Combined with the GOP's victories in state legislatures and governorships since , Republicans held a greater opportunity to reshape the nation than at any time since the s. And yet, Republican strategists were painfully aware that the party had lost the popular vote in six of the previous seven presidential elections.
The presidency had fallen to Donald Trump, a populist outsider who had mounted what was, in effect, a hostile takeover of the Republican establishment. The party's internal divisions had become so volatile that they had come close to blowing up the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that summer.
The Republican-controlled Congress had experienced infighting so severe that the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, had been overthrown and his successor, Paul Ryan, had been plagued by an inability to pass consequential legislation. An unprecedented number of GOP officeholders, activists, and voters harbored dark suspicions that they had been betrayed by their own party leaders. The continuity, the lifeblood, of a society must not be interrupted. Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.
Conservatives sense that modern men and women are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part.
Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.
Liberals and radicals, the conservative holds, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be effective.
The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery. The march of providence is slow; it is the devil who always hurries. Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.
They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality.
The only true forms of equality are equality in the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society longs for honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences among people are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality. Similarly, conservatives uphold the institution of private property as productive of human variety: without private property, liberty is reduced and culture is impoverished.
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created.
Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To aim for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering continue to lurk.
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