Conservative General

youtube.com/watch?v=YkQzq5fOEK4

Two books I reccomend as an introduction to conservatism are "Edmund Burke: The First Conservative", by Jesse Norman, and "Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind", by James E. Person Jr. I will put together a conservative literature chart (T.S. Eliot, Fyodr Dostoevsky and J.R.R. Tolkien, to give a few featured names). I have some books in mind, but recommendations are welcome.

"Traditionalist conservativism" (it has a wiki page) is distinct from what you might call "William F. Buckley Jr. conservatism" in that it is primarily is a philosophy, not an ideology (in fact it is almost anti-ideology, as conservatives reject universally ideal government in favor of government in accordance with local culture--this distinguishes them strongly from neoconservatives, who were bolstered by disillusioned Trotskyists oppossed to "liberal democracy in one state"). A platform can and obviously ought to be extracted from conservatism, but that platform is not what defines traditionalist conservatism, neither is it static. It will also surely differ from pop conservatism in emphasis: whereas pop conservatives consider economics to be the primary concern, traditional conservatives, such as Peter Hitchens, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton tend to consider education to be the paramount issue. And even on economics they can differ from pop conservatives: Richard Weaver said in 1948 that the conservative must defend private property against the encroachment of faceless bureaucracy, which can include capitalist corporations, stating, "Respectors of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy."
A brief overview, then, of traditional conservative philosophy. The most crucial point is the belief that reality is not a chaotic soup of disconnected particulars, but an intricate tapestry unified by a transcendent principle. This principle is most generally considered Christ, but that is not required: C.S. Lewis, in his superb essay, The Abolition of Man, uses the term "the Tao" for it, and says that one needn't be a Christian or even a theist to subscribe to it. The principle is also referred to most fittingly as
Cont

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the Absolute (the Absolute in traditionalist conservatism is not a culmination of dialectic, but rather beyond it; dialectic is precisely what isn't eternal, what is in flux), for within this principle, truth, beauty and morality are not relative, and each point in time is not a particular, but a a stitch seamlessly connected with every other point in time. Whig history is therefore rejected, because the very idea of each moment in time being "superior" to its predecessor, makes no more sense than saying each additional thread of a tapestry is superior to its predecessor. The present can never be about "transcending" the past, because the past is the very foundation of the present. When you step into the Absolute, you no longer see the present as the concrete, but only a frame of the concrete, with the future being just as concrete as the present, only not entirely discernable from the present (but, then, neither is the past). The idea that beauty, truth and morality are subjective, is a denial of the Absolute. Materialism is rejected because the principle is not a material compound. Consequentualism is rejected because the principle is not a consequence. Nominalism is rejected because it denies the existence of absolute; with the rejection of nominalism is the understanding that the self does not exist for itself, it exists for sacrifice, the heart of love, for love is the heart of joy and meaning. And so freedom must entail a corresponding increase in responsibility, duty and discipline; freedom in the absence of these qualities will "run on the fumes" of their prior contribution for only so long before the moral vacuum will be filled by tyranny, or at least paternalism. Because conservatives always seek the Absolute rather than relative perspective, the spiritual will always be given precedence over the material; which is simply saying quality will always been considered more important than quantity. This doesn't mean change is denied; on the contrary, change, if accomplished prudently and diffidently, using tradition (the past) as its foundation, is vital; however, not all change is good change, and when bad change is made, a restoration is in order. Some will say, "You cannot turn back the clock," but Weaver notes that conservatism is not about "turning back the clock," since conservatism is about preserving the timeless. Others will say, "You are only putting off the inevitable." Scruton notes that death is inevitable, but that doesn't make medicine fuddyduddy.

Nice blog post, faggot.

>William F. Buckley Jr. conservatism
Anyone interested in this subject needs to understand what the above really means. Buckley ruined conservativism by letting the Trotskyist jews who became the neocons take over the movement. That was when anything and anyone outwardly pro-white, notably the Birch Society, was purged and conservativism stopped conserving the most fundamental thing there is: the people; and instead started focusing on muh abstract principles and pretending this would appeal to the growing numbers of non-whites. Sadly, this remains the norm among establishment conservatives, which is why it has failed and, as the jewish controlled demolition intended, was always supposed to fail.

The John Birch society accused Ike of communism, which Russell Kirk thought stupid. Richard Weaver said accusations of communism is a way to silence criticism. Edmund Burke defended India against the East India Company. Tolkien opposed colinialism

You don't know what you're talking about. The John Birch society is pop conservatism in the extreme

Pity conservatives don't have any useful ideas or interesting literature (other then Ezra Pound, who's the freak exception)

No one under 50 has any reason to take seriously the cucked brand of "conservativism" a dying breed of outliers like yourself still take seriously. It's over and it failed.

You mean they don't have any ideological literature. Santayana's stuff is great, just no ideological

Conservatism will always be. It is at its ebb, but we're not presentists, we don't think of the present as all that is real, we consider the future and past equally real. We are pessimists, but unlike liberals we do not equate pessimism with despair, or hope with optimism.

Conservatives care about what is right. Better to be right and fail, than wrong and succeed. A moral man will always champion the lost cause if it is the right one.

If what you believed was right, you wouldn't have failed.

Wrong. A cause's triumph is zero evidence of its merit

Not this same guy, but this is true.

You are a very stupid person.

It wasn't right. It was based on abstract principles and ignored, and thus failed to conserve, the race of the people it was pretending to represent. Abstract principles are only relevant in a homogeneous nation, which no country in the west is now due to the failure of conservativism.

A cause's triumph is the largest evidence of its merit. What is right is that which is closest to nature and that which is closest to nature will always triumph over that which is farther by virtue of the fact that it is more in line with what is than what could be. Otherwise you're just preaching idealism like a Marxist.

is that the fat controller?

YAH commies hate trains

Can I be a conservative and hate faggots, women, Jews, liberals, blacks, and atheists?

The idea of a homogeneous "white people" is the antecedent to the EU

Your conception of nature is altogether useless. Doing something doesn't make it natural. If I convince everyone to live as horses and eat hay, getting them to do such is not natural, and will in fact destroy them in the long run. Furthermore even nature in a materialist "instinctual" conception is not the measure of man. Man's DISCIPLINE of his nature is what allows for civilization. Do you want us all to be so many complacent swine a la Brave New World? It is the supernatural, the spiritual, the ethereal, which allows for culture. Our willingness to put aside base, material desires, for things like virtue and wisdom. Without quality, there is no joy only quantity and "fun".

Not really. Hate is a vice.

>The idea of a homogeneous "white people" is the antecedent to the EU
No, it's not. It was much more perverse than that, as anyone familiar with Koudenhove-Kalergi's initial vision of it knows.

There's no hatred in conservatism?

Don't we want women back in the kitchen and niggers thrown the fuck out?

No, he's a *conservative* remember. He thinks blacks are natural conservatives who would adopt his principles if the Dems would just stop their damn race baiting!

The only thing that attracts me about conservatism is that you get to lynch niggers and rape women again

DO you even dialectics you dumb fuck

You sound like a nigger yourself.

political correctness is too restrictive. We need traditional values, i.e. women in their place, and niggers in their place. Disagree?

Principles are precisely what are NOT dialectical. Principles are the timeless core, dialectic is the temporal peripheral, what is in flux.

Everything going around you is nature, there isn't some magical line in the sand where things stop becoming nature. The ability of your ideals to cope with nature is indicative of how in line with nature your ideals are in the first place. When your ideals are not in line with nature, you end up like a Marxist creating a failed society despite holding the belief that you're doing the right thing.

And your conception of the material and spiritual as diametrically opposed is exactly why modern conservatism is where it is today. To deny one is to end up here in this nihilistic pit of hedonism because "lol don't judge just love". It's a yingyang, an outoboros. They're complements not opposites.

What I'm proposing is infinitely more dialectical than "stick to your guns even though we're losing just be a martyr"

That's how white societies would naturally organize without jewish agitation. It doesn't have to be stated explicitly if you remove the jew, and make yourself look like one when you overtly state you want to engage in non-white behavior like rape.

This. There'd be no immigration, no political correctness, no sex in the media, no atheism etc. in a global capitalist world with no Jews. Remove Jews, and these things won't make money for the rich and powerful

Your conception of nature is not only materialist, but grossly presentist. The material can discord with the spiritual, which will eventually cause catastrophe even if takes a thousand years. Moreover conservatism is not focused on the present, but the longhaul: a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years from now. An ebb in the present is not a cause for despair.

Material and spiritual are opposed unless we oppose them by saying the material is its own end. The material structured according to the spiritual is beauty.

Jewish falseflagger confirmed, called it. Though the irony is that those things did not actually exist when the elite was non-jewish.

>Principles are what i define them to be
>Implying there's such thing as timeless core
>Implying even if it existed you could *know* it
>Implying knowledge isn't always linked to a knower
>Being this much of a brainlet
Breaking news: Veeky Forums user solved the nature-nurture debate. The intellectual world is shocked. Philosophers on suicide watch.
>What I'm proposing is infinitely more dialectical than "stick to your guns even though we're losing just be a martyr"
One user says he's a conservative because of he aderes to a "timeless core". The other says his conservativism IS actually "more dialectical" (more dialectical?). Interesting.

This. It's not the result of expanding markets and in the cultural logic of late capitalism. It's the kikes

I can't tell which of you are pretending to be retarded and which are being sincere

I'm half pretending

t. bunch of nu-fascists in this thread trying to shit on conservatism.

Breaking News: man ironically learns that people are responsible for social changes instead of indefinable, abstract phenomena.

This. Great man theory is legit

only people brainwashed by Jews think otherwise

aren't* opposed unless

This is actually a pretty insightful post. When you really think about it, everything going around you is nature, there isn't a magical line in the sand where things stop becoming nature. Except for Marxism. That's not nature. It's almost as if there were some sort of magical line in the sand where Marxism lies, after which things stop becoming nature.

You are doing a poor job of sarcastically covering for your tribe and your behavior itt is a good example of why people dislike jews.

This. He's clearly paid by Israel to promote kike values by 'values' of course I mean subversive elements.
If there were no kikes on this image board, there'd be no falseflagging

>Implying even if it existed you could *know* it
Of course I could, everyone has the faculty to grasp what C.S. Lewis calls the Tao. It is grasped around the world in countless cultures. If you thought there is something wrong with cutting Shakespeare from school in favor of Harry Potter, you are graspimg it.

I suggest the reactionary mind by Corey Robin

Sarah Palin?

>It is grasped around the world in countless cultures.
Reductionist, unnuanced viewpoint.
>If you thought there is something wrong with cutting Shakespeare from school in favor of Harry Potter, you are graspimg it.
Wrooooooong! Wrong wrong and WRONG! Me thinking there's something wrong (notice the vague wishy washy lingo here. "something") is precisely NOT the result of some sort of immanent principle. It's the result of centuries of history, of culture, of literary critique, of art and most importantly, it's something I can motivate by using reason. I know EXACTLY what is wrong with that and i know exactly why. It's something very real, not untangible at all : the fat smelly and grandiose cauldron of culture, which has made me into his
oblivious slave. Btw what I wanted to say, in case you haven't grasped it, it's that there's nothing wrong with being gay.

Everyone in the world but you wants to replace Shakespeare with Harry Potter, and are successful. Were they right to do so?

Neo-cons haven't produced anything culturally relevant since the 50's

True conservatism in today's climate would be conserving your country, culture, and people from the demographic changes happening in white countries but the cucks wont do that. The capitalist conservatives would rather import 3rd worlders for cheap labour. Defend that OP

The biggest lie of conservatism is that it has real intellectual value and is not just a series of ad hoc paralogism that are self-serving justification of power and brutality.

The reactionary is hostile to power only when power is being too light in defending their interests. The reactionary cares nothing for truth, ethics, or beauty, they are just instruments for their flourishing.

The reactionary is not interested in any dialogue, he only understands the boot and his tongue is used only to lick it.

The only thing you'll learn from the reactionary it is strategies of power. When you open Burke you don't find any thought that isn't his discovery of how power can forge values and that is how you can shape the subjectivities of those you want to control.

Just throw it all in the trash.

>Everyone in the world but you wants to replace Shakespeare with Harry Potter
[citation needed]
>and are successful
[citation needed]
>Were they right to do so?
Yes because Angl*s need to disappear from the Earth.

You haven't read Burke, nor do you understand conservatism if you think it's a form of government

...

Please point where I say it's a form of government. Because if you can't understand simple posts on Veeky Forums I doubt you are in any position of schooling anyone on Burke.

Ps. I'll save you the effort: I know that conservatism is a school of political thought

It is partially, but it is almost metapolitical. Conservative thinkers battle on grounds like whether success is more important than virtue, or whether truth is relative. Politics are only drawn after that. Thinkers like Russell Kirk hardly ever wrote about politics in the crude sense

It's very hard to justify why you would need to conserve your culture. Wouldn't that be a form of cultural welfare? After all conservatives have argued for centuries that power justifies itself, that only individuals exist, that those who are not competitive deserve to perish.

Now that the tide is turning on western conservatives and they are losing their primacy, suddenly ideas like solidarity and society are coming back in vogue.

Why? What changed since the time of Thatcher? I thought conservatism was supposed to hold immutable timeless truths. And instead it's nothing but the opportunism of the moment.

Yeah like pretty much all political philosophers.

Still I'm always surprised by conservative philosophers' rejection of modernity. It seems that to them modernity (and nihilism) are the product of a lack of character. That is that people are not trying hard enough to uphold traditional rules.

And yet this view is in itself nihilistic, since it implies that the truth of tradition is dependent on will, that is on the subjectivity.

I mean how can anyone really speak seriously of virtue today. And I include in this Alistair Mcintyre.

>After all conservatives have argued for centuries that power justifies itself,
No, they absolutely haven't. You're confusing ideological reactionaries with conservatism, a school of thought which started with Burke, a man who opposed slavery and defended America's independence, and was the perpetual foe of his king

I hate conservatives and think conservativism in the west has been controlled opposition for decades, but find it hilarious how clueless the modern liberal is of all things right-leaning. Their reality is a morass because it's based in post-Christian utopianism.

Conservatives don't reject modernity in toto, they just think we threw out the baby with the bathwater . Conservatives aren't Evola

Yeah because he wanted to be taxed less himself. The crown and local aristocracies have always been in conflict. And often the common man has been a friend of the king, because central authority was his only defense from local authority (for example see how peasants in russia were always friendly to the tsar even while embracing the extreme populism of narodna volja).

An excellent analysis of the antagonism before aristocracy and the crown and how the commonwealth and subsequently the reception of this conflict enters the thought of Hayek can be found in Fukuyama's first volume on political decay.

And yeah I know that Fukuyama is a conservative.

Yeah you pick and choose depending on what is convenient for you at any given moment.

Conservatism is nothing but the opportunism of the moment.

As far as I can tell any blathering about conservative "principles" is just a ruse to trick people into accepting free trade and massive immigration. I have yet to see any reason to think it amounts to anything else.

This is literally autistic

There will be no conservatism if you can't preserve your own country and it's culture

The death of your country's historical lineage and it's transformation into a capitalistic amusement park where any 3rd worlder can come and live "the America dream" should be self-evidently horrific but conservatives would rather die sticking to their principals than conserve anything meaningful.

Burke wasn't an aristocrat, he was a bourgeois. But he recognized that the French Revolution was a bourgeois business venture to seize power and money, and it horrified him.

Haha, yeah, no, there was a major conflict between Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley despite their friendship.

Conservatives are for tariffs and restrictions on immigration

Those things, divisive social issues, and wars for Israel, have been what conservativism has revolved around since jews took over the party and movement and disallowed all explicitly pro-white policies and advocacy.

Yeah, sure. I don't believe you for a second.

>jews took over the party
Damn, they're really good

Start reading The American Conservative

"Good" is the wrong word. Jews are authoritarians that gain power by exploiting white people's sense of morality. They are bad people.

Wow, that actually makes sense. Thanks!

I used to read it and its one of the things that helped form my current stance.

TAC is more paleo than mainstream conservative, and while their ideas are better -- which is not saying much -- they do not have any real power. They rose and fell with Buchanan. It's all about the alt right now, though the alt right is kind of an extension of paleoconservativism.

One of the tricks you will find conservatives use is that they will say something to the extent of this
>1. I support limitations on immigration
>2. The candidate that supports limiting immigration does not meet the "conservative principle" X (the "failure" will often be something optical or related to manners/education)
>3. The candidate that supports unlimited immigration meets "conservative principle" X
>4. Therefore we must support the candidate that wants unlimited immigration
There's another variation that goes like this
>1. I support limitations on immigration
>2. This policy that limits immigration will not limit immigration enough
>3. Therefore we must reject this policy and keep our current high level of immigration until we can formulate a better policy
>4. Never formulate a better policy

Who determines what is right? You? Me? The People? The Party?

burke-ites should kill themselves, they are beyond useless. if he were alive today he would support gay marriage.

Conservatives love big black dicks in fairness. Just look at /pol/

conservatives are crypto liberals. They love freedom and democracy and they want everybody to conform to their principles. Look how conservatives are conned into the Lybian war by Obama and his cohorts of bleeding hearts liberals

Who could be behind this post?

>Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

Demographics is destiny

>it's that there's nothing wrong with being gay.
gay guy here, unsure about this

Hey guys what's going on in this thre-

>Wouldn't that be a form of cultural welfare?
I want to settle down with my own people and enjoy our own culture. Is this too much to ask?

Those aren't our values, goyim.

Bakersfag here. I went to a young republicans meeting and actually heard (((milton freedman))) qouted outside of an econ class

it was neet

>After all conservatives have argued for centuries that power justifies itself, that only individuals exist, that those who are not competitive deserve to perish.
this is why trying to talk to people about politics is futile; they don't even know rudimentary terms.

Slit your wrists.

>reddit formatting
>reddit opinions
Every single time.

>After all conservatives have argued for centuries that power justifies itself, that only individuals exist, that those who are not competitive deserve to perish.
This is how I know your only knowledge of right wing ideas come from left wing critiques of right wing thought

This is how I know that you're a newfag who pretends to not spot the obvious false-flagging because he thinks he's in /pol/ so he tries to fit in. Hang yourself.

That would be the Dems.

You are both insufferable brutes.

>I am right and everyone else is wrong and dumb

How can you manage to even read with such an infantile mind?

>antecedent to the EU
even if that's true, he's primarily referring to conservatism in the US, where it has been a relevant identity for a long time

>This. There'd be no immigration, no political correctness, no sex in the media, no atheism etc. in a global capitalist world with no Jews. Remove Jews, and these things won't make money for the rich and powerful

can you point to a single example of that paradise today? human nature contradicts every one of your fantasies

but you're both wrong and unsuccesful. how does that make you feel?

north korea? they;re not exactly capitalist tho

prolly parts of africa as well

ah, yes, "principled" conservatism, home to such illustrious figures as george bush, mitt romney, and glenn beck