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There is also something like a conservative disposition, which is characterized by an appreciation for the complexity of human society, the limitations of politics and the dangers of mistaking politics for soul saving. The danger facing statesmen, the great conservative Edmund Burke warned, is when they view self-government "as if it were an abstract question ... not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling."
American conservatism tends to be more hopeful and less dour than, say, British conservatism. It looks to the future rather than remaining fixated on the past. And it is eager to embrace change and reform as social circumstances shift. But true conservatism is wary of revolutionary rhetoric, utopian promises and efforts to remake the world.
Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center
Out of One, Many?
BY RICHARD LAND
The modern conservative movement was always a coalition of disparate groups often more united by what they opposed than by what they affirmed. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the fissures in American conservatism became more visible.
Land is the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
Words From a Founder
BY SAM TANENHAUS
"Calling for smaller government is essentially a meaningless idea, because what we need is not larger or smaller government but government that does the job it's supposed to do." It wasn't Obama who said this; it was Harry Jaffa, 93, who wrote Barry Goldwater's incendiary acceptance speech at the 1964 GOP Convention. Every ambitious Republican President since Abraham Lincoln understood this, whether it was Theodore Roosevelt reining in the trusts, Dwight Eisenhower muscling through the interstate highway system or Richard Nixon, who began his first term in 1969 with a plan "not to dismantle the Great Society but to try to do it better," to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democrat whom Nixon recruited to lead his antipoverty program. Nixon knew that Americans, much though they professed to dislike Big Government, still expected it to solve the most pressing social problems. Long ago, the archconservative Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," famous for battling the New Deal, spoke not of undoing government but of achieving "sound government." He pushed for federally subsidized low-income housing and the promise of "reasonable material standards of living."
Should a Republican win in November, the challenges facing him will include a shrinking job base and a struggling middle class afraid it can't afford college for its children. The public will demand solutions. Even an antigovernment President will be equated with government. He will need to find a way to make it work and do the job it's supposed to do.
Tanenhaus is the editor of the New York Times Book Review
TO READ LONGER VERSIONS OF THESE OPINIONS, GO TO time.com/conservatives
Standing on the Verge of Greatness