Conservatives. . . and conservatives

There are conservatives. And then there are conservatives. In the latest entry in the WRF's Comment series, Russ Kuykendall reviews Adam Daifallah and Tasha Kheiriddin's Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution. Although Kuykendall (aka Burkean Canuck) and I undoubtedly share much in terms of political perspective, I have never been enthusiastic about wearing the conservative label, whether begun with an upper- or lower-case C. I will not go into detail explaining this reluctance, because anyone can easily discover this in chapter 3 of my book.

That said, however, I will be the first to admit that, if the secular media were to pay any attention to me, they would almost certainly peg me as some sort of conservative, mostly because I oppose legalized abortion on demand, support a stable definition of marriage and family, and believe that government is under no obligation to manifest a supposedly benign neutrality towards a variety of personal lifestyle choices, much less to subsidize them.

All the same, the variety of conservatism I dislike most is the libertarian variety, exemplified by the likes of Ayn Rand and Friedrich von Hayek. Conrad Black is a caricature of the libertarian conservative, in which the common good or the public interest is ancillary to the ego of the sovereign individual — especially the individual with the economic means to have his own way. As I've written before, a government content only to protect a free economic marketplace falls short of doing public justice. It should encourage the wealthy to use their resources for the public benefit, probably through a careful design of the tax code. Those conservatives who can recognize this are worth co-operating with. By contrast, those claiming the conservative label, but who, following Marx's stereotype, do no more than to try to conserve their own spending power, are definitely not worth the time of day.