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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
Overregulation.
Thank you for asking: 1) foreign policy, 2) murdering fetuses and disposing of fetuses as medical waste.
“Victimhood”mongering.
And confiscation of property, so that original contracts are meaningless.
Weirdly, Reconstruction. It’s my go-to example of how even the most righteous campaigns to radically remake even the most heinously unjust social orders can go brain-curdlingly wrong, sputter, and die.
The Cold War.
I was a WWII buff as a child, so listening to Reagan’s speeches as a teenager resonated with me. The rest of the agenda just sort of followed naturally.
It all seemed just like common sense.
Size and scope of government. Both are important–I don’t buy the “cuts across the board” crap. Things need to be eliminated
While this isn’t something I was much aware of as a kid or a young adult, it has become my defining issue as my political opinions have matured. 90% of the other problems flow from this and would go away if we could dial the government back down to about 20-25% of its current level.
It’s a tie: Gun Rights and Illegal Immigration.
Life issues coupled with rugged individualism. As a teen my attention was caught by the contradiction preached to us that teens could make huge life impacting decisions about sex and abortion without parental oversight, but we couldn’t legally drink, smoke, drive or vote. You are either mentally and emotionally competent to make those decisions on your own or you are not. The weight of moral choice is something that we all must face, and the older I get the more I am convinced that an intrusive, hectoring government is the wrong avenue of societal persuasion.
Not a conservative, but the Welfare Trap.
Big government and the desire to be left alone.
Excessive regulation. Laws so large and complex that people cannot understand them, and thereby abide by them. It makes a mockery of the rule of law.
Tyranny.
Which is what we have now if anyone in the government takes an interest in you. We are no longer free: we are ducking.
Truth. Both sides stretch the truth to win votes, but progressives systematically deceive voters — often paternalistically, sometimes self-interestedly. That deceit is incompatible with human dignity and democracy. I identified as a liberal for many years. Ultimately I couldn’t stomach the lies.
Born that way I think. For me conservatism is as much an attitude or inclination as a political point of view. I believe that human beings have an innate sense of place. I also yearn for the permanent things.
BTW Rachel, I really enjoyed your conversion piece on Crisis.
That is an interesting remark. Please elaborate. I think it was probably different in different parts of the country. Anyway, the Southerners were patriots after all.
And also
I am with you on this one. See the War on Coal.
Property rights. It all flows from there.
Whether or not you’re a patriot doesn’t really have any bearing on whether or not you’re willing to be abominably cruel to fellow human beings. Ditto for good intentions. Millions of the newly-freed slaves were unable to provide for themselves for one reason or another and died from malnutrition and disease. Some organizations like the Freedman’s Bureau did yeoman work trying to help, but they were denied sufficient resources for a host of political reasons. Even devoted abolitionists wanted to sweep the issues under the rug, for fear of providing ammunition to their spectacularly racist opposition. Worse, the process of reintegrating the former confederate states and former confederates turned into a corruption-riddled bribe-fest as Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans jousted for control, and generals in the occupied south nursed political ambitions of their own. The KKK started riding around, and pitched battles between freedmen and whites broke out in several states. Some southern reformers tried to help – like William Mahone and the Virginia Readjusters – but by 1876 the extraordinary governmental powers invoked for the duration of the crisis had created a mess of corruption and clientelism, and everyone just wanted the whole stinking mess to go away. Meanwhile the South was still devastated, never properly rebuilt, and left to quasi-feudal and racist sharecropping arrangements.
How about this one. Are Democrat feminists big girls enough to be interviewed on the street? Or should that be outlawed.
You know, trigger warnings and everything.
Moral sanctity, individual liberty, and the realities of life, economics, and human nature.
Conservative realism v. liberal idealism.
I was a baby journalism school grad, steeped in liberal beliefs, nurtured and cultivated in the academic isolation of college; I had even worn a black armband after Reagan’s first election as POTUS.
After graduation, my first newspaper job was covering the hard news and politics beat in Laguna Beach, right at the political moment when power on the City Council shifted from “old” money conservatives to brash young “new” money liberals. I was able to see and hear the pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages of both ends of the political spectrum, in microcosm, up close and personal. I interviewed thought leaders from both sides; even interviewed Gov. Jerry Brown when he came through to stump for his fellow travelers.
Out here in the real world, I began to realize that the worldview of the conservatives better comported with the reality all around me.
Moreover, Reagan’s response after the attempted assassination changed my view of him; I began to see that he was a warm, funny, wise, real person — not the warmongering nutcase I had been taught.
By the time Reagan opened his re-election campaign here in Orange County, the transformation was complete. I was literally sitting in the front row at the event.
I don’t have one. So I guess that’s mine.
I grew up on military bases in the Cold War -so anti-Communism is probably the biggest one, and since Reagan and Bush brought down the Soviets they had my ear. Clinton’s botching of Rwanda, Balkans, and while technically started under Bush, Somolia, did not endear him to me, and the Lewinski scandal pretty much ended any chance of him getting a hearing from me further.
What got me into activism in college, though, was abortion.
Today? Preserving the tablets. It’s all that’s left.
I was an unthinking liberal until my conservative moment came. In my 30s, I’d become serious about faith. Oversimplifying it, it came down to this: if I believed Christ really was the Son of God, then that meant I also believed that God really did take part in human affairs. Which party welcomed that sort of view? That God really did act in the actual historical world? Pretty obvious that it wasn’t Democrats. Among the Republicans, I found that I was conservative.
And, and? What did the Southerners finally do. How many were killed supporting abolition. See also Civil Rights Act. For some Southerners, it really was a state’s rights issue.
You can be indicted for eating a ham sandwich, in your car. When you can be indicted for such an offense, every other offense is meaningless.
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