A traditional form of conservative political thought and action has been difficult to develop here in the States because the necessary foundation blocks simply aren’t there to build them upon in many cases – those foundational elements being an identifiable group of people who have inhabited the same space of land for many generations, who share a common religion, and whose individual and collective lives are identified with their religion, with its preservation and practice every day, every year, every generation.
In many of the States, liberalism is the real religion: the worship of the individual will, his being free of restraints to do what he pleases. This is often dressed up in Christian/conservative language, but it militates against the Church, the family, and all other traditional forms of authority and identity. The disestablishment of the Church and untrammeled freedom of religious exercise by the individual in particular undercut Christian norms. For religious pluralism leads to indifference to the Truth, and on to agnosticism and atheism (to paraphrase Aleksander Solzhenitsyn). The fact that so many who call themselves conservatives (e.g., the late Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, folks at National Review magazine) in the States have firmly embraced the deviancy of the sexual revolution – whether drag queen story hour or LGBT voters or etc. – shows how antithetical ‘mainstream conservatism’ in the States is to true, Christian-based conservatism.
The liberal ideal masquerading as conservatism also destroys the idea of identity rooted in an historical kin-group occupying the same land for generations. For the liberal it is enough to ‘pledge allegiance’ to certain abstract propositions to become a full member of ‘America’. It therefore becomes impossible to define just what an American is, as this is always shifting: being more heavily English and Celtic early on, then adding other races and ethnic groups – Africans, Spanish, French, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Vietnamese: The list keeps growing, and the identity harder to pin down.
Libertarian strains of conservatism make many of these same mistakes, simply carrying the individualism to further extremes. For them the government has no right to legislate morality at all, and citizenship is simply contractual. So if a government does try to establish a religion or impinge on the libertarian’s freedom in any other way, he can just become an e-citizen of some other imaginary, cyberspace micro-state. Importantly, libertarianism shares certain features with Marxism, namely the disappearance of government - and its replacement in the libertarian dreamworld eschaton by the international free market transactions of billions of free individuals.
Where libertarians do improve on the typical American ‘conservative’ is in their thoughts on warfare. They are typically of the pacifist sort, exemplified today in folks like Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell, which is a pleasant change from the neo-con aggression one often encounters on talk radio or Fox News.
There are some hopeful signs since Donald Trump’s short time as President. A more traditional sort of conservatism is beginning to take form, one more rooted in the older ideas mentioned above. The magazines The American Conservative and Chronicles both belong to this camp. But while they are improvements over the fake conservatism of American liberalism, they still err in a serious way – by placing too much emphasis on an American nation and on an American culture, both of which are mostly fictitious. To the extent that they are not, they are the imposition of the New England Yankee culture of secular materialism upon all the other States and regions of the union.
And that leads to where we will find the strongest expressions of traditional conservatism in the States: in the various ethno-regions, where an identifiable people and religion can be found.
I. New England
Since we have just mentioned Yankee New England, we will start there. The conservatism native to New England, whose ethnic foundation is in the folks of southeastern England, has been enunciated by men like Richard Henry Dana, Sr, and Fisher Ames. Mr Stephen Tippins, Jr, gives a summation of New England conservatism in his examination of Fisher Ames’s beliefs:
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The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/conservatism-united-states .
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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