Those who believe conservatives are all alike have never delved into the often deep divisions among traditionalists/social conservatives, libertarians, and free-market classical liberals.
For a current example of the traditionalist perspective (in which there?s no love lost for John Locke), you could do worse than George Panichas? recent Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism. The book collects many of Panichas? essays from his four decades of association with Modern Age, the quarterly publication he edited for a quarter-century.
A 1984 piece titled ?Agents of Rediuctionism? offers a good example of Panichas? style:
The reductionist yen, as we diagnose its symptoms and experience its consequences, mirrors in direct and overt ways the desire to evade moral demands, moral responsibility, moral struggle. We are an impatient and stiff-necked people who believe that, in a majoritatian democracy, absolutely no difficulty or disappointment is to be tolerated; that, as the old song goes, ?Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets?; that the hedonist philosophy of ?Easy Come, Easy Go? is a national pastime, abetted by one and all ? journalists, academics, clergymen, politicians. ?Welfare is what modern man expects of society,? Professor Gerhart Niemeyer wisely wrote in Modern Age more than twenty years ago, his words still identifying a major editorial concern of this journal. Difficulty and effort, it seems, are words that have now dropped out of the dictionary as conveniently as political dissidents now disappear somewhere in Gorky!
Incidentally, Panichas? successor as Modern Age editor is N.C. State professor R.V. Young. You might remember Young?s 2007 presentation to the John Locke Foundation?s Shaftesbury Society on academics? increasing effort to politicize Shakespeare?s work.
