The Problem With American Conservatism

“The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one’s soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.”

Lew Rockwell summed up the intellectual and moral poverty of the conservative movement with this short paragraph in a Mises Daily article ten years ago. It endures as a powerful statement against any ideology, conservative or otherwise, that would legitimize lording power over others. Mr. Rockwell’s lines are frequently quoted, such as in Laurence Vance’s recent article on conservatism compared to libertarianism.

“… It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.” According to Mr. Trump, the ship must be righted in his own image. In what is certainly one of the most megalomaniacal political moments of recent memory, Mr. Trump even said “I alone can fix [America]” at the Republican National Convention. This is startling not because of the break from general tradition, but rather its stark revelation of what conservatism actually believes. In the name of “lesser of two evils” arguments, they perpetuate the false belief that who is in office is what really matters, rather than the war of ideas.

What is right and true about America is that, with notable exceptions, this culture was built on self-determination and a sense of freedom that, unfortunately, is muddied continually by the allure, fascination, and confusion of political power. Libertarianism is the intellectual outgrowth, expansion, and successor to those founding ideals, and it is high time for conservatives (and progressives, for that matter) to recognize that true, real, peaceful progress will only be made by rejecting their previous bad beliefs and refining their decent beliefs into a non-violent, voluntary system that discards statism forever.

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