Today marked the first day of the Summer 2020 session of my History of Conservative Thought course. Because I’m sick and awaiting COVID-19 test results, we held the inaugural session on Google Meet, discussing the big picture question “What is Conservatism?”
The session went quite well (and I was pleased to see that even with a fever I could last around 75 minutes). The students hit upon these concepts as being key to conservatism:
- Fiscal responsibility
- Constitutionalism (in the American context)
- Limited/small government and States’ Rights
- Traditionalism in a cultural and religious sense
- Opposition to Progressivism itself (certainly a feature of Buckleyite fusionism
- Peace through Strength
- Strict immigration enforcement
To that list I added the classically liberal concept of natural rights and the Burkean idea of “ordered liberty.” We also talked about how the earliest conservatives of the Enlightenment Period were largely monarchists, and explicitly rejected the concept of natural rights (at least, rejected the concept as Americans understand it; that is, that all men are created equal and God gives them their rights).
They’re reading Russell Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles” for next week, and we’ll check Kirk’s principles against their list.