The Republicans’ Conservatism Is About Defending The Status Quo – OpEd |
By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya
Friedrich von Hayek explains in his article “Why I am Not a Conservative” that, given a choice between the progressive parties that destroy liberty, and the conservative parties that defend the status quo, the classical liberal will “generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties.” This is because there are many parallels between the classical liberal prioritization of individual liberty and the conservative principle of limited government in countries with a tradition of liberty. For example, Hayek argues that “in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions.”
Hayek further observes that, in this context, conservatism aligns with the defense of liberty: “In a country like the United States, which on the whole still has free institutions… the defense of the existing is often a defense of freedom.” This reflects that strand of conservative tradition seen in Magna Carta, which limits state power in order to enhance individual liberty. Hayek observes that,
…there is much that the liberal might with advantage have learned from the work of some conservative thinkers. To their loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions we owe (at least outside the field of economics) some profound insights which are real contributions to our understanding of a free society.
However, the conservative principle of limited government was all but extinguished by Lincoln’s revolution, and today’s Lincolnites offer no meaningful opposition to progressivist encroachments on liberty couched in egalitarian language. They seem to fear that society will descend into a cesspit if people are not forced by the federal government to embrace equality, on pain of being prosecuted by the repurposed Department of Justice for violating civil rights. In this they are almost as authoritarian as the progressives.
Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the Republican commitment to the equality and civil rights regimes introduced by progressives, which many Republicans see as one of Lincoln’s greatest........