Conservatives and the Progressive Ahabs

By Jeffrey Folks  April 2, 2017

Moby-Dick America's greatest work of fiction, Ishmael sits near the front window of a cozy inn, peering out into the stormy evening. His eye rests on those fellow human beings passing by, unprotected from the cold and wet.  Ishmael is separated from this fate only by a fragile pane of glass, but it is upon that separation, Melville implies, that all of civilization rests.

This truth – the fundamental insecurity of existence and the fragility of those forces that protect man from destruction – is the basis of all conservative thought.  Conservatives recognize that existence is fraught with danger and uncertainty and that only deliberate effort joined with prudence and self-restraint can save mankind from the sort of debacles that have occurred throughout history, from the utter devastation of the Hundred Years' War to the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the era of war and depression that reigned from 1914 to 1945............Read more