Thomas Fleming (political writer)

"The labels liberal and conservative used to mean something fairly clear. A liberal used to mean somebody who believed in the individual, who believed in the free market, who believed that you should break down all the barriers toward individual self-expression. If this meant destroying the church or weakening the power of parents within their family, destroying social classes, all sorts of conventions, this is what liberals were in favor of. What conservatives were interested in doing was preserving a kind of cultural order, preserving a tradition, preserving a sense of sacredness—even if they weren’t particularly religious themselves, they had to preserve that sense of the sacred. And what happened in the 1940s and 50s is that conservatism got defined as what used to be called liberal. In other words, the free market is everything, the individual is everything. Forget family—forget everything, essentially, but the marketplace and the defense of the nation, because the old liberals were also great colonialists. And the people who called themselves liberals were in fact socialists or worse. What was somebody with something like a conservative worldview going to do? There was no place. There was no label. There was no party. There was no movement. It’s like being a conservative environmentalist today. The greatest environmental thinker, the most powerful philosopher of conservation today, is Wendell Berry, who is a conservative. He lives on his little farm in rural Kentucky. He writes books about managing his own little family farm. He’s a Christian, he’s a traditionalist, but he’s on the board of the Sierra Club. Why? Because there’s no conservative organization that would welcome Wendell Berry; they think he’s the devil incarnate. And that, in a nutshell, is the failure of American conservatism—not to make a place for the real social, cultural, and moral conservatives who have surfaced from time to time. Jack Kerouac was a conservative and nobody knew that at the time. Why was he a conservative? He thought of himself as a man of the right. He thought he was a patriot. He was a rugged, old-fashioned individualist, but he loved America. He hated this rise of America-bashing of the 60s, and he’s quite an interesting person. Obviously, he was a moral anarchist in some sense, but way down deep he had the...impulses of a Baudelaire, who was also a conservative."