By Trent Serwetz

Everyone knows what a political conservative sounds like; as soon as a person starts going off about tax cuts or defensive spending, it becomes an ostensible fact that they are conservative. But where did conservatism come from, and why do certain views resonate with us as conservative, while others don’t?

Edmund Burke, one of the philosophical founders of modern conservatism, sympathized with the colonists during the American Revolution because he felt that the English taxation was an arbitrary and oppressive use of government power¹.

Adam Smith, the other grandfather of modern conservatism, expressed a similar view when he argued that a free market provides a fair allocation of society’s resources. Additional government intervention, he proposed, would sub-optimally redistribute an otherwise effective system².

Neither man was against change or progress, but they felt that it had to be organic and thus not forced by the state. Together, they formed much of the ideological basis for conservative thought in the last two centuries, but not without being skewed over time.

While Burke and Smith’s most core ideas have remained more or less intact, each generation naturally attaches its own cultural baggage to “contemporary” conservatism. Two hundred years ago, it was “conservative” to embrace the status quo and deny women the right to vote as equal citizens. Today, obviously conservatives and liberals alike embrace women’s suffrage as an intuitive fact; that is to say, conservative and liberal ideologies both posit women’s suffrage as a natural fact of life³.

The term conservatism gains nationally specific social baggage, as well. In the UK today, the conservative party is forwarding a green agenda, while environmental politics are allegedly a liberal domain in the US. For better or for worse, conservatism means something different to everyone.

Politically, that’s a really crucial recognition, because any social agenda included in a conservative platform is guaranteed to exclude potential conservatives. Every time we latch a “conservative” social issue onto our larger political platform, we limit our future possibilities by alienating people who fit the political profile for a conservative but reject our contemporary social agenda. The specific content of the social baggage is irrelevant, the harm is purely in maintaining the link between conservatism and any particular social issue.

As a new generation with a new generation’s problems, we need to interpret conservatism for ourselves. We face a huge national debt, increasingly powerful technologies, and an unprecedentedly transparent global network. The world we face is different from any previous one, so the most important social issues to our generation, whatever issues they are, should be unique and original as well. Maintaining the social baggage of conservatism’s historical past is antithetical to our political goals.

Politics have a meaningful history, and we should benefit from the conceptual lessons that we’ve learned in the past. But we need to free ourselves from the actual, empirical linkages that conservative ideology has acquired over the last few centuries in the US. Conservative politics is still filled with the baggage of the 20th century, like a link with the religious right whose origins no one questions. For example, in today’s vernacular, being conservative is naturally and ostensibly linked with things like being pro-life and pro-“family values.”

The conservatism of Burke and Smith is philosophically uncommitted to either side of the abortion debate, so why should we take on another generation’s social baggage? More importantly, why should we politically exclude people who identify with Burkean conservatism, but who reject a specific “conservative” social agenda?

That’s not to say that Burke’s ideas cannot be extrapolated to provide an opinion on contemporary issues; Burke was heavily influenced by theology, and would probably be “pro-life” if he lived today. But Burke’s ideas, because they are primarily political and not social, can be appealing to both pro-life and pro-choice thinkers. The conservatism of Burke and Smith has percolated through time because it is without a social agenda of its own. When we add time-specific baggage to the notion of “conservatism,” we prevent our ideas from being compatible with the ideas of people, even conservatives, who disagree with a specific social goal.

The world is changing fast. Every day more and more businesses fail because they were unable or unwilling to adapt to today’s completely new environment⁴.  As the newest voting adults, our generation can only stagnate if we continue to polarize ourselves by squabbling over the social issues of 1980s America.

Conservatives and liberals alike can only benefit from getting back to our philosophical roots, and critically thinking about political ideology. Who determines what’s “in” and “out” with respect to liberalism and conservatism, and are we helping our hurting ourselves by drawing lines in the sand within our own parties?

We should take conservatism for what it was worth to men like Burke and Smith who lived before the word “conservative” was conceptually attached to an ideology. Only then can we move forward with the most capable political platform to handle the most modern issues.

¹Paul Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 18 Oct 2008.

²Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations, Bk. 1, Ch. 5, 6. 1776.

³Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Accessed via Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 24 December 2009 . http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1072202/Ideology-and-Ideological-State-Apparatuses.

⁴Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture – from the days of Polio to the age of Aids. Boston: Beacon Press. 1994.’