What Are You Trying to Conserve?
Whenever a conservative person converses with leftists or left leaning people about the reasoning for being conservative, the discussion will possibly lead to all kinds of silly things like wanting to return to the days of slavery or racial separation. In conversations regarding the constitution and constitutionalism this will usually come up. The constitution is said to have supported the racist and evil institutions that were thrown off with much effort. All of this reasoning represents an uninformed view of the constitution that must be disputed.
You can hear this argument carry out between John Stossel and Charlie Rengel, where the conversation ended with, “Hey, the constitution only made me 3/5 of a guy.” Ask the person to show the codification of slavery in the constitution further than that, they will not be able to and they will not try to. It is a week position that must have terminal argumentation to back it up, or in other words arguments designed to close argument. In the Rengel example, he pulls out the trump card that he thought Stossel would back away from as though it were a landmine. If Stossel continued to argue the actual origin of the 3/5 clause and why it was in the constitution and how the constitution actually had written within it the demise of the overseas slave-trade, then he would have stepped on the landmine. It is much easier for listeners to understand that 3/5 means not whole than to get that same listener to understand that it was the slavery supporter’s position to count slaves as whole rather than not at all as the abolitionists wanted the constitution to reflect the reality of a slave in the south.
This nature of terminal arguments is why leftists rely on them so much. How often will you hear a conservative end an argument with sweeping accusations of racism or that the constitution established racism? Essentially, these kinds of terminal arguments put the conservative in the position of holding ground against a slowly slipping tug-of-war. This kind of argument puts the conservative in a position of being for the small, shriveled thing while the other side continues to call itself progressive. Holding ground is losing ground. Conservatives must define what it is that they are conserving in order to take ground rather than slowly concede it.
“What are you trying to conserve?” must be the question that is constantly answered. The answer to that question is Individual Liberty, Constitutional Enumeration of Power, State Sovereignty, Civil Society, and all those things that can be called the Virtue of the republic.
Charles Montesquieu talked of Virtue as the sustanance of the Republic. Without virtue citizens become like slaves who must make every argument for each morsel of license from the ever, now, mutating Republic. The people will “riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licence of many”. The evidence of this rioting on spoils can be heard by the virtue-less citizen who calls for undefined Obama-money. The strength of the controlling few is evident in the ever-expanding bureaucracies who control more and more of the lives of the many.
The virtue of a Republic is derived from religious virtue, those things that could be called Judeo-Christian values in the case of the American Republic, but though they are derived from religious values, Republican Virtue is a separate set from religious virtues. Where the religious virtue of respecting property holds one blameless before god, the republican virtue of the same sustains the republic. Where the religious virtues of self-reliance and individual charity one to another make moral imperfect people before god, the republican virtues of the same sustain the republic.
What are you trying to conserve? Without the enumeration of powers in the constitution, states become nothing more than regional administrations and individual rights become dispensations of those who would be our betters rather than our equals.
What are you trying to conserve? Without personal property, the hours of a person’s life are owned by others who may confiscate the value of those hours at will—that person is a slave and a cog in a system that owns his time.
What are we trying to conserve? If you take from one and give to another the natural consequences of choices are ignored and allowed to build until they bring down the whole.
Where a leftist will give terminal arguments, the conservative must give reason and discussion. If you pile on reason and discussion, the piling terminal arguments are made transparent and the leftist loses credibility and the conservative wins the argument.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Topical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.