What True Conservatives Want: The Five Basics

Here's a good question: why do conservatives and conservatism have such a poor reputation with so many people? Well, the answer is quite simple. Many people, namely politicians, who claim to be conservatives, are not conservatives. They are the proverbial wolves that put on sheep's clothing and fool us into electing them every few years. We too often discover, sadly to say, many Republicans who claim the mantle of conservatism are not really conservatives, but are actually progressives, globalists, and populists. When they go out and campaign, they appeal to the conservative voter, frankly because, well, they are not Democrats, whom we know to be big government progressives and liberals. Heck, let's just say what we really mean. Conservatives tend to not vote for Democrats because most modern Democrats are actually socialists that, despite their protests against the rich and against business, actually are fairly well off (read “rich”) and involve themselves in business all of the time, doing pretty darn well, I might add. Conservatives know that Democrats want a big, powerful centralized government that can manipulate and control every aspect of Americans' lives. At one time, Republicans were the alternative to the Democrats. Republicans were supposed to be the limited government, more personal freedom crowd, but not anymore. To say that the United States government did not get significantly larger, more bureaucratic, and more involved in the daily lives of American citizens under the George Bush administration would be a lie. The Republican Party has become just as greedy and manipulative (can anybody say, Mitch McConnell?) as the Democrat Party, and they, too, realize that they can become even more powerful by concentrating all of their political power in Washington. If we cannot trust the Republicans, and we sure as heck cannot trust the Democrats, who can we trust? The Libertarians? All that I can understand about Libertarians is that they are totally about individual freedom and individual rights, but they refuse to stand up for the inherent personal freedom and God-given rights of the babies in their mothers' wombs. That is an astounding contradiction that my mind and heart cannot reconcile.

It is really simple to express in a few words what conservatives, that is, true conservatives, want in government:

1) A return to the Declaration of Independence and the United States' Constitution as the law of the land;

2) Power that is currently vested in the federal bureaucracy, not enumerated by the Constitution, must be returned to the states and to the citizens. This includes repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which would return the power to appoint U.S. senators back to the state legislatures where it belongs. I'll write more about the Seventeenth Amendment later;

3) Amendments to the Constitution that place term limits on members of the United States Congress and on federal judges;

4) Amendments that allow Congress and the states to remedy unlawful decisions made by the United States Supreme Court;

5) Fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, a balanced budget, and a reduction in the size of the federal government by attrition.

Really, when we get down to it, that is all that conservatives want. We're realistic, probably more so than anybody. We know that the damage done to this country is so great, that it cannot be fixed in just a few years. It might take decades, even a century for the ship to right itself. We have to fight. We have to kindly explain to people why conservatism works, why it is the best route to take. We have to let people know that nobody wants to enslave anyone, or hurt anybody in any way. We have to fight against the derision and the lying from progressives and ultra-liberals. It has been proven over and over throughout history that their ideas do not work, and repeating the efforts will not have different results. People have to be shown that conservatism and capitalism and fiscal responsibility and free trade are the best policies that we can follow in order to make America free and prosperous, again. We can do this! We might be bruised, and we might be battered, but there is still a lot of fight left in each of us. Let's go out there and show the world what true conservatism is all about.

Where to go from here?

When I started this blog, I wanted to use it as a means of explaining to people the true nature of conservatism. Since 'conservatism' constantly gets a bad rap from the press and from progressives and liberals, I also intended to help explain what true conservatism is not, but that is hard to do, since the opponents of conservatism have really been the ones who have defined it all of these years. Despite the best efforts of conservative talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, etc., the voices of the anti-conservative crowd seem to have gotten louder and louder. Why is that? Is it because we're not trying to scream over them? Is it because we aren't pushing back enough? Do we have to reduce ourselves to the level of our opponents in order to make our voices heard? I don't know. I wish I had an answer. All I know is that we have to adhere to our principles, if not to save the American republic and the Constitution, to at least leave a record for future generations to discover and study. If we give up now, the true ideals of conservatism will be lost to posterity.