Twelve Questions About Conservatism Your Family Will Ask You, Answered

The turkey has been carved, the second helping of potatoes is making its way around the table, and your uncle, who has been waiting patiently for exactly this moment, sets down his fork and says: "So explain something to me. What do you people actually believe?"

Every conservative has been there. The question is rarely hostile. More often it comes from somebody who has heard a hundred slogans, from both sides, and has not heard a straight answer. The trouble is that most of us have never been asked to give one. We know what we are against. We are a little less sure how to say, in plain English and in under a minute, what we are for.

So here are twelve questions, the ones I'd expect at a family table, with answers you can use. They are meant to be full and fair. Where the honest answer is "conservatives disagree about that," I'll say so. Where the other side has a point, I'll give it. And where a name or a document helps, I'll supply it, so that you can say "go and read it" instead of "trust me."

What conservatism conserves

1. What does conservatism actually conserve?

It conserves what has been proven to work, and especially the institutions that let ordinary people live together in freedom: the family, the church and community, the rule of law, private property, and a constitution that limits the powerful. The thinker who tried to put this in order was Russell Kirk, whose 1953 book The Conservative Mind traced the tradition from Edmund Burke forward. Kirk later boiled it down to ten principles, including a belief in a moral order, a preference for the tried over the untried, a respect for custom, and a conviction that freedom and property are linked. Russell Kirk's Ten Principles Are the Best Short Course in Conservatism lists all ten.

Notice what is not on the list: a particular tax rate, a particular party or a particular president. Those are applications. The core is an attitude toward inheritance. We received a great deal from people who came before, much of it hard-won, and we should be slow to throw it away because a clever person has a theory.

2. Do conservatives hate government?

No, and anyone who says so has not read the founding documents. The Constitution is a conservative document in this sense: it creates a government, gives it real powers and then chains it. James Madison put the underlying idea in Federalist No. 51 in a sentence that has outlived most of the speeches of his day: if men were angels, no government would be necessary. Because they are not, government is necessary, and because the people who run it are not angels either, it has to be limited.

What conservatives oppose is unlimited government, and government that does what smaller bodies could do better. The national government's first duties, defending the country, enforcing contracts and protecting rights, are ones we want done well. The Hardest Questions About Limited Government, Answered Straight takes up the hard cases. The short version is that we are for good government, and we think the best way to get it is to keep it to the things it can do and hold it accountable for those.

3. Isn't conservatism just resistance to change?

That is the most common charge, and it has a grain of truth worth admitting. Conservatives are cautious. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in the mission statement of National Review in 1955 that the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," and critics have been quoting that line ever since. Burke argued that change should be gradual and respectful of what already works.

But caution is not the same as paralysis. Burke himself said a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation. G. K. Chesterton gave us a useful test, now called Chesterton's fence: if you come across a fence in the road and cannot see the use of it, do not tear it down until you find out why it was put there. Then, if the reason is gone, take it down with a clear conscience. Chesterton's Fence Is the Best Argument Against Rushed Reform explains the idea. The conservative position is not "no change." It is "show me what the problem is, show me the cure will not be worse, and let us try it where a mistake can be fixed."

And, as a matter of history, conservatives have been reformers. The Republican Party of Lincoln was founded to stop the spread of slavery. Welfare reform, school choice and tax reform were all, in their day, radical changes pushed by people who called themselves conservative.

Conservatives and Republicans

4. What is the difference between a conservative and a Republican?

A conservative is someone who holds a set of convictions. A Republican is someone who belongs to, or votes for, a political party. The two overlap heavily, but they are not the same thing, and the gap matters.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in opposition to the spread of slavery into the territories, and it was not, at that time, a "conservative" party in the modern sense. The Little Schoolhouse in Ripon and the Oak Grove in Jackson, 1854 tells the founding story. Over the next century and a half it became the home of most American conservatives, but it has always been a coalition: free-market advocates, social traditionalists, national-security hawks, populists, and some moderates and libertarians. There are Republicans who would not call themselves conservative, and conservatives who are unhappy with the party and sometimes vote against it. Within living memory, there were conservative Democrats in significant numbers.

The practical advice for the family table: do not let anyone make you defend every vote, speech or scandal of a politician by saying "that's what you believe." You believe a set of principles. A party is a tool for pursuing them, and tools can be criticised. Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table sets out the main factions and what separates them.

Family, faith and freedom

5. Why do conservatives value the family so much?

Because the family is where a child learns to be a person. It teaches language, manners, honesty, how to share and how to take no for an answer. It raises children, cares for the old and absorbs shocks, and it does so for free, with a knowledge of each member that no institution can replicate. Burke called these small attachments "the little platoon" and thought the love of country grew from them.

There is also a practical argument. The healthier the family, the less the state is needed. A country of strong families can run a small government; a country of fragile families will find the government growing to fill the gap. The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One makes that case in full. Note that "valuing the family" does not mean sneering at those whose families look different: a grandmother raising her grandchildren, a single father, an adoptive family are all doing the family's work, and a good conservative says so.

6. Why do conservatives want religion in public life?

This one needs care, because it is often misunderstood. Most conservatives do not want a state church or any religious test for office. The First Amendment forbids an establishment of religion and protects its free exercise, and the great majority of conservatives defend both halves.

What they argue is that a free society depends on habits and virtues that it cannot manufacture by law, and that religion has been the main teacher of those habits. George Washington said it in his Farewell Address in 1796: religion and morality are indispensable supports of political prosperity. John Adams, writing in 1798 to the officers of a Massachusetts militia, said the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Tocqueville, who toured the country in the 1830s, saw the same thing: religion, he thought, was the first of America's political institutions, though it took no direct part in government, because it shaped the moral habits that made self-government possible.

You can accept that argument without being religious yourself. It claims that a people who cannot govern themselves will need to be governed, and that faith, family and community are how a free people learns self-rule. Believers and non-believers alike can argue about how much of it is true.

7. How do you square freedom with moral standards?

This is the question that nearly tore the American right apart, and the way it was resolved is one of the interesting stories of the twentieth century. Some conservatives, like the traditionalists around Kirk, said that freedom without virtue decays into licence. Others, like the libertarian-minded followers of Friedrich Hayek, said that coerced virtue is no virtue at all, and that the state should leave moral questions to individuals.

Hayek made that case in a famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," printed as a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty in 1960. Frank Meyer, writing in National Review, proposed an alliance, later called fusionism: freedom is the political end, and virtue is the personal end. A free society makes room for virtue by not forcing it; the person who chooses to be good is more admirable than the one who is made to be. The state protects the conditions of choice, and families, churches and communities do the shaping. Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible tells the story.

The honest conclusion is that there is a real tension, and the best conservatives admit it. Liberty and virtue pull in different directions in particular cases. The way through is to prefer persuasion to coercion, to leave as many decisions as possible with families and communities, and to use law for the clearest cases, such as protecting the vulnerable.

The poor, the rich and the experts

8. Do conservatives only care about the rich?

No. The charge is old and it keeps coming back, so it deserves a real answer. Conservatives argue that the surest way to help working people is to create the conditions in which they can earn: sound money, low barriers to starting a business, good schools, and a government that does not tax or regulate the family business out of existence. The first beneficiaries of those conditions are not the wealthy, who can manage in almost any system. They are the people starting out.

You can disagree with the policies, and many people do, but disagreeing with the means is different from accusing us of indifference to the ends. Some of the most important conservative reforms were meant for the poor: school choice for the child in a failing school, work-linked help like the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the 1996 welfare reform. Answering the Charge That Conservatives Only Care About the Rich is the longer reply.

9. Are conservatives against helping the poor?

No. They are against helping in ways that trap people. The distinction is between a safety net and a hammock. Most conservatives support a safety net: help for people who truly cannot work, and temporary help for those between jobs. What they resist is a structure in which each extra dollar earned costs a family a dollar of benefits, so that work does not pay.

Conservatives also point out that much of the real help for the poor comes from outside government: churches, charities, neighbours and extended families. A conservative who believes in the "little platoons" will want policy to work with them, not crowd them out. That is a testable claim, and you should test it. Look at what a church food pantry does, and look at the paperwork that surrounds a government program, and see which one treats people as adults.

10. Why do conservatives distrust experts and planners?

Not because they think expertise is worthless. Because they think knowledge is scattered, and that no committee can gather all of it. Hayek's argument, in his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," was that the most important knowledge is local and specific: the shopkeeper who knows what his customers want, the farmer who knows his soil. A price system, in his view, brings that dispersed knowledge together better than any central planner could. Hayek Explained Why the Smartest Planner in the Room Always Loses explains this at length.

The economist Thomas Sowell adds a second point: most policy questions are about trade-offs, not solutions, and experts who forget this tend to push their preferred trade-off as if it were a fact. Thomas Sowell Asks What Happens After the Policy Passes is a good introduction. None of this means ignoring doctors, engineers or economists. It means asking them what they know, and not letting them decide what we value.

One right or many

11. Is there just one kind of conservative?

No, and I'll be straight about it: it is a family with plenty of arguments at the dinner table. There are traditionalists, free-market conservatives, national-security conservatives, religious conservatives and populists, and the lines between them blur. They agree on enough to work together, and they fight constantly about the rest. If someone tells you "conservatives all think X," the correct reply is "which ones?"

That is not a weakness. A movement that never argued with itself would not be thinking. The test of a healthy tradition is whether it can disagree in public and still recognise its own principles.

Passing the pie

12. How do I talk about this at the table without ruining dinner?

A few rules, learned the hard way by a lot of people.

1. Ask before you tell. "What worries you about it?" will tell you more than any speech.
2. State their best case first. If you can describe their view in words they would accept, they will listen to yours.
3. Separate the facts from the values. "The program cost this much" is a fact you can check. "It's worth it" is a value, and people may differ.
4. Concede what is true. A conservative who says "you have a point about that" is far more persuasive than one who never gives an inch.
5. Do not make it personal. Argue about ideas and public acts. Nobody has ever been talked out of a view by being called a name.
6. Know when to pass the pie. Dinner outlasts the argument.

The bottom line

• Conservatism is a disposition to conserve what works, especially the family, the rule of law, private property and limited constitutional government, and to change things carefully, with evidence.
• Conservatives do not hate government. They want it limited, accountable and good at the few things only it can do.
• Being conservative and being Republican are not the same. A party is a tool; the principles are what you hold.
• Where the honest answer is "we disagree," say so. The tension between liberty and virtue, and between the factions of the right, is real.
• At the table, ask questions, state their best case and concede what is true. You will win more arguments, and keep more relatives, than you would by volume.