What is Conservatism? (Part 2)

This is part two of a two-part series examining what it truly means to be a conservative in the American tradition in the age of Trump. For part one, go here.

The differing national heritages of the United States and many European nations gives rise to another important distinction, apart from the relative importance of land versus ideas dynamic I discussed yesterday: American conservatives worthy of the name actively seek to roll back the federal government and its power, believing that the best and most effective governments are those at the state and local levels, those closest to the people.

Most European conservatives, meanwhile, lie somewhere between cautiously accepting their respective welfare states, and actively embracing them. Their conservatism is fiercely protective of territorial integrity, of controlling immigration and fighting foreign influences, but is largely accepting of the concept of the welfare state, believing only that its growth must be slowed, and its many national programs be better managed. (This comparison can, once again, be better illustrated by the debate over Brexit, in which a key talking point for Vote Leave campaigners was that the United Kingdom, if separated from the E.U., would be able to use money currently being funneled to the E.U. to instead increase funding for the National Health Service.)

This difference between American and European conservatism can again be traced to their respective national histories, as well as their unique systems of government. European nations, evolving naturally over time, either saw the emergence of a strong central government which then created local governments as it saw fit, or (particularly in the case of Germany) saw several states band together for mutual safety and protection, and eventually give up most power to a strong central government.

In America, by contrast, a strong central government of the kind embraced in Europe never emerged, as the Founders by design avoided any governmental system which could potentially lead to a monarchy similar to the one the new nation had just fought a war to escape. In the system of federalism enshrined in the Constitution, the state governments retained much of their power, ceding to the national government only those powers necessary to conduct foreign affairs and keep the internal functions of the Union, and the relationships between the states, running smoothly.

Unlike virtually any other country, America remains the only nation in which the state governments (or the equivalent) are truly coequal, sovereign governments alongside the national government, despite continuing attempts by the latter to increase power at the expense of the states. American conservatives continually fight to preserve this unique balance of power, something absent in European, and all other, models of government.

These, then, are the interrelated features that set American conservatives apart from their counterparts in other countries: that they seek to preserve the ideals and basic mode of limited government set forth in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, rather than merely preserving the security or territorial integrity of the country. There have been attempts by some to copy these uniquely American aspects in other countries, such as basic models of federalism-style limited government, but they have been considerably less successful than the original experiment, largely because those other nations lack a history and founding documents that easily facilitate the implementation of such ideas.

And the similarities and differences between these models of conservatism and Donald Trump, who frequently invokes national identity and claims to be a better manager, without mentioning America’s founding ideals or unique model of limited government, seems stark indeed.

But in regard to the question “What is American conservatism?”, the answer seems clear. All conservatives seek to conserve some object or idea. What truly constitutes an American conservative is the desire to conserve the American experiment, as embodied by the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and related documents such as the Federalist Papers. If these were suddenly removed tomorrow, and replaced with a model of government exactly the same as France’s, most Americans would say that their country had been destroyed. The United States would still be an independent country, still occupy the same borders, but would be unrecognizable as America.

That is what American conservatives seek to prevent. At its heart, American conservatives seek to conserve the American experiment, an experiment begun as a radical idea by a few revolutionaries two and a half centuries ago. In that sense, conservatives are preserving a radically liberal idea in the history of man.