Why I am a Conservative: A Symposium‪.‬

EDITOR'S NOTE: On the occasion marking the fiftieth anniversary of Modern Age, coming as it also does at a critical point of the American Republic and of the American soul, it is altogether appropriate to feature a symposium on "Why I Am a Conservative," in the context of affirmation rather than of interrogation. The essays that follow convey a variety of responses in the form of discourse, criticism, autobiography, opinion, reflection. One who peruses these essays will appreciate the candor and the conviction that impel and deepen the symposiasts' exposition. Indeed, one can say that here each essayist speaks not only as one who strives to give witness to truth as he or she perceives and expresses it but also as one who, ultimately and honestly, bravely defends traditional conservative values and principles. Especially at a time when the very meaning of conservatism is devolving as it is being emptied of its integrity and it basic beliefs by opportunists and apostates, this symposium helps to provide correctives. Foremost among these is the belief that conservatism is in substance an idea, temper, sensibility, attitude, disposition. In sum, it is not a movement per se, a science, or a doctrine. The symposiasts are also in substantive agreement that restoring the true meaning of conservatism is absolutely required to safeguard it from the evangels of ideology, and to rescue the idea of conservatism from the ever-tightening jaws of ideologues allegiant to the demands of the nominalist and the relativist, and to the spirit of modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the task of retrieving the fixed signification and the authenticity of conservatism from aggressive and arrogant usurpers is seen by the symposiasts as the major task confronting conservatives in the twenty-first century. The abuse of the word conservative, and its conflation to what is a purely political or a temporal commodity, to be bought and sold as conditions and circumstances exponentially change, are matters that deeply concern the symposiasts. Stripping conservatism of essentials and, in effect, of its moral character constitutes for them a phenomenon that conduces what vexed Richard M. Weaver, "the flight toward periphery," and in short the erosion of its metaphysical foundations and the consequential adulteration of timeless truths and of conservative transcendentals. The random musings in this editorial note, however, need not detain us any longer than necessary and are tendered simply as a way of encouraging a reader to interpret and judge this symposium in its specificity and plea for the task of restoration that is required if conservatism is to mean more than that which imperious and sneering publicists and sophists promote in the print industry and journals, as in the electronic media, in the academy, in the halls of government, with neo-Jacobin zealotry. Richard J. Bishirjian