What’s a “real conservative�
Whenever that phrase gets trotted out, I always hear echoes of the “no true Scotsman†logical fallacy.
That's quite true in the sense that most attempts to define what is "conservatism" or what it means to be a "conservative" ultimately wind up being essentially self-referential, rather than universal.
There is in fact such a thing as "conservatism" and there are "conservatives" who seek to follow its principles, but what comprises those principles can and does change based upon time, place and the course of human events.
In our own time and place, conservatism can be understood to reflect a preference for ideas that have been tried and found to be true, as opposed to an automatic dissatisfaction with all current states, and a preference instead for novelty, dissent and the attempt to alter both nature and reality.
Conservatives may also be defined as those who reject the notion of human perfectibility; they understand the fundamental purpose of government to be one of promoting and protecting ordered liberty, and that of civil society to be the promotion of voluntary association in the service of social and cultural achievement.
Within that framework, conservatives can and do often differ on means, strategy, and even on desired outcomes for a wide variety of social and political issues. Such is the natural outcome of a belief in limited government and individual liberty, and it is not something to be feared or denied.
Only those who seek governmental control over wide swaths of human interaction - today, these are our "Progressives" - would prefer a social order where the collective rules the individual, where lockstep thought and action are seen as desirable, and where governments are empowered to enforce such rules in the service of a march toward an imagined - and imaginary - perfect society.
