The Conscience of a Conservative
by Barry Goldwater
Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
Foreword © 2004 by The Heritage Foundation
From the book The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater.
© 1990. Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by special permission of Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C.
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Foreword
Among the many analyses about the 2004 Republican National Convention, one offered by the eminent conservative columnist George F. Will caught my eye. “Barry is back,” he wrote, referring to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who won the Republican presidential nomination forty years ago but was then crushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the general election, receiving only 38.5 percent of the popular vote and carrying just six states.
Notwithstanding his resounding defeat in the fall of 1964, wrote Will, Goldwater’s nomination sealed “the ascendancy of conservatism in the [Republican] party.” Goldwater’s brand of conservatism, Will explained, included a “muscular foreign policy,” economic policies of low taxation and light regulation, and a “libertarian inclination” regarding cultural questions. While not “fully ascendant” in the GOP, suggested Will, Goldwaterism made a comeback at the 2004 convention, as evidenced in the “rapturous reception” of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, known for their unyielding opposition to terrorism and their tolerant views regarding abortion and gay rights. The reemergence of conservatism with a socially libertarian (but economically conservative) cast, Will wrote, could make the Grand Old Party more appealing to the many young suburban voters among whom the Democrats have made substantial gains.
As usual, George Will’s political analysis was thoughtful and provocative, with a sense of history rarely found in today’s journalists. I was particularly struck by his opening words “Barry is back” because I had already decided to write the 2004 President’s Essay about the Arizona senator and his remarkable book, The Conscience of a Conservative, that had a profound impact on me and many other young conservatives of the 1960s.
Barry Goldwater was the grandson of a Jewish peddler from Poland who became a millionaire and the head of the largest department store in Arizona. He was a college dropout whose little book The Conscience of a Conservative sold over 3.5 million copies—the best-selling political manifesto of our times—and was once required reading for History 169b at Harvard University. He was a master mechanic and ham radio operator whose K7UGA MARS station patched more than 200,000 calls from U.S. servicemen in Indochina to their families back home during the Vietnam War.
He never smoked a cigarette or drank a cup of coffee but kept a bottle of Old Crow bourbon in the refrigerator of his Senate office for after-five sipping with his colleagues. He was a gifted photographer whose sensitive portraits of Native Americans and scenes of Arizona have hung in galleries around the world. He was an intrepid pilot who during World War II flew a single-engine P-47 Thunderbolt over the Atlantic to Great Britain and ferried four-engine C-54s over the Himalayas and subsequently flew more than 170 different planes, including test flights of the U-2 spy plane and the B-1 bomber.
He was a man of contradictions—inspiring and courageous, infuriating and cantankerous. He delighted in saying the unexpected and rejecting conventional wisdom but always relied upon the Constitution as his guide. He insisted that doing something about the farm problem “means—and there can be no equivocation here—prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program.” He declared that welfare ought to be “a private concern ... promoted by individuals and families, by churches, private hospitals, religious service organizations, community charities, and other institutions.” Social issues such as abortion and gay rights had not surfaced in the sixties, but Goldwater endorsed a constitutional amendment reaffirming the right of public schools to permit public prayer. Regarding the waging of the Cold War, he had a ready solution that strongly influenced fellow conservative Ronald Reagan, “Why not victory?”
He affected American politics more than any other losing presidential candidate in the twentieth century. The political historian Theodore B. White wrote, “Again and again in American history it has happened that the losers of the presidency contributed almost as much as to the permanent tone and dialogue of politics as did the winners.” Goldwater was just such a candidate in 1964. Like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, he warned the people to repent of their spendthrift ways or reap a bitter harvest. Anti-communist to the core, he urged a strategy of victory over communism by a combination of strategic, economic, and psychological means, including military superiority over the Soviets and the cessation of U.S. aid to Communist governments that have used the money “to keep their subjects enslaved.” He talked about the partial privatization of Social Security and a flat tax. Denounced as extremist in 1964, today such proposals are deemed mainstream.
Barry Goldwater laid the foundation for a political revolution that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the Republican capture in 1994 of the U.S. House of Representatives. In his memoirs, he insisted that he did not start a revolution, that all he did was to begin “to tap ... a deep reservoir [of conservatism] that already existed” in the American people. That is like Thomas Paine saying he did not ignite the American Revolution by writing his fiery pamphlet Common Sense. Goldwater was absolutely fearless, challenging every shibboleth of the liberal establishment and sometimes requiring his supporters to be equally fearless. In mid-October of 1964, I was seated on a stage of an auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania (where I was a graduate student at the Wharton School), along with the eminent professor and foreign policy expert Robert Strausz-Hupe, listening intently to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Suddenly some liberals, turning the principle of academic freedom upside down, lobbed a couple of tomatoes and eggs at the visiting candidate. Everyone on the stage except Goldwater ducked—he kept on talking. And I kept on supporting his candidacy because I believed in the ideas he had expressed so simply and yet powerfully in The Conscience of a Conservative.
As my colleague and Goldwater biographer Lee Edwards wrote, Goldwater’s book, published in 1960, and only 120 pages in length, “changed American politics” because it proclaimed a major new factor in the national political debate— conservatism. In a review in the Chicago Tribune, George Morgenstern, the chief editorial writer for the key Midwestern newspaper, declared there was more “hard sense in this slight book than will emerge from all of the chatter of this year’s session of Congress [and] this year’s campaign for the presidency.” Iconoclastic columnist Westbrook Pegler asserted, “Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona certainly is now the successor to Senator Taft of Ohio as defender of the Constitution and freedom.” Conservative thinker Russell Kirk wrote that “if a million Americans would read his book carefully, the whole of this nation and of the world might be altered for the better.”
What had Barry Goldwater (and his ghost-writer L. Brent Bozell) produced? Before answering that question I want to lay to rest a persistent myth about The Conscience of a Conservative— that it was entirely Bozell’s work and Goldwater had little or nothing to do with it. Although only in his mid-thirties, Bozell was a senior editor of National Review and a seasoned writer who had written speeches for Goldwater (and before that for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin). Starting in the fall of 1959, he began drafting a 20,000-word manuscript based on Goldwater’s speeches and articles and interviews he had with the Arizona conservative. He was in frequent telephone contact with Goldwater and every week or so would visit his Capitol Hill office with the draft of a chapter. Goldwater would scribble his comments in the margins or dictate corrections to his secretary that would be passed along to Bozell.
Bozell founded the Parents Television Council in 1995, initially as a branch of the Media Research Center focusing on entertainment television, after he felt that decency was declining on prime-time television programming.[12] The PTC's stated mission is "to promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry."[13]
In 2001 the PTC also organized a mass advertiser boycott of the professional wrestling television program WWF SmackDown! over claims that the program caused the deaths of young children whom the PTC felt were influenced by watching the program; in particular, the PTC cited the case of Lionel Tate, a 12-year-old Ft. Lauderdale boy who was arrested after murdering a 6-year-old girl. Tate's attorney claimed that he had accidentally killed her when he botched a professional wrestling move. It was ultimately determined that the girl had been stomped to death and had not been the victim of any professional wrestling move, and that the children were watching cartoons at the time the murder occurred. The World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE) would ultimately sue Bozell and the PTC for libel. PTC's insurance carrier eventually chose to settle the case and pay $3.5 million to the WWE and PTC issued a public apology.[14]
-- L. Brent Bozell, III, by Wikipedia
Goldwater and Bozell were incongruous collaborators: The easy-going Westerner and the intense Midwesterner; the college dropout and the Yale law graduate; the Jewish Episcopalian and the Roman Catholic convert; the principled politician and the activist intellectual (Bozell had run for public office in Maryland). But they shared a Jeffersonian conviction that that government is best which governs least. They looked to the Constitution as their political North Star. And they were agreed that communism was a clear and present danger.
Goldwater gave his final approval of the manuscript in late December, and Clarence B. Manion, the moderator of a highly popular weekly radio program “The Manion Forum” and the former dean of the Notre Dame Law School, undertook the publication and promotion of a book he was convinced would “cause a sensation.” Indeed it did. Before The Conscience of a Conservative appeared, Barry Goldwater was an attractive but controversial senator from a small Western state who was at best a long-shot vice presidential possibility. After the publication of The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater became the political heir to Robert Taft, the hope of disgruntled Republicans, partyless Independents, and despairing Democrats, and the spokesman of a new national political movement—conservatism.
What had Goldwater—and Bozell—wrought? The Conscience of a Conservative was an original work of politics and philosophy, a vision of the nation and the world as it should be, not a compromise with the world as it was. It was a fusion of the three major strains of conservatism in 1960—traditional conservatism, classical liberalism or libertarianism, and anticommunism. It was a book by a conservative for conservatives at a time when conservatives were beginning to realize the potential of their political power.
On the very first page of The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater declared that America was fundamentally a conservative nation and that American people yearned for a return to conservative principles. He then blamed conservatives for failing to demonstrate “the practical relevance of conservative principles to the needs of the day.” He would try in this book, he said, to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
He began by dismissing the idea that conservatism was “out of date,” arguing that that was like saying that “the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle’s Politics are out of date.” The conservative approach, he said, “is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom of experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today.” He proceeded to explain what conservatism was and what it was not.
Unlike the liberal, Goldwater wrote, the conservative believed that man was not only an economic but a spiritual creature. Conservatism “looks upon ]the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.” Indeed, Goldwater stated, the first obligation of a political thinker was “to understand the nature of man.”
Before the convention most of the delegates knew Franklin only by reputation. His long absence from America rendered him something of a mystery; most wondered whether he would live up to all the good things said of him -- or down to the few bad things. William Pierce of Georgia was one of the handful of delegates who recorded his impression:
Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age; all the operations of nature he seems to understand, the very heavens obey him, and the clouds yield up their lightning to be imprisoned in his rod....
A month into the convention the body had made frustratingly little progress. Franklin noted that the delegates had searched history for guidance and looked to the governments of other countries. "How has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our understandings?" At the onset of the troubles with Britain, the Continental Congress, meeting in this very room, had daily requested divine help in finding its way. "Our prayers were heard, sir, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed the frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favour." Without Heaven's help the delegates would not be where they were, attempting what they were attempting. "Have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need its assistance?" Franklin remarked that he had lived a long time. "And the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?" ...
This statement was as open as Franklin ever got in public about his religious beliefs. (And it was only partially public, the delegates having pledged themselves to confidentiality.) The delegates probably did not appreciate the unusual candor in Franklin's remarks; in any case they ignored them. His motion received a second, but Hamilton and others worried that, however laudable the practice of prayer might be, to commence it at this late date would convey a sense of desperation. Franklin responded that the past omission of a duty did not justify continued omission and that the public was just as likely to respond positively as negatively to word that their delegates were seeking God's blessing on their labors.
His argument failed. After Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the convention lacked funds to pay a chaplain, Edmund Randolph offered an amendment to Franklin's motion. Randolph suggested hiring a preacher to give a sermon on Independence Day, less than a week off, and thereafter to open the sessions with a prayer.
Franklin accepted the amendment, but the delegates put off discussion by recessing for the day, and the proposition died. Franklin remarked with some wonder, at the bottom of the written copy of his speech, "The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary!"
Most delegates had more earthly matters in mind.
-- Part Five: Birth of the Republic, Chapter 9: Miracle at Philadelphia, by H.W. Brands
The senator then listed what the conservative had learned about man from the great minds of the past: (1) each person was unique and different from every other human being— therefore, provision had to be made for the development of the different potentialities of each person; (2) the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature “are inextricably intertwined”— neither aspect can be free unless both are free; (3) man’s spiritual and material development cannot be directed by outside forces—”each man,” he declared, “is responsible for his own development.”
Given this view of the nature of man, Goldwater stated, it was understandable that the conservative “looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.” But, he said, the delicate balance that ideally exists between freedom and order had long since tipped against freedom “practically everywhere on earth” (as a result of what he later called “the Soviet menace”). Even in America, the trend against freedom and in favor of order was “well along and gathering momentum.” For the American conservative, there was no difficulty in “identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom.”
Freedom was in peril in America, he said, because government had been allowed by leaders and members of both political parties to become too powerful. In so doing, they had ignored and misinterpreted the single most important document in American government, the Constitution, which was an instrument above all “for limiting the functions of government.” The alarming result was “a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people, and out of their control.”
While deeply concerned about the tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few, Goldwater was convinced that most Americans wanted to reverse the trend. The transition would come, he said, when the people entrusted their affairs to those “who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power they have been given.” It was a radical and some would say utopian statement. What public official would relinquish rather than seek more power? In perhaps the most famous passage of The Conscience of a Conservative— Lincolnian in its rhetoric—Goldwater said that the turn toward freedom would come when Americans elected those candidates who pledged to enforce the Constitution, restore the Republic, and who proclaimed:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. (Emphasis added) It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
Here was a vision of government that aimed to restore the ideas of the Founding Fathers and throw out the welfarist plans of the modern liberals. It was what conservatives believed was still possible in America; it was what liberals believed was hopelessly antiquated and even dangerous. In the following chapters, Senator Goldwater got down to specifics, dealing with civil rights, agriculture, organized labor, taxes and spending, the welfare state, education, and communism.
Summing up his feelings about government interference in any area, he said, “I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power .... Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.” Consistent with his principles, Goldwater had personally led the integration of the Arizona Air National Guard in 1946, two years before President Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, and had been an active member of the NAACP and the Urban League in Phoenix well before he ran for public office.
Regarding farming, Goldwater pointed out that the Constitution was clear—”no power over agriculture was given to any branch of the national government.” Besides, like any other industry, farm production was “best controlled by the natural operation of the free market.” In the chapter on organized labor, Goldwater (a ranking member of the Senate Labor Committee) attacked the enormous economic and political power concentrated in the hands of a few union leaders. He advocated enactment of state right-to-work laws, the limitation of contributions to political campaigns by individuals and neither labor unions or corporations, and the elimination of industry-wide bargaining, applying the principle of anti-monopoly to unions as well as corporations.
Madison’s realignment with his Virginia neighbor, Jefferson, bitterly disappointed Washington and Hamilton. However, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801, he and Madison joined in one of the biggest federal power overreaches in U.S. history by negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France – despite the absence of any “enumerated power” in the Constitution that envisioned such an act by the central government. [For more on the politics of the Founding era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Racism and the American Right.”]
-- Source of Anti-Government Extremism, By Robert Parry
Echoing the proposals of economist Milton Friedman, whom he had known since the mid-fifties, Goldwater proposed a flat tax, declaring that “government has a right to claim an equal percentage of each man’s wealth, and no more.” He bluntly described the graduated tax as “a confiscatory tax.”
As for government spending, he said, the only effective way to curtail it “is to eliminate the programs on which excess spending is consumed,” including social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal, and “all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals.” He did not suggest that the federal government drop all these programs “overnight” but that it establish “a rigid timetable for a staged withdrawal,” encouraging the process by reducing federal spending in each field by 10 percent each year. Reducing spending and taxes, in that order, would guarantee the nation “the economic strength that will always be its ultimate defense against foreign foes.”
In the chapter, “The Welfare State,” Goldwater conceded the strong emotional appeal of welfarism to many voters and therefore to many politicians. But it was the duty of conservatives, he said, to demonstrate the difference between being concerned with welfare problems and insisting that the “federal government is the proper agent for their solution.” He demonstrated a remarkable prescience by arguing that the welfare state eliminated “any feeling of responsibility [on the part of the recipient] for his own welfare and that of his family and neighbors”—precisely the argument and finding of welfare critic Charles Murray, my Heritage colleague Robert Rector, and other analysts twenty years later. It was one of the great evils of welfarism, Goldwater wrote, that “it transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it.” He restated a fundamental truth for conservatives: If we take from someone “the personal responsibility for caring for his material needs, we take from him also the will and the opportunity to be free.”
After listing the several harms that can be caused by federal aid to education, Goldwater, sounding much like the intellectual historian Russell Kirk, stated that the proper function of the school was to transmit “the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation” and to train the minds of the new generation so that they can absorb “ancient learning” and apply it to the problems of today. The role of our schools, he insisted, was not to educate or elevate society but to educate individuals.
The last part of The Conscience of a Conservative was devoted to U.S. foreign policy and the Cold War, which, Goldwater said, the enemy was determined to win while the United States and the rest of the free world were not. We have sought “settlements,” he stated, “while the Communists seek victories.” He proposed a comprehensive strategy of victory that included the maintenance of defense alliances like NATO; the limitation of foreign aid to military and technical assistance to those nations “that are committed to a common goal of defeating world communism”; superiority in all weapons, military, political, and economic, necessary to produce a victory over communism; a drastic reduction in U.S. support of the U.N.; and the encouragement of the peoples under communist occupation to “overthrow their captors.” America’s objective, he said, “is not to wage struggle against communism, but to win it.”
Risks were inevitable, Goldwater conceded, but the future would unfold along one of two paths: Either the communists would retain the offensive, ultimately forcing us to surrender or accept war “under the most disadvantageous circumstances,” or Americans would “summon the will and the means for taking the initiative and wage a war of attrition against them,” seeking to bring about “the internal disintegration of the communist empire.”
It was the latter course that President Reagan, with the backing of the American people, chose in the 1980s, leading the nation and the world to what Barry Goldwater had predicted— the disintegration of the Soviet empire and victory in the Cold War, both without firing a single nuclear shot.
I have selected the first two chapters as a representative excerpt of The Conscience of a Conservative. The reader will notice one or two outdated passages—a reference to “the aggressive designs of Moscow,” the use of the long-forgotten Arthur Larson as a prototypical big-government Republican. But ninety-eight percent of Goldwater’s manifesto remains relevant to our time.
As the author of The Conscience of a Conservative and then as a presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater insisted on addressing the key issues that have dominated the national debate for the past four decades: taxes (flatten them); government spending (work toward reducing and even eliminating subsidies, as in agriculture); Social Security (it is in actuarial trouble—strengthen it by introducing a voluntary option); law and order (the right of victims should take precedence over those of criminals); and morality in government (the president and all in public office must avoid scandal and corruption and set a good example for society).
In his 1988 memoir, Goldwater stated that his campaign for the presidency helped to broaden and deepen the conservative movement beyond “any other movement of our times.” Today, he said, “conservatives come from all regions, every social class, every creed and color, all age groups. The new GOP,” he wrote, “was forged in the fires of the 1964 presidential campaign.” And it emerged triumphant in the 1994 congressional campaign when Republicans captured Congress for the first time in forty years and which was based on the ideas first proposed by Goldwater— smaller government, lower taxes and spending, tougher anticrime measures, and less Washington meddling in people’s lives.
Barry Goldwater was, in the words of George Will, “a man who lost forty-four states but won the future.” He placed ideas at the center of his campaign. He inspired more people, especially young people like me, to enter the world of politics and policymaking than any other losing candidate in modern times. And it all began with a little book that takes about an hour to read but whose liberating words stay with you for a lifetime.
***
There are several individuals behind the scenes without whose help this publication would not be possible. I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Lee Edwards for his recommendation that I use these chapters from The Conscience of a Conservative and his assistance in drafting the text of the foreword. Mike Needham, Jonathan Larsen, Alex Adrianson, Richard Odermatt, John Cryderman, and Drew Bond have all helped in the production of this essay. Finally, sincere thanks to all of our friends who, with their numerous suggestions and encouragement, continue to make this annual publication possible.
Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
President
December 2004
***
The Conscience of a Conservative
by Barry Goldwater
Chapter One: The Conscience of a Conservative
I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am a conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives.1 These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.
The same judgment, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. “We liberals,” they say, “are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.” Take them a step further and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the “malefactors of great wealth.”
Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.
The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel “progress.” In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.
-- The Preacher and the Slave, Played by Harry K. McClintock, by Joe Hill
pie in the sky: 1911, phrase originally in reference to the promises of religion taken from a song written by Joe Hill, "The Preacher and the Slave", a parody of the Salvation Army hymn "In the Sweet By and By". Hill was associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the Wobblies), who organized migrant laborers. When the workers returned to the cities, they faced the Salvation Army.
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die
A fanciful notion; an unrealistic or ludicrous concept; the illusory promise of a desired outcome that is unlikely to happen.
-- Pie in the Sky, by Wiktionary
Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.
The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.
Secondly, the Conservative has learned that the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free, or even economically efficient, if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the State.
The Conservative realizes, thirdly, that man’s development, in both its spiritual and material aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings. If the Conservative is less anxious than his Liberal brethren to increase Social Security “benefits,” it is because he is more anxious than his Liberal brethren that people be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit.
So it is that Conservatism, throughout history, has regarded man neither as a potential pawn of other men, nor as a part of a general collectivity in which the sacredness and the separate identity of individual human beings are ignored. Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with “democratic” Jacobins. The true Conservative was sympathetic with the plight of the hapless peasant under the tyranny of the French monarchy. And he was equally revolted at the attempt to solve that problem by a mob tyranny that paraded under the banner of egalitarianism. The conscience of the Conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being. Today, therefore, he is at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race.