The essay contrasts “Heritage Texans,” who see the nation as a historically rooted people, with “Creedal Texans,” who treat Texas identity as an open idea of hard work and football that anyone can adopt, and questions which view counts as genuine conservatism.

Drawing on Peter Stanlis’s reading of Edmund Burke, it argues that true conservatism rests on classical natural-law principles of social freedom, inalienable property and the preservation of national character, rather than abstract rights or majoritarian consensus.

It concludes that policies which erase heritage, national culture or traditional institutions fall outside Burkean conservatism, even when advanced under the banner of shared democratic values.

Texas Republicans recently became embroiled in a dispute between two factions that we could call, for purposes of exposition, the “Heritage Texans” and the “Creedal Texans.”

Heritage Republicans believe that a nation is constituted by a specific and identifiable people who are historically rooted in a place over time, while Creedal Republicans believe in a concept they call “the idea of Texas.” Their idea of Texas involves hard work, love of football, and the savoir-faire to say, “Hook ‘em Horns.” To the Creedals, anyone from anywhere in the world who embraces this idea is as much a Texan as anyone whose ancestors rode with the Texas cavalry in 1861.

Which of these factions represents true conservatism? What is real conservatism, anyway, in a situation where different sides of an allegedly conservative party are unable to agree on such a fundamental issue?

Creedal Republicans believe that conservative values entail upholding the civil rights laws that were introduced by the Radical Republicans in the post-bellum reconstruction era. The political consensus today, as they see it, is based on what they call “our shared values.” These values are said to be enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, with which, it is further assumed, we all agree. Anyone who dissents from that is typically denounced as “racist.”

The fact that their political opponents agree with them on this issue does not strike the Creedals as troubling, because many of them are, in any case, devotees of political compromise. They seek the middle ground between opposing parties and favor issues on which the Uniparty can stand united. But when the strongest supporters of a conservative faction are socialists, questions must be raised about the coherence of their political ideology.

Writing in 2019, Kai Weiss observed that some conservatives “have even gone so far as to embrace Bernie Sanders, the openly (“democratic”) socialist democratic presidential candidate.” Their abandonment of free market policies was driven, at least in part, by what they saw as “disintegration of society into individualism of the wrong sort.” The concept of “individualism” is fraught with ambiguity, but by “the wrong sort” they usually mean the type of atomistic individualism that rejects the importance of family, community, and nation.

In........

© Eurasia Review