Our Common Wealth

11Conservative Commoners,Once

Few things would shake up American politics as much as clarifying the term conservative. From the daily media one might surmise that conservatives are people who hate taxes and gays and love markets and religion. But the conservative tradition runs deeper than that, and in some ways contrary to it.

Conservatism is, or at least used to be, a way of thinking about society as a whole and the qualities that help maintain it. Edmund Burke, the father of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, believed society is an organic whole—a “community of souls,” as his twentieth-century follower Russell Kirk put it.¹

This view of society has large implications. For one thing, it means that people have a duty to support the whole with taxes. ...