How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch With Reality

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.


Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

A great article which hits hard at the core reason why today's Republicans have lost their ability to reason. Today's Conservatism is not the traditional Conservatism that made America great, and was based in reality, but is one that, much like the Liberals, is based on nothing but abstraction. There were, and still are, some great Conservative thinkers in our time.... Buckley, Buchanan, and Goldwater. What have they been replaced with? Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, and Ryan. The party of ideas, the GOP, has gotten stuck in a ditch, and can't seem to get out of it, and right now, the Conservative movement desperately needs a great thinker once again, to help restore the Republican party to sanity. To those hyperpartisans on the right who maintain that "Liberalism is a disease", I say "Physician, heal thyself".