Paul's typical conversation gambit in those days was to begin every paragraph with, "I am more conservative than you are because…" I occasionally played along, though, in truth, I never cared much for the subject, partly because it was never clear to me what people meant when they used the word conservative. Back in the 1930's and 1940's, "Conservative" had been used as a term of abuse for people who supported the status quo, generally regarded as the rule of the wealthy and powerful. It was also used occasionally as an insulting synonym for the timid or over-cautious. Bill Buckley and his friends had cobbled together a pragmatic ideology they called "fusionism"—equal parts classical liberalism and respect for order and tradition--but I have run into very few people (Donald Devine, most prominently) who believed in it.
The main problem with fusionism was that it is based on a fundamental incoherence that reflects the disparate origins and sources of American (and English) conservatism. The adjective "conservative" implies an attachment to the existing status quo and an antipathy to change. That is why one could speak, in the Brezhnev years, of the conservative hard-liners in the Kremlin. Buckley and his friends were certainly conservative in this sense, opposing, as they certainly did, both revolutionary communism and democratic socialism. Buckley declared that the mission of his magazine was to stand "athwart history yelling stop." In every generation, then, conservatives have tried to slow the pace of revolutionary change without necessarily mounting a principled opposition to the Revolution itself.
Related:
Rod Dreher responds to David Brooks on Russell Kirk: The Rout Of Traditionalist Conservatism. See Lord Karth's responses, here and here.
The quandary of "movement" conservatism, separated from ties to real communities with traditions and history?
Misc.
Thomas Storck, Capitalism, Distributism and the Hierarchy of Human Goods
William Lind, What's So Special About Special Ops
Manifesto for a Post-Growth Economy
Richard Heinberg, Introduction to ENERGY, Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth
Helena Norberg-Hodge at the Degrowth Conference in Venice:
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