This will come as a shock, but conservatism is the antithesis of the Tea Party and the modern Republican Party. The reason for this is the meaning of conservatism itself. Conservatism, in short, aims to conserve what it can of the ideas that came before.

Quintin Hogg, U.K. Conservative Party leader in 1959, said, “Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself.”

Conservatism, and indeed most rightist ideology, comes from the time of the French Revolution. Commentators, such as British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, and participants in the Revolution helped to mold conservative the political ideology known today.

For Burke, government and politics were artifices of convention, experience and experiments, not of absolutes heedless of the context of time and space. “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori,” he said.

Fast-forward through time, and conservative parties across the world vary considerably on the basis of national context. In the U.K., for example, the Conservative Party rests both on the tradition of aristocratic noblesse oblige and the neoliberal free marketers. This arises out of any uneasy cohabitation between business classes and the heirs of the old nobility.

By contrast, the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is a party founded on the premise of Catholic social teaching, solidarity, subsidiarity and a belief in both the virtues and limitations of the free market.

“The CDU Germany stands for a free and constitutional democracy, a social and ecological market economy, Germany’s inclusion in the Western values and defense community, and the unification of the nation, as well as a unified Europe,” according to the party’s website.

Finally, the dark horse of international conservatism is American conservatism. It is, at its best, a mixture of classical rights-and-freedoms-based liberalism, states-based parochialism and political pragmatism.

The problem with defining a true American conservatism is that the basis of American political values rests on a bourgeois, classically liberal revolution. The Founders, though varying in origin and occupation, all came from aristocratic and professional classes and a classically liberal bent. They were Whigs; any American Tories abandoned the fledgling U.S. for Britain or British Canada. Even today, the breadth of American political ideology is small.

The Republican Party of today is, in fact, not conservative. It is economic libertarianism attempting to maximize localism, deregulation and religious moral legalism. If anything, the so-called Tea Party conservatives of America today are angry cultural reactionaries on par with Islamism, just not as politically successful.

True American conservatism, if anything, might look like this: mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Deist in religious ethic; accepting of a valid role for the federal government; politically pragmatic with regard to social programs; loose constructionist; and assertive in foreign policy and promotion of American values abroad.

If it were to exist, a true American school of conservatism would be cognizant of time and space. It would, as Burke did in Britain, recognize the evolution of an understanding of rights, responsibilities and liberties. It would see topics such as marriage equality as a good and necessary extension of the fundamental institution of family. It would recognize universal healthcare as a reasonable welfare. It would not attempt to restore a 1950s Golden Age. It would, above all, not be afraid of Washington, D.C. excising power, as necessary, to confront issues of national importance.

Somewhere in the American political jungle still lives the beast known as the True American Conservative. For now, it is our job to identify it, nurture it, and hopefully release it again into the political wilderness.

Tyler Laferriere is a first year master’s student in applied economics and statistics from Phoenix, Ariz. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of the Office of Student Media.