthly agent of the objective moral order is always the subject.
The Medieval Origins Of Conservatism
A number of influential conservative writers look back to a God-Centered time in the middle ages as a time when Western Civilization was on the right track in following God’s will.
Western Man made an evil decision in the late 14th century when it abandoned the belief that there is a source of truth higher than and independent of man. [Richard Weaver ]
Conservative convictions that Western Man made an error is based on the religious belief that a Transcendental Realm exists and that after the end of days (the end of profane history) the "saved" human beings will live in that realm for eternity.
By labeling some events of history as "error" conservatives seem to have a belief that there was a way that things "ought to have gone or happened," but that "error" occurred instead.
Saint Augustine distinguished between a profane sphere of history, in which empires rise and fall, and a sacred history. [Eric Voegelin]
Voegelin believed that trying to make the profane, secular world better was equivalent to man trying to become God. He called this a heresy and dubbed it Gnosticism.
The death of the spirit is the price of progress. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. [Eric Voegelin]
Voegelin’s words point to two very important pieces of conservative confusion. One is that whatever else conservatives may say is their top value their real top value is "order and stability" of the status quo. The second piece is that conservatives are caught between two urges. One urge is to make things better by trying to recapture some past greater morality that has degenerated over the last five hundred to one thousand years. The other urge is to "do nothing," since given the "nature and condition of man" nothing can be done.