Seven Things People Say About Conservatives That Do Not Survive Scrutiny

Conservatives hate government. Everybody knows that. Yet the Republican Party's first President signed a law creating the Department of Agriculture, a law giving away land to anyone willing to farm it, a law funding a transcontinental railroad, and a law creating state colleges on federal land, all in one year. If that is hatred of government, it is the strangest hatred in history, because the hater keeps building things.

The claim is false, and so are several of its cousins. Conservatives are told they are against change, all alike, indifferent to the poor, careless of the Earth, and stuck in the past. I have heard each of these at a dinner party, usually delivered with the calm confidence of a person who has never met the people being described.

But I promised myself I would run this post straight. Some of these accusations are exaggerations of something true, and our side has earned a piece of each of them. So for each claim, I will give the charge, the record, and a verdict that you can repeat to a neighbor without embarrassment. Seven claims. Let us go.

Claim 1: Conservatives hate government

The charge: Conservatives want to shrink or abolish government, and they hate public servants and public programs.

The record: Start with the party's origin. The 37th Congress, which met from 1861 to 1863 with Abraham Lincoln in the White House and Republican majorities, passed the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land-Grant Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the act creating the Department of Agriculture, all in 1862. You can read more in Six Laws Passed in 1862 by a Republican Congress That Still Shape America. Theodore Roosevelt expanded federal power over food safety and railroads. Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that created the interstate system. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of smaller government, signed the 1986 tax reform and the 1983 Social Security rescue package and built up the military.

What conservatives distrust is unaccountable government, government that outgrows its charter, and government that uses a crisis to take permanent power. Madison described the right posture in Federalist 51: enable the government to control the governed, then oblige it to control itself. That is not hatred. It is the attitude of a homeowner who wants a good fence, not a bulldozer.

Verdict: False. Conservatives are skeptical of government's reach, not its existence. The test of a conservative is whether he wants it limited and accountable, not whether he wants it gone.

Claim 2: Conservatives hate change

The charge: They resist progress by instinct. Whatever is new, they are against.

The record: The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, and in Jackson, Michigan, in opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories, which was a radical position in its day. In 1865 the 13th Amendment ended slavery. In 1868 the 14th Amendment wrote equal protection into the Constitution, and in 1870 the 15th protected the vote against racial discrimination. All three were pushed through by a Republican-led Congress, in the teeth of fierce resistance.

What conservatism actually holds, going back to Edmund Burke, is a particular view of how to change: slowly, with respect for what already works, and with humility about unintended consequences. G. K. Chesterton gave it the image of a fence across a road. The reformer says he sees no use for it and wants it gone. The wiser reformer says: go and find out why it was put there, and then I may let you tear it down. That is the argument in Chesterton's Fence Is the Best Argument Against Rushed Reform. It is not "never change." It is "know what you are changing."

Verdict: Misleading. Conservatives want change that is tested, accountable and reversible. The record contains some of the biggest changes in American history, and a movement that is allergic to change does not abolish slavery.

Claim 3: Conservatives are all alike

The charge: Conservatives are a single bloc with a single set of views, handed down by a single set of donors.

The record: Anyone who has sat through a Republican primary knows better. The American right has at least five strands: free-market economists, social and religious traditionalists, national-security hawks, libertarians and populists. They disagree on trade, on foreign intervention, on how much the state should enforce morality and on whether to be loyal to party leaders at all. The table in Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table sets them side by side.

History shows the fights. In 1964 the party picked Barry Goldwater over Nelson Rockefeller, and the loser's wing never entirely forgave the winner's. In 1976 Ronald Reagan nearly took the nomination from a sitting President, Gerald Ford, at a convention that went to the floor. The deal that held the movement together, what came to be called fusionism after Frank Meyer's argument, was exactly a truce between strands that did not agree. Look at Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible for how that truce was struck.

Verdict: False. A movement that cannot agree on tariffs, foreign wars or what to do about Social Security is not a monolith. It is a family reunion.

Claim 4: Conservatives care only about money

The charge: They are the party of the rich, and their faith is in the market and nothing else.

The record: There are two parts to this. The first is the philosophical one. Russell Kirk's list of principles in The Conservative Mind (1953) starts with a belief in a transcendent moral order, then lists custom, prudence, community and a suspicion of leveling. Money is not at the top. The core texts of the movement are about duty, family, faith and local life. You will find the case in Russell Kirk's Ten Principles Are the Best Short Course in Conservatism.

The second is practical. Conservatives have a record in helping people, which does not get told as often. George W. Bush launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003, an overseas program that measured its results and is still discussed as one of the most effective American aid efforts. Jack Kemp spent a career arguing that the best urban policy was ownership and growth. The First Step Act of 2018, a criminal justice reform bill, was a Republican priority. And in private life, conservative writers such as Arthur Brooks in his book Who Really Cares (2006) have argued that people with traditional religious practice give a larger share of their income to charity than others. Read the data yourself before you cite it, since the claim depends on how you measure.

Now the fair concession. The party has too often talked about taxes first and families second, and it has too often treated the poor as a budget line. The charge sticks to the style more than the substance, and a movement that cares about working families has to say so out loud. See Answering the Charge That Conservatives Only Care About the Rich.

Verdict: Mostly false on principle, partly fair on tone. The movement's founding texts are about moral order, not money. The party still needs to talk like it.

Claim 5: Conservatives do not care about the environment

The charge: They deny the value of clean air, clean water and wild places.

The record: Conservation is a conservative idea. The word itself shares a root. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, created the United States Forest Service in 1905 and signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, which lets Presidents protect natural and historic sites as national monuments. He used it to protect the Grand Canyon, among others. Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970, created the Environmental Protection Agency that year, signed the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 over his veto, in a dispute about cost and method, not about whether to clean the water. George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

Where conservatives differ from the left is on means. We favor property rights, local knowledge and cost-benefit tests over sweeping mandates, and we ask who pays. Those are real disagreements and honest people can weigh them differently. They are not evidence of indifference. The record in Six Myths About the Republican Record on Conservation and the Environment goes through it.

Verdict: False as a blanket claim. Republicans built much of the structure of American environmental law. The fair debate is about methods and costs, and some Republicans have indeed been careless on the subject, which is no reason to miss the larger record.

Claim 6: Conservatives oppose civil rights

The charge: The party has always been on the wrong side of racial equality.

The record: This is the one that stings, and it deserves to be answered carefully. The Republican Party was founded against the spread of slavery. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were passed by Republican majorities. Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress also passed the Enforcement Acts to fight the Ku Klux Klan, and Black Americans such as Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce served in the Senate as Republicans. Frederick Douglass was a Republican for most of his public life.

On the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Senate invoked cloture on June 10, 1964, by a vote of 71 to 29, four more than the 67 needed. Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois pulled his caucus into the effort, and a larger share of Republicans than of Democrats voted yes. The details are in Republicans Delivered the Votes That Broke the 1964 Filibuster.

Now the honest part. Barry Goldwater, the party's nominee that year, voted against the bill, on constitutional grounds about the reach of federal power over private business, and that vote shaped the party's image with many Black voters for a long time. Before that, the party's own record in the late nineteenth century faded, as Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877. The party that began as the party of freedom let that cause slip for decades. To say otherwise would be to lie about the record.

Verdict: Misleading. The Republican record on civil rights runs from the strongest in the nineteenth century to a real, decisive role in 1964, with a long gap and a serious dissent between them. Own both halves.

Claim 7: Conservatives are the party of the past

The charge: They want to turn the clock back and have nothing to say about the future.

The record: The movement's biggest victories have been about the future. Reagan's 1981 tax cut and 1986 reform changed the rate structure for a generation. Welfare reform in 1996 changed the rules for how a safety net works. The Contract with America in 1994 produced the first Republican House in forty years. The school choice movement, which has spread through state legislatures, is a bet on the next generation, not the last one. The conservative case on energy, on space, on technology and on entrepreneurship is a bet on what people can build.

What conservatives do say is that some things from the past are worth keeping: the Constitution, the family, the church, the local school and the civic habits that Tocqueville praised in Democracy in America (1835 and 1840). That is not nostalgia. It is the judgment that some inherited institutions encode lessons that took centuries to learn, and that you can build a better future on them or lose both.

Concede this. Every movement is tempted by nostalgia, and conservatives can romanticize an era that was less fair than we remember. A good test for any "back to the good old days" claim is to ask who was left out of the good old days. If the answer is "many people," then the argument needs more than memory.

Verdict: False as a description of the program, fair as a warning against the temptation. The goal is to carry the best of the past into the future, not to live there.

What the seven have in common

Look at the pattern. Every accusation takes a real tendency and turns it into a caricature. Conservatives are wary of government, and the claim says they hate it. They prefer to change slowly, and the claim says they oppose all change. They have disagreements, and the claim says they march in step. And in each case, our side has contributed to the caricature by speaking carelessly, talking about money before people, or retreating on a principle we once led on.

The right answer is neither anger nor denial. It is the record, offered calmly, with honest concessions. A person who can say "that charge is false, here is the evidence, and here is the part you have right" is far harder to dismiss than one who only says "that's unfair." That is the habit worth building. The family-table version is in Twelve Questions About Conservatism Your Family Will Ask You, Answered.

The bottom line

• Conservatives distrust unaccountable government, not government itself. The first Republican Congress under Lincoln built more national institutions in a year than most Congresses do in a decade.
• The conservative approach to change is "learn why the fence is there first." It is a method, not a refusal, and the party's founding is proof it can drive large change.
• On civil rights and the environment, the record runs deeper than the stereotype, and it also contains failures. Say both. People trust a speaker who does.
• Do not argue from slogans. Bring one fact, such as the 1862 laws, the 1964 cloture vote, or Nixon's 1970 environmental statutes, and let it do the work.
• When a critic lands a real point, say so. Then ask for the same honesty in return.