WELCOME to Common Sense Conservative, applying conservatism's time-tested principles, attitudes and temperaments to America's policy issues and challenges.

Why Common Sense Conservatism?

Of all modern ideologies, conservatism is the most history-based.  Its precepts and teleology rest not on abstract analyses, hopes and dreams, but on human experience.  It looks hard at history and attempts to draw continual lessons from it.  It is no surprise that the father of conservatism, England ’s Edmund Burke, launched the ideology by analyzing what was going so horribly and brutally wrong with the French Revolution and its Robespierian excesses.  He would have been unsurprised by the slaughters unleashed by Stalin or Mao or Hitler or Pol Pot. 

At the root of conservatism is the recognition, distressing and frustrating as it may be, of man’s (and woman’s) limitations, that as smart as individuals and groups of individuals may be, even when aided with great brains and, lately, vast computing power, they inevitably make huge and costly mistakes.  Utopian idealism inevitably careens out of control, inflicting massive pain, as evidenced by the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s forced collectivization, Hitler’s Totalitarian state and Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. 

Change, therefore, must proceed slowly and deliberately.  Power, therefore, must remain diffused.  Idealistic certainty, therefore, must be tempered and never enshrined in power.

In fact, conservatism regards any certainty as suspect.  This notion is most concisely put by the pre-conservative Oliver Cromwell who, when urged by a hard-line religious associate to impose on Englishmen a particularly draconian religious measure, turned on the associate and roared: “I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, think thee that thee may be wrong.”

This notion that the smartest and best-intentioned “may be wrong” is at the core of conservatism.  Conservatism’s sole certainty, in fact, is that certainty itself is wrong.  That true-believers are flawed and dangerous believers.  That such certainty and true-beliefs must be tempered by history’s lessons.  That what humans bring to this process are an ability to read history and an ability apply to it their own wisdom, limited as it is.  This limited wisdom is commonsense.

Thus while conservatism’s reading of the historical record has identified core principles essential for a healthy society, what Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” the translation of such principles into policy and action must be tempered by commonsense.

Individual liberty.  Property rights. Limited government.  Rule of law. Market economy.   These well-known conservative societal foundation-stones cannot be absolutes.  Those who treat them as absolutes violate the most central conservative dictum: The repudiation of certainty. These foundation-stones too must be tempered by conservatism’s essential modesty, by commonsense.

It is to offer my version of commonsense that I post this website and its accompanying blog, offering random conservative musings on the nation’s passing policy scene.

Burt Pines