Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

1-20-90 . . . Contemporary political terminology is misleading. On programs such as Crossfire, liberals delight in lumping American conservatives with what they call “Soviet conservatives”, as if the two have anything in common. The distinction these liberals are making is between “liberals” like Mikhail Gorbachev and “conservatives” who oppose his reforming ways. Soviet conservatives, in this view, are hard-line communists. Needless to say, American conservatives are as far from hard-line communism as anyone could be. The problem is that the word “conservative” has two uses or senses. It is used in a relative way to mark out the ends of a spectrum of political thought and in an absolute way to describe a certain set of views. A person is conservative in the first sense when he or she wants to conserve the status quo—whatever that status quo may be. An American conservative wants to conserve current American institutions, rules, policies, values, and so on. A Soviet conservative wants to conserve current Soviet institutions—say, a centralized economy. Since both American and Soviet conservatives want to conserve something, they have a common feature. A person is conservative in the second sense when he or she defends a certain set of principles or policies. American conservatives defend free markets; Soviet conservatives do not. Soviet conservatives defend Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe; American conservatives do not. So liberals are being silly when they lump conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak [1931-2009] with arch-communists. Buchanan and Novak should say “Admittedly, both of us want to conserve certain features of our respective societies, but what we want to conserve differs drastically”.