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What’s Your Conservative Issue?
We sometimes talk here about “conservative converts”: people who were once liberal and were in some way or other “mugged by reality” such that they ended up conservative. For others of us who were mostly raised in a conservative mold, I find that there is usually at least one important issue that we feel on a particularly deep and visceral level, which has been defining of us as conservatives since before we even really understood what the implications were.
For some people it’s taxes. Or the right to bear arms. For some, respect for the military is a core defining principle. Some are raised with a deep and abiding respect for rugged individualism, and a core belief in our right to decide for ourselves what we believe and how we wish to live. Some were shaped from a very early age by a horror for the injustice of abortion and a yearning for a culture of life.
These are in no way mutually exclusive, but I suspect many or most of us, on reflection, can name some issue or other that shaped us as conservatives from a particularly young age. Many of these points end up feeding into each other as we mature, so it’s mostly one of those no-wrong-answer questions that’s just interesting to consider psychologically. And yet, sometimes when disagreements divide us or when political coalitions start to break down, we do discover where our deepest “principled” allegiances lie.
I have an answer that I’m willing to explain, but I’d first love to hear other people’s. What’s your “original” conservative issue?
Published in General
I don’t really see this in terms of conservatism or not but I do remember being absolutely horrified when my parents told me, at age 9, what abortion was. I remember it like it was yesterday. As for becoming libertarian, that happened as I thought through the merits of a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.
Let’s hope, though I share your concern about values. It also helped to have a Reagan running in ’80. At the time I was nervous voting for him (and disagreed with him on several issues) but there was something about the man that gave me the confidence to take a chance.
Hey, look who dropped by!
The big distinction that gives me concern is that so many people give Obama a pass — 6+ years later — on the basis of what he “inherited” from Bush. On the economy and on the Middle East.
1. fiscal responsibility
2. government overreach: Big Brother
3. Taxes and the people who collect them
4. Abortion
You know, on a fundamental level of analysis, I would have to repeat what Son of Spengler said. Protection of defenseless human lives and the essential worth of such lives are the areas where the left is most diabolical in its dedication to lie for the sake of political power. The pro-death left hasn’t told the truth about abortion for decades and only maintains its aura of intellectual acceptability through deceit-both in moral reasoning and in the basic science of human development.
My 5-year-old is already asking me a lot of questions about what abortion is. I guess being around religious conservatives he hears things… tough parenting issue for me because I really feel like he’s too young for a totally honest explanation.
Really enjoying this, but I’ll toss mine in. It’s a little academic, but that’s what happens when you’re the daughter of a conservative academic. I think for me, animosity towards secularism, the stripping of the public square, and the need for a substantial foundation for public life, were central formative ideas.
Small government conservatism was a later discovery. I remember getting some of the bare bones of it from a few politically conservative debate friends in high school (one guy explaining to me, for example, why a flat tax was philosophically better than our progressive tax code), but in my home we just didn’t talk much about government or politics per se. Overregulation, the welfare state etc. I mostly didn’t think about that until college and beyond. What we did talk about in my home was the collapse of Western civilization and culture, the secular assault on religion and tradition more generally, the loss of meaning in the modern world… etc.
Not really surprising then that I was drawn to Aristotelianism, Catholicism, and intellectual history more broadly, as I got into adulthood. And even though I wholeheartedly agree that government should *be* smaller and less intrusive, I don’t always see eye to eye with people who see governmental shrinkage as the central and all-encompassing goal. In my mind, the roots go deeper, and the problems are much broader than just an excess of bureaucrats.
If you call Welfare a “Trap” you are conservative. A liberal calls welfare a “social justice”.
I’ve always been against abortion. I used to be progressive on everything else. I remember reflecting, when I was progressive, that if I knew that one of the two sides, right or left, was correct about everything, it would have to be the right. I thought the left was probably correct on labor laws, health care, regulating industry, etc., but I couldn’t see any way that they were right to support abortion. I thought it was an odd, awful, quirk of the progressives that they didn’t see the unborn as needing compassion and protection like anyone else.
My progressivism was always shallow. I never hated conservatives the way a real progressive is supposed to hate conservatives. I kept an open mind, and now here I am.
Ironically, the straw that broke the camel’s back was after 9/11, and I saw some people on TV suggesting that airline pilots should be armed. This struck me as an incredibly common sense practice. If I was responsible for keeping hundreds of people alive, I would arm myself. I would have a solemn duty to protect myself so that I could keep those people alive. Of course, the left-wing response to this was, essentially: “Guns bad!” I can remember that moment thinking “I am not a progressive. I am a conservative.” Progressives are always bragging about how smart they are, so seeing them being that dumb killed whatever credibility they had left with me.
Ironically, abortion is not really my conservative issue now. I’m still against it, but I have little interest in arguing about it. It’s a question of values, and I’m just not that interested in debating values anymore. If ultrasound doesn’t convince you that abortion is bad, I don’t have much to add.
My conservative issue now is economics. With abortion, the Democrats are at least delivering on their promises. If you want abortion, you really will get more of it with Democrats. On economics, however, the Democrats are just fraudulent. They are telling us that poor people are poor because rich people are taking too much of the wealth, and this is just objectively incorrect. Their policies do not and will not help poor people, and anyone who really thinks about the issue should be able to figure out why.
Maybe I’m just more passionate about economics because I’m a convert who still has a lot to learn, while I think I pretty much know everything that’s been said about abortion already.
The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence—-any questions?
The first issue I remember having an opinion on was abortion way back when I was a child. I remember wondering who could possibly think such a thing was okay.
But I didn’t start identifying as a “conservative” until I had to deal with one of my friends declaring himself an “anarcho-socialist,” which, even at the tender age of 15, I could tell was utopian nonsense, (and contradictory utopian nonsense at that.)
Addendum: To build on my previous post, I believe a good operational definition of conservatism is the rejection of utopianism. Progressives seem to think we can create utopia through force, and libertarians through self-interest. Conservatives not only believe that utopia is impossible, but that a great deal of damage will result from trying to make it happen.
This, this, a thousand times this.
The brand damage done by GWB is similar to that of Carter.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been anti-Communist, pro-capitalism and anti-crime; all connected by the common thread of property rights. I’ve also always been in favor of separation of Church and State, and therefore pro-choice; in favor of social acceptance and fair treatment for singles of all orientations; enthusiastically in favor of women in the workplace; and also strongly in favor of keeping government’s nose out of sexual spaces.
Democrats, Republicans and libertarians, they’ve changed more than me. Around the time when Reagan proved to all that free market capitalism was the best path to prosperity, I paid attention, but I didn’t immediately switch parties. That was also the time of the noisy emergence of the “religious right” which put as much of a stink on the Republicans for me as the way the Democrats were discrediting themselves on economics, affirmative action, and foreign policy.
On April 30, 1992 I stepped out the front door of our condo and smelled fire. The L.A. riots were underway, and you could smell it all the way to the beach. I put on a cap I’d received from the TV show “Law & Order” and went to the grocery store to stock up. On the radio, some idiot was using the word “uprising” to describe the riots. That’s what some on the hard Left had called the Harlem riots, too, back in 1965. The Democrats had learned nothing since the 1960’s. Henceforth, they were dead to me.
I didn’t start calling myself a “conservative” but others did, when they weren’t saying things like “oh, you’re one of them.” I’m not a pure libertarian, either, because they’re all nuts about pot and isolationism.
I do have an individual liberty take on social issues, but hardly anyone calls that conservatism. And no, I haven’t drunk even a sip of the religious right’s Kool-Aid on social issues. Fetal ultrasounds are no game changer — what did people think was in there? — except to make me a stronger advocate of effective birth control for the poor, the dumb, and the impulsive. And Republicans in general need to get over their homophobia fast, if they want to win any more national elections.
So you could call me a property rights, law-and-order, personal liberty conservative, I suppose. What really convinced me to self-identify as a conservative Republican permanently was the successful mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani. Between Giuliani and Reagan, conservatism won out by proving itself as a governing philosophy on both the national and local levels.
When I was very young, I was a straightforward Christian social conservative, listened to Christian radio, etc. In high school, I was a fascist and probably an ideal recruit for ISIS. Destruction and violence was awesome. I thought both parties were full of idiots, and only a person of ruthless intelligence could rule the day.
Then I experienced a Christian conversion, and became much more sane. I was only slightly into politics – a conservative-leaning swing voter, and I was more interested in religion. I nearly voted for Al Gore, and I did vote for Blago.
Then 9-11 happened. I wanted vengeance. I wanted to see Al Qaeda utterly destroyed. I could tell we were at war. The democrats moaned, talked about underlying causes, and basically wanted to surrender. John McCain was saying “May God have mercy on them, for we will not.” Bush took us to war and would not give up. At that point, I would have voted for a socialist gay abortionist if he was willing to fight the war until it was won.
You could the issue that led me to conservatism was defiant patriotism and unwillingness to submit.
The maintenance of high social trust as a paramount goal of government.
Progressives don’t consider it at all, and libertarians have the causation backwards but are nearly always otherwise correct.
That and:
slaughtering children at holocaust rates is not the touchstone of a healthy society.
Human nature is not infinitely malleable and, whatever ingenious springs and sloughs may be found or devised, it is a perennial problem.
History is incapable of overcoming this fundamental fact, and the variety of ways of life that we can study through history or through comparative politics does not testify against this fact but rather proves witness to it: natural right is the same in all places and in all times.
Wow, I feel like I stepped back into a bygone golden age! Joseph and Pseud and Mollie and Crow’s Nest all popping up in one thread? Hail hail, the gang’s all here!
I think, though, that my initial attraction to deregulation was pretty darn moral, though:
All it took was recognition that I didn’t feel this shame so deeply because I was some sort of deviant – freakishly different from all other humans – but because I was so human.
I thought I saw the bat signal, but it totally could have been an ill-digested street kebab.
Bingo. The liberals want to treat terrorism as a criminal justice issue, they want to track down the individual perpetrators and masterminds, arrest them, read them their Miranda rights, and put them on trial with the full legal protections afforded to citizens.
President Bush recognized 9/11 for what it was: an act of war.
The Reagan Revolution and the Cold War. That really encompasses almost everything conservative, though — free market economics, personal freedom, reduced taxes and regulation, strong national defense, traditional American values.
I remember vaguely supporting Carter in the 1980 election. In my defense, I was 12 years old at the time. By the time of the 1984 Reagan landslide, when I was 16, I was a solid conservative.
I left the Republican party briefly for the Libertarians in the early 1990s, because George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge.
For the record, I was arguing for invasion of Iraq (as a high school and college debater) in the Clinton administration. But of course I was already a conservative. When we actually invaded I was in Uzbekistan and American friends kept asking whether I was all right (reading about anti-American protests and whatnot). I got to tell them, no worries, President Karimov signed onto the Coalition of the Willing and funny thing about these post-Soviet strongmen, they have an amazing power over public opinion. I actually got people congratulating me on our country’s fine service to the world, bravely handling the Iraq threat.
Probably the top one for me was liberal race-mongering. The idea that American blacks are still terribly oppressed always really bothered me.
Number 2 would have to be liberal anti-military sentiments, i.e. people blaming America instead of the real bad guys.
Those are the ones I can specifically remember bothering me from a young age.
You can put me on that list. The Obama administration caused me to start voting Republican. I started to see that the mainstream media really is biased. They portrayed Obama as a quasi-messiah, and Republicans (George W Bush in particular) as really bad people, and not very smart. When I researched the best arguments from conservatives, I realized that their positions were quite intelligent and reasonable, and have voted R ever since.
“Borking” tipped me over the edge at about age 29. My issue is based in the law – mainly of adhering to our Constitutional structure as devised and amended.
As a school kid in the 1960s I had an awareness of what seemed to be a gradual but broad degeneration of respect for the law and our institutions. I bought into a lot of the cynicism at an early age, but in college found myself often in conflict with the social justice warriors as regards the need for consistent standards in execution of law and order (an early exposure to the writings of Lincoln made an impression). Nonetheless, clinging to notions of class loyalty I stayed with the decay and corruption of modern liberalism even through Reagan’s first term.
In 1987 I was in the USAF, sitting nuclear alert as part of B52 crew. Somebody had a Wall Street Journal subscription and I took to regularly reading the opinion pages. Coverage and controversy over the Judge Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court revealed unwarranted personal attacks and deliberate obfuscation of issues. It exposed a Media-Academic-Democratic Party coalition that was so intellectually corrupt that I began to question all of my prejudices and assumptions. That was the start.
Free markets. I was fortunate enough to take a comparative economics class in which the professor (a Polish immigrant, and this was early ’80’s) showed/convinced me (I hope the rest of my class, as well), that a freer market “system” will *always* produce greater material well-being than a centrally-planned economy.
And he didn’t even use Hayek for a text.