There are grave difficulties and limitations to the idea of deliberately reviving or creating an American conservatism. With a political connotation, "Conservative," for better or worse, is historically a European word with an established European usage, and a usage that became established only several decades after the American War of Independence. The genuine conservative in America has been all too aware of this. The Lockean and the Jeffersonian heritage are not easily ignored. It is sometimes hard to think of such a wise English conservative as Professor Michael Oakeshott in the steel and concrete setting of the London School of Economics, but it is far harder to picture Kirk trying to carry the style and understanding of Burke to the students of Michigan State, whose fact and symbol of property is the automobile, not the "fair broad acres" or even "the small and humble plot" of well-lived land. Politics is not like great art that in some manner may be experienced vicariously. It demands a substantial similarity in tradition before Burke can become meaningful in Michigan or Illinois. At the heart of this new fashion there is a confusion between traditionalism and conservatism, concepts that may seem identical in Great Britain, but are far from so in the United States.
(Bernard Crick, "The Strange Quest for an American Conservatism," The Review of Politics 17 [July 1955]: 359-76, at 361 [italics in original; footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 