I've been paying more attention to conservatives this month. I've ignored them for years since they held power and I always find the opposition to be more interesting, more dynamic as they cast about for some hook that will get them back in power. I don't mean that I listened to left wackos, they are always boring, just those who were sane enough to have some insights about their plight. Now, it is their doppelgangers on the right that are more interesting: these folks for example. Following a link from there I find this.

. . . in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. . .

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three.

The text contains much more. Some of it is throat clearing before making what I thought was the main points, some of it is support for those points. Some of it is interesting.

The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility toward the state than any other modern conservative party. . .

The American Right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. . .

In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right — unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort or another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T. S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card.

He has a point. In America it is the statist liberals - unions, academics, civil service - that generally champion hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. Conservatives seem far less enchanted by them, though it is a matter of degree.

The article spends a number of pixels arguing that American conservatism is a native mutant of sorts having little in common with the older sort of European conservatism. Perhaps this is a result of not having had much of an hereditary aristocracy, greater influence of the Scottish Enlightenment than the Continental variety, the mongrel nature of a nation of immigrants rather than the blood and soil culture of older and more rooted nations, self-selection for those who had a pioneer spirit and were willing to risk their lives in a wilderness? Whatever. It doesn't seem to have gotten much thought in the past, perhaps because like fish, they didn't notice the water.

Americans might imagine that their politics is as varied as everybody else's, and in one way it is. . . But the center of gravity of American opinion is much further to the right — and the whole world needs to understand what that means.

The peculiar sort of conservatism that lives in America doesn't seem peculiar to Americans, except perhaps for academics who know so little of America and have mostly the ersatz knowledge of scholarship rather than experience and personal knowledge.

Clearly I too am a fish who had taken his water for granted while getting on with life, so I look forward to an education in the next couple of years about the nature of the local waters and the varieties of fishes and such that swim here.