Who We Are: What is Conservatism?
Conservatives in America seek to conserve the political inheritance of our Founders. That inheritance is a system of governance premised on the unchanging nature and God-given sovereignty, equality, and rights of all individuals. Government is instituted by individuals to protect those rights and to allow for their free exercise wherever and whenever possible for the benefit of society.
Our Founders understood that the principal problems of mankind are permanent, not temporary. Three principal areas of policy that reflect this understanding are:
1. There will always be belligerents. Defending the borders and policing the streets are the first business of government.
2. People differ in skills, desires, attitudes, and goals. Free markets are the best way to allocate resources amongst them.
2. Raising children will always be profoundly difficult. Thousands of generations of human history have proven that nuclear families are critical to child rearing and necessary to a functioning society.
More broadly, Mr. Rusher defined conservatism as follows in his Final Column on March 3, 2009:
“Conservatism is essentially an analysis of social problems from the standpoint of a particular understanding of human nature. As long as that understanding continues essentially unchanged, the ways of dealing with those problems will remain basically unchanged.
What is that understanding? Conservatives believe that people are designed to pursue their own best interests and that the job of society is to make sure that, as far as possible, the pursuit of those interests conduces to the benefit of society as a whole. Happily, it tends to do so.”
Who We Are Not: What is Progressivism?
The term “progressivism” is used widely across the political spectrum when people refer to the left. It means a consistent, zealous belief in certain kinds of social change to be driven by government action.
“Progress” sounds nonpolitical and is sometimes meant that way. But the desire for progress becomes very political indeed when it turns into an “ism,” and “progress” is considered the foremost responsibility of government.
This is what happens when progress’s zealots demote, often virtually ignore, every value that competes with it. “Progress” becomes an ideology, an “ism.”
Thus, “progressivism” is a predominantly leftist ideology as it is wedded to the notions that human nature is malleable and that limitations on the actions of government to change people’s behavior in desired ways are impediments to “progress.”
The left most wants progress in two areas: a reduction of pain and difficulty in life, and the most complete equality possible—not in terms of legal treatment, but in terms of resources and power, what is often called “equality of result,” or “equity.” In pure progressivism, these concerns or values tend to outrank everything.
Throughout most of William Rusher’s career in the latter half of the 20th century, progressives were usually called “liberals.” Most were less extreme than today’s progressives, but their ideology was in essence the same. “Liberals,” “liberal,” and “liberalism” are the terms you will generally find Rusher using on this website. His contemporaries, right and left, tended to use it as well. But “liberals” can also be thought of as progressives, and “liberalism” as progressivism.
