What Does It Mean To Be ‘Conservative’ Anymore?

By Andrew Hull

At one time, the most well known conservative voices included the likes of William F. Buckley. People who, while certainly witty and capable of being what we may now call “savage” or “trolls,” were also intellectual. In other words, they weren’t one trick ponies and shock jocks.

Beyond that, being conservative essentially meant simply believing in lower taxes and less government intrusion into everyone’s lives, as well as standing for individual rights as outlined in the Constitution. To me, that’s still the most basic and honest interpretation of what conservatism means.

However, we’ve now allowed “conservative” to be defined not just by the left, who lazily uses it as a code word for “racist” or other such terms they throw around with impunity, but by elements of the right which should be shown no welcome at all within any respectable party or political movement.

I speak, of course, of the self-titled Alt-Right, which is made up of people who think that if you don’t agree with their race baiting ideology, then you’re a liberal. These are usually the same people who think that they’re the most conservative people in the room if they’re louder and more obnoxious than everyone else, and that’s the problem.

Conservatives once prided themselves on being intellectual, whereas the left was more driven by emotion and appeals to empathy. Now both ideological groups have descended into being nothing more than a pissing contest about who can be more melodramatic. If you and your opponent hold the same views, all you need is to simply be louder about yours, and voila! You win the race to the right, for some reason. God help you if you try to be an intelligent voice in conservatism, lest you be labeled an “elitist snob,” a “liberal,” and a “know-it-all.” I know, because I’ve been called all three (and worse) for calling out such behavior as I just described.

But this is what happens when the likes of Sean Hannity, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Tomi Lahren, and other professional provocateurs with books to sell and ratings to boost get to be the voice of a movement.

Of course, there are still guys like Ben Shapiro out there who manage to avoid the one dimensional dogma-spouting of the individuals previously named, and who display intelligence and a level of respect for their opponents. But alas, now we get to be known as the party of hysterical trolls instead of the party of intelligence and letting the success of our ideals (the essence of which, as you’ll recall, is about less government action in our day-to-day lives and not taxing us to death and spending said taxes foolishly) speak louder than ourselves.

Simply put, we’ve embraced arguing loudly about wedge issues instead of remembering the basic principles of conservatism, which are fairly unifying ideas, and promoting them intelligently.

So what’s the solution here? I’m of the mind that the only way to fix this is to win elections with real conservative candidates who aren’t divisive blowhards with no real ideas aside from being generally outraged and hysterical about everything.