Real conservatism recognizes the truth that a moral citizenry is more important to a nation than good laws. It also understands that bad laws can encourage vices among the citizens that create problems that legislation is unable to remedy. Conservatism is a force for stasis, whereas liberalism is a force for decadence, and the nation--with rare exceptions--lurches leftward politically because it lurches downward morally.
Liberalism, at worst, calls on your desire for material comfort and security, and at best on your wish for material comfort and security for others. In no case does it--or can it--call on something higher than the self, than the individual, and its material wants. Implicit in its arguments is the fact that moral progress is impossible without economic comfort.
Conservatism, on the other hand, calls relentlessly on something higher than the self. It insists that the moral fiber of the nation is more important than its economic stat sheet. It believes that family, community, religion, and tradition are more important to the encouragement of responsibility and morality than economic security.
Our laws have increasingly operated under the assumption that pain is the only absolute evil, and it has taught us as a people to be cowards. A nation in which a quarter of high school girls has contracted an STD regards an economic depression as the worst imaginably calamity, but doesn't realize that it is more than halfway under the quicksand already. Can such a nation turn back and reject the idolatry of comfort?
The smart money is, long-term, on "no." And the evidence is a striking lack of conservative principles among modern "conservatives." John McCain is running against the big-company CEOs who shouldn't earn so much more than you and against big money in politics, crowding out the "little guy"; his appeals are purely to envy. It was George W. Bush who said that when someone hurts, government needs to move. Congressional Republicans and their please-the-people pork binges are hardly distinguishable from Democrats anymore, and they pay the price at the polls. We've come a long way from the stirring words of Ronald Reagan.
But appeals to a higher principle don't work in a democracy except in times of crisis. During our last major national crisis, a leader stepped up and inspired a nation. How long will we have to wait for the next such crisis? And when the next one does come, will we have the moral strength to stand up under it?
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