Conservatives need to agree on a philosophy

So says the Telegraph, speaking about the Conservative Party. Any three American conservatives can give you four firmly held opinions on any topic; why do they think unanimity is possible, let alone desirable?

1 thought on “Conservatives need to agree on a philosophy”

  1. Mitch, our British cousins face a different situation. The Conservatives over there were the party of a class and to some extent of a region, had very little intellectual coherence. Deciding on a few core principles, or at least a self-consistent set of major issues, would be a good idea for a political party.

    Conservatism as an intellectual or ideological movement has pretty specifici roots in the United States — and it has all along been a coalition of people who focus on a variety of different things. In Britain this is much less true — policy was secondary to tone and attitude. But being blithely inchoherent has not served the Tories well in recent elections. For one thing it allowed Tony Blair to pick every popular issue there was and call it New Labor.

    American Conservatism and British Conservatism face different challenges and different medicine is needed for what ails them.

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