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

Holding the Climate Hostage
Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:58:14 -0500
Naomi Klein The US is forcing developing countries to choose between a fair deal that stands a chance of averting climate chaos and the funds they need to cope with the droughts and floods that have already arrived. Mark Hertsgaard: Obama to Meet with Chinese Premier Wen
Video: Plouffe Counters Healthcare Critics
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:06:28 -0500
Ari Melber In an exclusive interview with The Nation, David Plouffe, former campaign manager of Obama for America, talks healthcare, messaging, and organizing after election day. Lindsay Beyerstein: No Public Option: Worse Than Nothing?
Lessons of Darkness
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:49:35 -0500
Mark Sorkin For Peter Maass, oil is not a drug so much as a Pandora's box. Tap a well and base instincts spew. Ted Conover: Human TrafficBarry Schwabsky: The Resistance of Painting

Articles on National Review Online

Stossel Comes Alive -- By: Robert Costa
webmaster@nationalreview.com (Robert Costa) Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:00:25 -0400
John Stossel is hepped up. In a cramped studio at Fox News in midtown Manhattan, with three minutes until showtime, the former ABC reporter is bouncing from producer to producer. He eyes the low-hanging lights, rushes past the skinny hipster holding cables, and grabs coffee from an intern. Behind him, the audience of about 60 fidgets. This is the first live taping of Stossel’s eponymous new program on the Fox Business Network. Both the crowd and the production team seem unsure about just what kind of show this is. An uncomfortable quiet lingers. Then, some magic: Stossel hears an argument in the front row.A frat boy with shaggy hair is feuding with a middle-aged soccer mom. Mom thinks global warming, Stossel’s focus for the episode, is a fraud. College Guy, an Ivy Leaguer, thinks she’s nuts. Voices rise and Stossel smiles. He jumps up onto the risers and starts to chat with the crowd. He tells them to get ready to participate in the taping. “Don’t show off your intellect,” he says with a wink. Instead of pontificating, he urges them to ask tough, simple questions. On stage a few feet away, Jerry Taylor, the Cato Institute scholar and Stossel’s first guest, flashes a thin grin. Charlie Rose this ain’t. Stossel’s fine with that. “When I started, I told my producer that maybe we should be a little more Charlie Rose, but after taping the pilot, I realized that I actually wanted to go to the audience more,” he says.Indeed, all of this -- the audience interplay, the live take, the Murdoch-owned studio -- is something new to Stossel. In nearly three decades of consumer reporting at ABC, he rarely did live television. His contract stipulated that only in an emergency would he go live, since he had long suffered from a stuttering problem. Now, after years of 20/20 specials and college lectures, where he relished back-and-forth with students and lost the stutter, Stossel tells NRO that he was ready for something different -- something that bubbled with the libertarian ideas he cherishes as well as the sparks that come with a smart crowd unafraid of putting the host on the spot.“I’m used to telling stories by writing scripts and re-editing footage six or seven times,” says Stossel. “The wildness of live and uncontrolled interviews is very new to me.” The fresh format, however, was not the reason why Stossel left ABC for Fox. “It’s about having the time to focus on the content,” he says. “Part of the reason I wanted to do an hour-long show is because, after speaking on campuses, I wanted to capture the energy of lively, angry students and the spirit of their provocative questions.”Critiquing the growth of the state will be the theme running though each episode. Tonight’s program (airing at 8 p.m. EST) will focus on the health-care debate. Investigating government gone bad and exploring the power of free markets makes for good TV, says Stossel. Beyond blending a little Milton Friedman in with the news of the week, Stossel believes he’s filling a void. “Libertarian ideas aren’t explained well anywhere on television,” he sighs. His idea: Why not inject Milton’s ideas with a little Oprah oomph? (Nobody won a car at his first taping, though the crowd did walk away with free copies of Freakonomics.)So what distinguishes this show from every other conservative talk show on Fox in the age of Obama? “I wanted to do a show like this when George W. Bush was president, too,” he says. “Fox is open to a bunch of different points of view. I often like what Glenn Beck is saying. I enjoy going on O’Reilly. They each have different talents. Beck does radio for hours every day and is a master at riffs. O’Reilly is great at the live interview and knows how to argue. He moves quickly. I like a little more control. I’m a perfectionist after many years in a world where we left so much on the cutting-room floor. At the same time, I’m very aware that live and spontaneous is also a key part of what makes Fox successful.”Fox Business Network, he adds, is “more in line” with his interests than is the Fox News Channel mothership, since it’s “all about business and economics, and rarely spends much time on the murders of the week or the vanished pretty girl.” It’s a good fit, he says.News, says Stossel, will drive his program’s topics just as much as libertarian criticism. Stossel says he had thought about using the pilot episode, in which he discusses the work of Ayn Rand, as his first show, but jumped to global warming after the “Climategate” e-mails were leaked from the University of East Anglia, where top climate scientists where shown to be trying to manipulate the historical record of global temperatures.Back to the studio. Skewering haughty politicos, Stossel is merciless. While introducing the opening segment about the U.N.’s climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Stossel brings out a green telephone (much like the red phone that sits on Beck’s desk) and invites former vice president Al Gore to call in. “Will we all drown from global warming?” he asks. “Al Gore says yes.” He lights up. “Gore has enough time to go on Saturday Night Live but not on this program?” he asks. Then Stossel - slate-gray suit, slate-gray hair, slate-gray ’stache -- moves from the audience to the stage, where Taylor waits. Taylor, a global-warming skeptic, is greeted with a sharp question: “Are you a tool of the coal industry?” Some policy talk follows. Next, Stossel goes to College Guy in row one, a Columbia student, and lets him challenge Taylor. Clips follow, and Stossel more than lives up to Fox’s “fair and balanced” billing. In between absurd apocalyptic snippets from Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth are shots of then-presidential nominee John McCain cheering on the “science” of global warming. “Are they just pandering for votes?” asks Stossel. The audience laps it up, but it’s less like a traditional television slugfest and more like a late Friday afternoon class with the cool prof who lets you spout off and tangle with him.Reflecting on the audience’s questions, Stossel says afterwards that he is pleased with only “the one girl who was informed, clear, angry, and articulate.” The rest of the questioners “were a little convoluted and not very passionate. Maybe we’ll have to hire professionally angry people for next time,” he jokes.Stossel only falls flat when he tries to be a little too kitschy, driving out in a golf cart that he bought through the Cash for Clunkers program. It’s funny, but in a little-giggle, not riotous-laughter, way. It is clear he is aiming for the feel of the spunky consumer reporting he did for years, but in a tiny studio, and with little background information, it doesn’t stick. “Look, I’ve always been really nerdy and careful about editing things,” says Stossel. “I’m still learning how to do this live gig.” I have a feeling he’ll figure it out. Oprah’s retiring and libertarian ideas are rising. Instead of “going Galt,” this Rand fan has decided to change stations. For now, it’s good to see a conservative who is willing to light a fire, not just wag a finger, get some airtime.-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute. “Stossel” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on the Fox Business Network. It re-airs on Fridays at 10 p.m. and Sundays at 11 p.m.  
Take Control, Congress -- By: Bakst & Cordato
webmaster@nationalreview.com (Bakst & Cordato) Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:00:25 -0400
Congress is still debating whether to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to address global warming, but unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency have in essence declared that, as far as global warming is concerned, not only is the science settled, so is the politics. The EPA’s recent endangerment finding declaring greenhouse gases to be harmful to public health and welfare was the first major step toward the agency’s regulating them as it does smog and soot. Some members of Congress reportedly are angry at the EPA’s attempt to preempt their authority. These members should stop blaming the EPA for its actions and instead start taking responsibility for the EPA’s having such extensive power in the first place. Congress authorized the EPA to regulate pollutants via the Clean Air Act -- an authorization that, the Supreme Court has decided, applies to greenhouse gases -- and Congress can rescind that power at any time. Congress could pass a law today that would prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases in general and carbon dioxide in particular. In fact, earlier this year, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) introduced a bill (H.R. 391) to do exactly that. The bill currently has 101 sponsors. This means that at least 111 of the 212 representatives who voted against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill last spring have neglected to endorse a measure that would prevent the EPA from invoking similar restrictions through the regulatory process. When these 111 representatives complain about the EPA’s actions, they are being disingenuous. Congress tells the agencies what to do -- agencies are not supposed to tell Congress what to do. While there has been a great deal of talk about the White House using the EPA decision to “blackmail” Congress into enacting cap-and-trade legislation, the fact is that ultimately the president is powerless to pursue such a strategy without tacit approval from that same Congress. This isn’t an environmental issue as much as it is a good-government issue. If Congress leaves the Clean Air Act as it now stands, it will be construed as granting the EPA authority to regulate almost every facet of our lives. Since greenhouse-gas emissions come from most uses of energy, the reach of such regulation could be endless and onerous. The EPA could tell us what cars to drive, where we can live, how our homes must be built, how spacious our homes can be, and how much we need to pay for energy. This is the kind of power typically exercised by central planners. It can hardly be thought of as consistent with the principles of representative government for the legislative branch, the branch closest to the electorate, to cede this kind of power to an unelected body of technocrats. But that’s what happens when Congress delegates very broad powers to an agency without imposing any clear limits. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel recently observed, many members of Congress may be happy with the EPA’s decision. Cap-and-trade legislation is contentious. Any vote on such legislation, particularly in an election year, could be politically costly. The EPA’s decision appears to allow members of Congress to deflect blame toward the administration. But this is a charade. In fact, by not acting to rescind the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases, Congress is completely responsible for whatever action EPA takes. Congress needs to make it clear that the EPA has no authority to make climate-change policy. Legislators who oppose greenhouse-gas regulation should use every possible opportunity -- they should add language to change the Clean Air Act to as many bills as possible. If the current Democratic-controlled Congress is not willing to get behind such an effort, the Republicans need to bring the case to voters next fall. A promise to amend the Clean Air Act so that the EPA is stripped of all powers to regulate greenhouse gases should be a part of the GOP platform in the 2010 elections. Ultimately, without such legislation, Congress is implicitly granting the EPA central-planning authority over the entire American economy. -- Daren Bakst is a legal and regulatory analyst, and Roy Cordato is vice president for research, at the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation.
Gitmo Does Not Cause Terrorism -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy
webmaster@nationalreview.com (Andrew C. McCarthy) Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:00:13 -0400
So we’re going to shut down the detention center at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay and move the 200-plus terrorists detained there to a seldom-used civilian correctional center in Thomson, Ill. And we’re doing it, the Obama administration and Sen. Dick Durbin assure us, not because they want to use federal money to indemnify their home state for a white-elephant prison Illinois taxpayers should never have built, but because Guantanamo Bay simply must be closed. Gitmo, they say, causes terrorism.It’s worth remembering that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, perhaps the world’s most influential jihadist, was never held in Gitmo. Instead, he and eleven of his followers got the gold-plated due-process plan: a nine-month 1995 trial in the criminal justice system for waging war against the American people. (That’s not rhetoric; that was the charge: conspiracy to levy war against the United States -- Section 2384 of the federal penal code.) The red-carpet treatment didn’t begin or end with the trial. There were Miranda warnings upon arrest (no one cooperated). Counsel was appointed, with the defendants choosing their lawyers -- and, for some, Uncle Sam paid for two or more attorneys. Mountains of evidence were culled from intelligence files and duly shared with overseas terrorist organizations. The defense enjoyed a couple of years to make motions to get more discovery, to suppress evidence, and to dismiss the indictment. When things finally went to trial, there was a two-month defense case (that’s much longer than most criminal trials), which allowed them to put the government on trial for its investigative tactics. There was a post-trial hearing on their motion to vacate their convictions and dismiss the case on the ground of “outrageous government misconduct.” There was elaborate litigation before severe sentences were imposed: The Blind Sheikh got life imprisonment, and the other sentences ranged from 25 years to life. That was followed by a three-year appeals process, during which the court appointed new lawyers to argue that their clients had been railroaded through the incompetence of the old lawyers, while the old lawyers continued arguing that their clients had been railroaded by the malevolence of the government. Finally, when the appeals were done and the convictions upheld, the defendants began filing habeas corpus petitions -- a practice that continues to this day -- claiming that this or that constitutional right was infringed, or that this or that prison condition was inhumane.So the Islamic world and its sundry terrorist bands were all very impressed with this ostentatious display of our humanity, our benign intentions, and “our values” -- right? Wrong. The usual Islamist organizations claimed that America had put Islam on trial -- the original slander that was refitted after 9/11 into the equally spurious charge that America is at war with Islam. In early 1997, about a year after sentencing, Sheikh Abdel Rahman’s Egyptian terrorist organization, al-Gama’at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group), issued a statement declaring “all American interests legitimate targets” for “legitimate jihad” until the release of all those convicted terrorists, beginning with their beloved leader. A few months later, Abdel Rahman’s always-helpful American lawyers (one of whom has since been convicted of helping him run Gama’at from his U.S. prison cell) issued a statement pressuring U.S. officials to release him. “It sounds,” they wrote, “like the Sheikh’s condition is deteriorating and obviously could be life-threatening.” On cue, Gama’at publicly warned that if any harm were to come to the sheikh, the group would “target#...#all of those Americans who participated in subjecting his life to danger.” The terrorists elaborated that they considered every American official, from Pres. Bill Clinton down to “the despicable jailer,” to be “partners endangering the Sheikh’s life.” The organization promised to do everything in its power to free Abdel Rahman.On Nov. 17, 1997, they made good on the promise. As 58 foreign tourists visited an archeological site in Luxor, Egypt, they were set upon by six Gama’at murderers. The jihadists brutally shot and stabbed them to death -- also killing several Egyptian police. The torso of one victim was slit so the terrorists could insert in it a leaflet demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh. Similar leaflets were scattered about the carnage.Luxor was not the last of these atrocities, but it is the most savage so far, and it is the scene that should leap to mind every time some useful idiot like Senator Durbin makes the absurd claim that Guantanamo Bay must be shut down because it causes terrorism and spurs terrorist recruitment. That this claim is mindlessly repeated by high-ranking military officers and intelligence officials doesn’t make it any less absurd. We are talking about people who live in sharia states where they still stone women for adultery, apostates for daring to abandon Islam, and homosexuals for breathing. We are talking about people who riot and murder over cartoons -- people who use mosques to hide weapons and Korans to transmit terrorist messages and then murder non-Muslims for purportedly defaming their religion. It makes no difference to these people that we detain Muslim terrorists in military brigs under the laws of war rather than detaining them in civilian prisons after trial in our criminal justice system.After 17 years of attacks, we should have learned the difference between causes of terrorism and pretexts for terrorism. Terrorism is caused, and terrorist recruitment is driven, by Islamist ideology and by American weakness in the face of terror attacks. In that sense, Senator Durbin causes more terrorism than Gitmo ever will. Terrorist organizations are encouraged when they come to believe they can win -- when they come to believe they can outlast America because we lack resolve. The Blind Sheikh, echoed by Osama bin Laden, has promised for years that if “battalions of Islam” keep reprising Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and al-Qaeda’s orchestration of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, then the Americans will pack up and go home. The terrorists tell their recruits we’re soft and won’t defend ourselves if it gets ugly. When a U.S. senator takes to the floor of the chamber and compares heroic American troops to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, he confirms Abdel Rahman and bin Laden’s views. When he suggests that terrorism is somehow caused by locking up terrorists in a secure, offshore military facility, where they can no longer threaten Americans or anyone else, the Islamic world’s fence-sitters start thinking, “The jihadists are right: America doesn’t have the stomach to tough it out. If we just make it bloody enough, we can win.”The only part of Gitmo that causes terrorism is its front gates, when we allow terrorists to walk out of them so they can go back to the battle. Gitmo is a pretext for terrorism. Terrorists use it because, unlike us, they know it’s irresponsible not to study and understand the enemy. They know the Left exercises outsize influence on the media and that the Left’s key characteristic is projection. Leftists don’t like Gitmo (or the PATRIOT Act, or warrantless surveillance, or military commissions, or Bush, or Cheney, or#...#) so, presto, Gitmo becomes a “cause” of terrorism. Perversely, jihadist murderers become the vessels of our values: They’re noble savages and they don’t murder because they believe their religion commands them to. They do it, we’re told, because of national-security policies that just happen to be the ones despised by the Left. The terrorists are onto this game even if we’re not. So they snicker and say, “Oh, yes, of course, it’s been Gitmo all along -- that’s why we do it!” They know some pointy-headed intelligence analyst, some ambitious general, some craven U.S. senator, or even some pandering American president is bound to repeat the canard until it becomes received wisdom. And the press will play along, never pausing to ask: “Well, then, how come 9/11 and the Cole and the embassy bombings and Khobar and Bojinka and the Trade Center bombing all happened before there ever was a Gitmo?” (To which the answer, of course, would be “Israel!”)Long before there was a Gitmo, Muslim terrorists also plotted to accomplish the release of their captured confederates, either through escape plots or extortionate terrorist attacks -- like the massacre at Luxor. For them and their millions of sympathizers, the issue isn’t where the jihadists are detained, or under what theory (law of war or civilian prosecution) this detention is justified. The issue is that we detain them, period. In the Muslim world, where illiteracy is rampant, there are not many scholars of American law. And, as we’ve already seen, even the ACLU is saying there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Gitmo and the new Gitmo North at Thomson. If that’s what the lefty lawyers are saying, what do you suppose the jihadists think?From the prison where he serves his life sentence, Abdel Rahman was able to announce to the world: “The Sheikh is calling on you, morning and evening: Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! And he finds no respondents. It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to come to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” That he was in a nice civilian jail after a nice civilian trial didn’t make any difference. Of Americans, the sheikh decreed: “Muslims everywhere [must] dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” Osama bin Laden later called this the green light -- the necessary Islamic fatwa -- for the 9/11 attacks. It was four years before there was a Gitmo for Dick Durbin to blame. So should we shut down all the civilian prisons, too?

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