Why I love conservatives

U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis

I love conservatives. That's probably a good thing because, as a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, I'm surrounded by them.

Our students are conservative. I know because I correct their papers, talk with them in class, and interact with them in their off hours. All but a few of the junior officers who function as company officers in Bancroft Hall, the "world's largest dormitory," are conservative too, and those that aren't don't let it be publicly known: it's not a good career move. So far as I can tell, the military administrators of the institution itself are the most conservative of all. Their mandate is keep traditions going, foster respect for authority, and generally keep the lid on things.

Justifying the claim that a military institution such as the Academy is an arch-conservative bastion may well seem at first glance like what my students call a "no-duh." In today's climate, the military is what the conservatives are all about. Voting money for military needs is a badge of honor of conservative senators. A yellow ribbon to show you "support the troops" is right up there with an American flag in the lapel to show you support the current commander-in-chief. And even the commander-in-chief competes to see how martial he can look, dressing up in a flight suit to make a carrier landing to announce "Mission Accomplished" and spending Thanksgiving with the troops in Baghdad. Democrats vying for their party's presidential nomination try to outdo each other in bellicose rhetoric. They rarely say that the problem with the war in Iraq was that it was a war, or a pre-emptive one, only that it's going on too long and costs so much.

But the Naval Academy is conservative in more than the fact of being a military institution. The clockwork, spit-and-polish nature of the surface here at Annapolis is not mere window-dressing, it's an expression of the conservative way of life.

For the most fundamental fact about conservatism is that it is a way of life, not a pattern of argument, as liberalism is. That's why conservatives and liberals will always be at each others' throats. Liberals and conservatives don't merely disagree about issues. We're engaged in fundamentally different enterprises--and almost all people are one or the other, fundamentally liberal or fundamentally conservative.

Liberal and conservative, to be sure, are only relative concepts. They're made to describe complementary but opposing viewpoints, and that means, opposing (or complementing) in a specific context. The tenets espoused by someone who counts as liberal in one place need not jibe with the tenets espoused by someone who's liberal in another; a conservative here might be liberal there. You're a conservative on a specific issue in a specific place because you're not a liberal, and the reverse.

Yet it tends to be the case that liberal thought and conservative thought each build a constellation of predictably linked issues. If we meet a man at a cocktail party and somehow find out that he is opposed to gay marriage, we're justified in betting serious amounts of money that he is also going to be against abortion (or, as he would probably say, murdering "the unborn"), for the war in Iraq (unless we stay there too long), and probably drives an SUV, or would like to. And if he tells you out of a clear blue sky, in the first moments of your acquaintance, that he's against gay marriage, the chances of all these things being true shoot up exponentially. He probably thinks the pledge of allegiance ought to say "one nation under God," and isn't too interested to hear that it's done so only since 1954.

If you turn to the woman nursing a drink near the shrimp and somehow learn that she is "pro-choice," you can be pretty sure that she doesn't approve of allowing drilling on public lands in Alaska, and isn't in favor of giving the rich tax breaks (what the man you've just turned away from would describe as "tax relief"). Nor, in all probability, does she think the Ten Commandments belong in courtrooms. Clothes are part of the package too: the person in the dress-for-success suit is more likely to be conservative than the one in the bell-bottoms. And it's relevant too that the person with the first set of ideas, in the example, is a man, and the second a woman.

Of course not everyone espouses such a predictable package of ideas. Libertarians, whom Ayn Rand famously (and accurately) called "hippies of the right," overlap in many instances with John Stuart Mill-influenced liberals. Sometimes you'll find somebody who, usually because of personal experience (an abortion? a gay uncle?) approves of "choice" or gay marriage, while otherwise holding fast to the current conservative project of feeding the military and starving all the rest of the government. But they're the exceptions. You'll shake your head for weeks if the woman in Birkenstocks and the multi-colored skirt with the clunky necklace just about to get a glass of chardonnay turns out to be a fan of Rush Limbaugh.