Who the Hell Redefined What It Means to Be a Conservative?

To be a conservative is to believe that a natural order rightly produces winners and losers ⁠– rulers and the ruled – and that the meddling hands of government or those who hope to change society shouldn’t interfere in that sound and sacred process ⁠or upend the hierarchies it produces on the basis of abstract principle.

So says a conservative pundit, and I can but wonder where they came up with that.

Whatever happened to ‘conserving’ things of value? SO, I trot myself over the Merriam-Webster, which claims to be America’s most trusted dictionary, and it gives me this:

1) of, relating to, or favoring a philosophy of conservatism (see conservatism sense 1a), especially political conservatism (see conservatism sense 1b) and often also social conservatism, and

2) of, or constituting, a political party professing the principles of conservatism, or

3) marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners: tending to avoid qualities or elements that are novel, showy, etc.,

The final one of which, makes me feel like a necktie.

When ‘usage’ overcomes definition, we lose language. Language is our only form of communication, whether it’s Czech, Swahili, or English. When good, old, reliable Merriam Webster decides Republicans have a lock on ‘conservative,’ we’ve lost something dear.

Having been an Eisenhower-style Republican for the first half of a rather long voting life, I recoil at the fact that nothing is any longer to be heard of actually ‘conserving’ what made our nation the ‘go-to’ destination for decades of welcoming the less fortunate peoples of the world to our shores. We are not a jar of jam, to be set on the shelf for later consumption.

Although, perhaps that would be preferable, to boil down the finer fruits of our Constitution, look more honestly at the inedible truths of our genocide against a native population, and sweeten the mix with the blood shed by a nation divided against the slavery of African humans. Cool that on the windowsill, and shelve it in a jar, two jars down from American leadership in industrial, scientific and social revolutions, and a jar this side of a couple of wars we joined to save our brand of freedom in Europe, ending with a Marshall Plan that healed those wounds and rebuilt those wounded societies.

Those are American values worth conserving, on the shelf, in the jar, and saved like homemade marmalade.

For the most part, to be a ‘conservative,’ today, particularly in the Republican style, is to hate thy neighbor, do away with as many voting rights as possible, remove a woman’s choice over pregnancy, burn Mark Twain’s and Charles Dicken’s books, all the while ignoring the homelessness and misery those authors exposed.

I was raised differently, by a wire-rimmed-glasses Republican father, who never turned away a hungry man, and cared for and sheltered an immigrant who couldn’t even speak English. Why? Because he needed food and shelter. What’s more, he needed humanity.

That was my ‘conservatism’ before the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan pulled the rug from under it, and I had to leave. I still believe to ‘conserve’ is to ‘hold on to something of value.’ And the man or woman who does that may honorably call themselves a conservative.

Merriam Webster be damned.