What is a Conservative?

It's unsure whether or not we have had a real conservative in the White House since the Nineteenth Century. There were no conservative Presidents in the last century who were Democrats. There were no obvious Republican conservatives in the Oval Office, either. Eisenhower certainly wasn't a conservative. Nixon was openly socialistic. Ronald Reagan wasn't a conservative, either, at least in governance--although he espoused conservatism forcefully on a rhetorical level. Perhaps in that sense, we may define Reagan as a Rightist philosopher, like Robert Taft or Barry Goldwater. Unfortunately Reagan's beliefs did not transfer into presidential leadership--due in large part to the fact that Reagan was an anachronism, and he had already outlived the effective lifespan of conservatism itself.

Conservatism--in this day and age of flexible meanings for words--is mostly illusion. It retains a few free market platitudes, but for the most part, it is fakery. It has become a product label for an inferior substitute product, like the 80s label of "New Coke." Faux conservatism rules America. It bears very little resemblance to the real thing. Real conservatism will never rise from the ashes until we at least grasp what it stands for.

Before we define what conservatism is, perhaps we should define what it is not.

* Fascism is not conservatism. It is left-wing socialism with bombs and machine guns. Communism is essentially the same thing. There is no ideological gulf separating Communism and Fascism, facades aside.

* Capitalism is not conservatism. It complements conservatism, but does not override its principles. Conservatism is a political and social concept. The corporation is not more important than the Constitution.

* A Theocracy is not conservatism. It is a bastard state. Christians who empower tyranny in the guise of doing God's Will apparently never understood Christ's admonition of "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."

* Neo-conservatism isn't conservatism, either. (See "Fascism," above.)

Inflammatory labels aside, I am not here to call George W. Bush dirty names. I am only attempting to clear up what is and is not a conservative. Apparently there is a great deal of misunderstanding of this concept, since conservatives have not held any real political power in our system for a long, long time.

Allow me to state what should, by now, be extremely obvious: GW Bush is not--by any definition--a conservative. Neither are Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Bennett, George Will, or a bunch of other people on Capitol Hill who apparently never guessed what their Oath of Office was supposed to represent. All these people are political moderates. And their President is a liberal.

Bush is a happy socialist who has yet to veto a single spending bill. He has maintained a massive post-Clinton bureaucracy without even giving lip service to reducing the size and scope of federal government. Bush has greatly expanded the government's role in our lives. He has thrown tidal waves of money at education, Medicare, and farm subsidies. He has monstrously inflated the government's police powers, in complete contravention to the Bill of Rights. He has racked up the biggest deficit in American history. A small tax cut or two, perched decoratively atop a towering mountain of free spending and federal expansionism, does not make the mountain into a conservative one.

Even John Kerry, a Massachusetts liberal ideologue, figured out that Bush isn't a conservative. People often allude to the fact that Bush and Kerry were both members of the conspiratorial fraternal organization "Skull & Bones." Skull & Bones is trivia. Of much greater importance to us is the fact that the two candidates had no real ideological differences. The bitterly fought race for the White House in 2004 was a contest between two liberal

I also believe that conservatism means that you do for yourself with as little help from anyone as possible. But people do less for themselves nowadays.

The Libertarian party...been invited to join a few times, but like other people, knew at this time there were not enough votes to get a person of that mindset into office. So much for my lazy thinking.

Other Conservatives....David Horowitz, Thomas Sowell, Dr. Alan Keyes, Michael Reagan(with a few exceptions).

My grandmother (who was raised during the Great Depression) believes in a coming race war. I disagree, but only on color. I see a war between the welfare state and the conservatives. When you're hungry and you don't know how to raise food or cook it, you will take it from anyone. Conservatives should know this.

Harry Truman was a conservative