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- This lecture is about what conservatism means. To understand conservatism, we must understand that are three necessary prisms through which to think about politics and the conservative project. These three prisms are the individual, the community, and posterity.
- The first is the individual. We know that individuals are born with God-given inalienable rights. This is the natural language of conservatism: we stand up for and defend our rights. This prism alone, however, is insufficient. Life is not just struggle between individual liberty and the state.
- This leads us to the 2nd prism: the community. Individuals do not exist in a vacuum: they are embedded in various communities. They are born to families, they belong to religious congregations, they join civic associations, they are citizens of states, and they are Americans. It is in this vast space between the individual and the state, called civil society, that individuals live out their lives and pursue happiness.
- Finally there is the 3rd prism: posterity. It is the duty of each generation to take care of those who came before it you as well as those who will come after it. By thinking of society as a series of interlocking generations, conservatives are imbued with a sense of gratitude for those who came before us, in particular those who built our great country. We are also taught to think of ourselves are custodians tasked with transmitting the blessings of liberty we inherited to the generation that will follow us.
- Conservatism can therefore speak the language of liberty, but also the language of solidarity, of patriotism and of duties to prosperity.
- Only through this gratitude to our fathers can we truly love our country and appreciate what it means to live here. And it is only through this appreciation that we can properly teach the next generation what it means to have liberty and to fight for its cause. This is passing on of what it means to have liberty from generation to generation is what it means to have sustainable liberty.