Volume 7. The Crisis of Conservatism. Sheffield Hallam University. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Article PDF first page preview. Issue Section:. You do not currently have access to this article.
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This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. Populism insists that the people should push back against the establishment. The kind of homegrown conservatism advocated by Saving Elephants is of a uniquely American variety. And the cultural heritage bequeathed to us by our American Founding Fathers contain some—wait for it— universal, abstract ideas that transcend differences of time, place, and culture. This peculiarity of American conservatism has led to no small amount of confusion and has made the American variety of conservatism truly exceptional—that is, unique and not necessarily superior—to all others.
What does any of this have to do with radicalism? It meant opposing the conservative monarchs of European politics and led to the now universally used political terms of Left and Right: Those on the Left wanted to change the monarchy while those on the Right favored conserving that institution. Adding to the confusion, the American colonists who immigrated from the Old World to the New had developed an entirely unique culture and history from those of the European monarchs.
As such, what it meant to conserve the histories and traditions of our European cousins meant something entirely different back in the thirteen original colonies.
Here it meant preserving the ideas inherent in the British commonwealth more than the institutions of the Crown. Fast-forward to our present day and we have a bit of a definitional mess on our hands: a conservative is one who conserves their culture and institutions, but the American culture was built upon a revolution, which is a tool most familiar to radicals.
But if American conservatives are conserving radicalism, how is it that conservatism and radicalism can be said to be opposites?
Is it simply a matter of allowing enough time to pass so that what may have been radical in one generation is now conservative in ours? Conservatism may be highly contextual, but it is anything but arbitrary. But to understand this we have to look deeper at the context of American conservatism and—for the sake of clarity—compare it with some other contextual example. Fortunately, history has provided to us an excellent case study, for shortly after the American Revolution there arose the French Revolution.
The former exemplified the conservative approach while the latter epitomized radicalism. Two revolutions, two very different approaches. How does a Conservative differ from a Radical? Part 1 Contextual Matters. Recent Posts See All.
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