Francis W. Porretto
2011-03-07 02:40:04
An excellent capsule. However, I must differ in one particular:
Conservatives — Originalists — speak of Big Government always: an aversion to it is deservedly the driving intellectual thesis behind conservatism.
This is inexact. The driving force behind conservatism is an aversion to abrupt or unwarranted interference with established ways and institutions. In this view, Big Government, as noxious as it is, is not a primary but a resultant.
Conservatism in earlier times wasn’t inherently friendly to human freedom. Only with the rise of statist leftism in its multifarious guises – i.e., in the Twentieth Century, particularly after the World Wars — did persons of conservative disposition realize en masse what was at stake.
