SOME conservatives definitely have "an idea what to do" -- and a good idea, at that

Submitted by Michael S (United States), Aug 8, 2018 at 13:58

Mr. Howard, you said,

"when "conservatives"... take over government... they have no idea what to do."

Either you do not count President Trump as a "conservative", or you grossly underestimate him. He certainly has ideas of what to do: He articulated them during his campaign for election, and has spent the past 18 months implementing them. I will list a few of them:

1. Appointing originalist justices to the courts
2. Securing our borders and ensuring our country's ability to defend itself (a very originalist definition of the duty of the President)
3. Restructuring our trade and commercial relationships, to make them more favorable to US interests, and
4. Restructuring our foreign political and military relationships, to bring them in line with our current security needs.

Not only does this present a very clear picture of what we are to do as a country, but it actually revolutionizes the current world order -- in a very conservative direction, restoring Westphalian system based on national sovereignty.

You went on to say,

"Burke's approach has also sapped the energy of what could be a robust political philosophy by ladening it with religiosity and social impulses, making it self-contradictory by arguing, on the one hand, for individual liberty and, at the same time, for a social orthodoxy as a matter of politics."

The "religiosity" you refer to, is the conservative tendency to look to the Bible for moral inspiration, as opposed to the very liberal "moral relativism" that is destroying our society. You went on to say,

"One cannot argue for freedom and, at the same time, tell me what to do with my personal life, as a matter of politics."

This is absurd. Of course, the government has the right and obligation to "tell you what to do with your personal life". People are arrested every day for beating their children, driving while under the influence and many other things some might consider to be rights of their "personal lives".

Where governments have been remiss in enforcing time-tested precepts such as forbidding adultery (and thereby providing stable families), they have replaced the old morality with new precepts demanding political correctness, "reducing your carbon footprint" and other notions, which are treated as though they were given to us on the mount. Liberals, in short, are as likely, if not more so, to be telling us what to do with our personal lives, than are conservatives. The difference is that what the liberals are telling us to do is flat-out balmy.

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