This article deals with conservatism as a political philosophy. For other uses (such as national movements or parties), see Conservatism (disambiguation) and/or the navigation bar on the right side of this page.

Conservatism is a philosophy defined by Edmund Burke as "a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve"."A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman." - Edmund Burke The term derives from conserve; from Latin conservāre, to keep, guard, observe. Classical conservatism does not readily avail itself to the ideology of objectives. It is a philosophy primarily concerned with means over ends. To a conservative, the goal of change is less important than the insistence that change be effected with a respect for the rule of law and traditions of society.

Conservatism is tethered to the traditions of a given society and therefore it cannot hold any single or universal meaning across the world. Additionally, conservative 'means' are often combined with other ideological 'ends' (e.g.: Conservative or Classical Liberal versus Radical Liberal). Conservatism is older than the left-right division in politics; and conservatives may align with either the left or right depending on the time and place.

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The Nation: Top Stories

House Passes 'Historic' Health Reform
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:52:43 -0500
John Nichols Speaker Nancy Pelosi secures necessary votes, but only after accepting unsettling limits on abortion rights demanded by anti-choice Democrats.
Fixing Too Big to Fail
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:07:59 -0500
Mike Konzcal How well will Representative Barney Frank's proposed regulatory reform legislation address the "too big to fail" problem? Greg Kaufmann: Do They Take Us for Shmucks?
Gladwell for Dummies
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:27:27 -0500
Maureen Tkacik Malcolm Gladwell's success as a brand-name thinker rests on the assumption that the unexamined life is the only sort his readers could be living.

Articles on National Review Online

Centuries in the Making -- By: Conrad Black
webmaster@nationalreview.com (Conrad Black) Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:00:03 -0400
Twenty years ago, like scores of millions of others, I watched in delight as the Berlin Wall came down. A huge crowd stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate, waving the flag of the Federal Republic and singing the current words of the country’s stirring national anthem, composed by Haydn. This piece is still better known outside Germany as “Deutschland über alles,” but now extols peace, unity, and freedom.It was a rare, seismic event, and it produced a kaleidoscopic variety of perspectives on Germany, Europe, and the whole world. For Germany, it was clear that the imposture of the Democratic Republic (East Germany), an artificial creation of Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, was over. It was like watching a fly after a blast of insecticide, buzzing furiously about, in denial that it was about to drop down dead.I remembered the aftermath of the popular unrest in 1948 and 1953, of East German dictator Walther Ulbricht’s assertion that the “State had lost confidence in the people,” prompting disillusioned Communist writer Bertolt Brecht to ask if the regime intended to choose another population to misrule.Like all who lived through the Cold War, I saw the steady departure of huge numbers of East Germans to the West, through Berlin, and Khrushchev’s construction of the wall in 1962, the first “national” physical enclosure to keep a population in rather than invaders out. And I watched the agony of fugitives being murdered by the East German police as they tried to cross over the wall, and the immense demonstrations on the western side, with swaying masses locking arms and singing the mournful and moving German dirge, “Once I Had a Comrade.”What the Americans had mockingly called “the Pankow regime” had been backed into announcing the opening of the wall. Ulbricht’s successor, the equally leaden Erich Honecker, when sacked by his central committee as the state crumbled, dutifully voted for his own dismissal and censure to preserve unity. His successor, Egon Krenz, bustled purposefully around, explaining how much East Germany had to teach West Germany: “In [East Germany], we don’t have to take our car keys out of the ignition when we park our cars.”All Germans were aware of the ability of totalitarian police to discourage street crime, and also of the limitations of East Germany’s absurd little plywood, 40-mph national car, the Trabant. (When they strayed unsuspectingly out onto the Federal Republic’s unlimited-speed autobahns, the Trabants were regularly run down, and over, by the mighty Porsches and Mercedes and BMWs of the west.)The only becoming face of East Germany was that of the graceful and beautiful figure-skating champion, Katarina Witt, the poster girl of the Communist government, who often concluded her performances by reclining on the ice, on her side, an allegory of female allure. She was much indulged by the regime, but carefully monitored, with officials listening pruriently to bugged recordings of the highlights of her allegedly energetic but quite conventional sex life.In the only place where heavily armed Soviet and American soldiers had faced each other in the Cold War, at the world-famous Berlin checkpoints, there was now an immense flow of traffic, and thousands of people tearing down the wall, as U.S. leaders from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan long had demanded. Now its relics could join the other nearby alluvia of previous German states, like the rings of a tree: Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate; Bismarck’s Reichstag; the pretentious Hohenzollern Lutheran cathedral, with implausibly heroic tombs of deceased infant princes; a few stark, Teutonic, Albert Speer exemplars of Hitler’s pre-nascent Germania (the Fuehrer Bunker remains, sealed, the subject of intense controversy); and Stalin’s grotesquely large socialist-realist Soviet embassy.All these heirlooms of Germany’s unsuccessful search for responsible government are jumbled together in half a square mile, and they would be joined by the magnificent monuments of a reunited Germany: the brilliantly restored (by British architect Norman Foster) Reichstag; the immense but benign, white chancellery; and, soon, the restored Schloss of the Wilhelmine emperors.These chronological layers of Germany’s terribly disturbed history express the truisms that Germany was too late unified (centuries after France, Britain, and Russia), had always been ambiguous about whether it was an eastern- or western-facing country, and could not assure its own security without destabilizing its neighbors.Twenty years ago, Communism itself was crumbling along with these deep-seated German politial neuroses. Part of the Hungarian border was opened. Romania’s Ceausescu was publicly booed, fled his palace in a helicopter, and was hunted down by his former collaborators; he and his wife were finally executed by one of history’s largest firing squads, so eager and numerous were the volunteers for it.In Prague, students conducted large sit-ins and occupations of the universities and public places, and read out some of the most lapidary works of Jefferson and Lincoln. Poland was already under martial law and committed to elections that were sure to send the Communists packing (these being the elections Stalin had promised at Yalta 44 years before). Soon, Poland would join NATO and the European Economic Community, finally fulfilling the decision of Britain, France, and Canada to go to war to defend Poland when it was attacked by Hitler and Stalin in 1939.The eastern border of the Western World would not be a German border. Germany would be encased in the West. The Cold War, and in a sense the Second World War, would end in a mighty and bloodless triumph of democracy, and, more or less, market economics.I lived in Britain then, and though not a Eurofederalist, I did not doubt the sincerity of German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s formulation: “A European Germany and not a German Europe.” After 40 years of professing to seek the reunification of Germany, the British and French governments (led by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand) fell to lobbying Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev not to allow it to happen. But it was soon clear that Gorbachev was powerless to stop it, and the United States, unlike the U.K. and France, had no fear of a united Germany. President Bush (senior) and his agile secretary of state, James Baker, worked skillfully with Chancellor Kohl, and turned the Open Skies meeting at Ottawa into a German-reunification meeting.All this was easily foreseeable, even inevitable, 20 years ago. What was not so clear was that the Soviet Union would itself disintegrate, and that the emergent era of one overwhelmingly powerful country in the world would be such a fragile vacuum.The spirit of reconciliation and relief that rippled out from the Brandenburg Gate uplifted the world. I assumed that the United States, at the supreme coruscation of its history, would have a long, successful, and benign eminence in the world. In these 20 years, it has come close to fumbling, but has not forfeited, its status, unique in the world since the Roman Empire. It will presumably recover its balance, if not its dominance. America was there when civilization needed it, and when only America could lead. Twenty years ago, almost the whole world was grateful to America. The world turns, but it should not forget.-- Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com. This article is reprinted from Canada’s National Post with the author’s permission.  
The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy -- By: Mark Steyn
webmaster@nationalreview.com (Mark Steyn) Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0400
Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “War on Terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy -- a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.And he’s a U.S. Army major.And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity -- as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Major Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name.”Concerned Tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that -- and not just in the sense that the New York Times’s first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’”What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions -- flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own -- taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war.” Some of them are objectively on the other side -- that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation” is an adviser to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: “We are not to question sharia.”That’s the guy manning the airport-security desk.In the New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan’s faith only obliquely: “He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference.” Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had “Allah” and “another word” pinned up in Arabic on his door. “Akbar” maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired. But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle.That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline -- his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents -- one American, one Canadian -- arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else -- even in the Army.What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy -- in Afghanistan and in Texas.
A Few Good Democrats -- By: The Editors
webmaster@nationalreview.com (The Editors) Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:00:24 -0400
Republicans have made a good case against the Democrats’ health-care bill, and they have offered a decent alternative. But given the majorities enjoyed by Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, Republicans can do only so much. The minority whip, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, has promised that not a single Republican will vote for the monster of a bill that Democrats are pushing through the House. But Republican party discipline is not the magic bullet that will stop Obamacare. What’s needed is a few good Democrats -- either moderate “Blue Dogs” who are experiencing some queasiness about the size, scope, and radicalism of the Obama-Pelosi program, or those with specific concerns about the proposed legislation, including its trillion-dollar price tag, its forced subsidy of abortion, and its insistence upon disrupting insurance arrangements with which American families are satisfied.The health-care vote will tell us a lot about what America is and what it is to become: a nation with a limited government, a robust market economy, and a tradition of moderate reform, or a European-style social democracy. Secondarily, it will tell us much about who is really running the Democratic party, and whether that party will continue on its road to radicalism or return to its sensible, centrist roots. With that in mind, it is worth noting that topmost in the minds of many House Democrats is the truly shocking expense of Obamacare. The current best estimates put the price at $1.3 trillion over the next ten years; if Medicare and Medicaid are any example, though, the costs could run many times that figure. Though the inevitable last-minute wrangling will find some minds changing, Democratic Representatives Arcuri, Giffords, Himes, Rodriguez, and Schrader all have expressed reservations about that whopping price tag. Oregon Democrat Schrader, to take one example, is under pressure from the SEIU and allied leftist groups to knuckle under to Pelosi and salute whatever flag she runs up the pole. How he breaks will tell us something about who is really calling the shots in today’s Democratic party. Representative Arcuri has expressed sober concerns that the gigantic new tax burden that will be imposed by Obamacare will hurt manufactures in his constituency of Utica. The SEIU stands to reap a financial windfall from Obamacare, but upstate New York manufacturers will be kneecapped by new taxes. Whose interests will the Democrats embrace, and whose will be cast aside? A particularly ugly aspect of Obamacare is its insistence that Americans be forced to subsidize abortion -- there’s not even an opt-out for those who have conscientious objections to the practice. In the past few elections, Democrats have made a big show of recruiting candidates such as Bobby Casey of Pennsylvania, who is at least nominally pro-life. Besides Representative Stupak, the strongest of the pro-life voices, the Democrats who are said to have some reservations about forcing their constituents to finance abortion include Representatives Boccieri, Boswell, Carney, Costello, Cuellar, Driehaus, Kanjorski, Kildee, Lipinski, Mollohan, Oberstar, Rahall, and Wilson. Representative Cuellar probably does not want to go home to Laredo and explain that his party is forcing his constituents to write checks to Planned Parenthood, and he’s also in a good position to appreciate that tort reform has done great things for his state -- achievements that would be endangered by all the gifts to trial lawyers packed into this bill. Representative Kanjorski has been an important voice on the abortion aspects of the bill, and you can be sure that no effort is being spared to bully him or buy him off. Another group of Democrats prominent in this debate includes those who believe that the “public option” -- the government-run insurance program -- is too big and too intrusive. It will also force private insurers to compete against the government, putting them at an incredibly unfair disadvantage. This fact is not lost on those Democrats with insurance companies headquartered in their districts. Equally important, the public option will probably cost many American families their current health insurance as employers bend to financial incentives to dump their health-care expenses into the laps of taxpayers. Representatives Baird, Bean, Cardoza, Chandler, Kagen, Markey, Michaud, Snyder, Space, and Teague are among those who have expressed these reservations. Rep. Scott Murphy has been treated to the presence of a rent-a-mob at his district office because of his hesitance to fall in line behind Nancy Pelosi. The vote will tell whether he will hold the line or toe it.There are other ways to reform health care. There are more sensible, market-based, moderate approaches -- and, more important, there is no need to pack every reform into one sweeping bill, larded up with special favors and irresponsible spending, that will radically remake the American economy and health-care system. Radicalism may be in fashion in Nancy Pelosi’s district and in the salons in which Barack Obama was educated, but it may be less so in south Texas, rural Ohio, northeastern Pennsylvania, western Colorado, and other places where Democrats will have to face the voters again soon enough. Let us hope that enough of them are willing to show some restraint -- and to put the national interest over President Obama’s ambitions -- that they are able to put the brakes on this mess before we go any farther down this road.

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