Note: Originally written March 2012

“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” - Winston Churchill

 Churchill's maxim is not just representative of a liberal-conservative divide, while it is amusing to ponder. It also, in my view, can be applied to our journey through conservatism these past few years.

 Allow me to elucidate. We began our political careers as smart, albeit monochromatic, movement conservatives. We were fraught with idealism to the point where American society was set one step from despotism, and one step from right-wing utopia. Our idols were to the letter combative, flushed with the passion of political combat; less jujistu, more Krav Maga. We were distrustful of government to the extreme. So extreme, indeed, that our backs would be in the wind only with the fiercest of condemnations concerning government. Of course, we were stolid in our belief in the common man against the Elite. Elitism was the stuff of 'liberalism', and we admonished ourselves against the detached tyranny of urban thought.

 We were good Jeffersonians. We celebrated the anti-Federalists as purveyors of liberty, ponderously shaking our heads at Continental calls for centralizing power. In the same breath, we criticized Hamilton and Adams, and desired a grass-roots groundswell of popular revolt against the Establishment. Equally as harmful as the Left was this amorphously insidious Republican Establishment, a dried husk masking the ripened harvest of “true” conservatism.

These are all "liberal" in some respects. We spoke the paranoia of the ever-growing state and extolled the virtues of common society in the same breath. We were flirtatious with the excesses of conservatism out of a desire to be prophetic radicals. Jacobin without the Jacobinism, militancy without the arms or intent. Democracy was seen as perfectible vehicle for our march onward, in which we would link our arms with a conservative majoritarianism and march on to drain the swamp.

 And now we are changed.

Our spirits no longer cry for Jefferson , Paine, and ill-understood liberty. It stands with Hamilton, Burke, and order.

 We now avoid majoritarian struggles, and criticize populist overtones with the slicing pendulums of our minds. So many of the talking points of the movement are but canards to us now, false choices that neglect the search for small, yet good governance that once defined conservatism. We stubbornly resist the sweeping, grandiose exhortations of Tea Party types, who see society as one step away from socialism, and one leap away from paradise. Utopia is simply that; an ill-founded fantasy.

 Good governance is not only possible, it is a CONSERVATIVE belief to defend it. Disraeli was more conservative than Gladstone, Ames more conservative than Paine. The populism of Jackson stands naked and shivering before the cold wind of Federalist, Anglophilic polity.

True conservatives reject the radicalist conclusions of their own ideology, metering it and molding it into a relatively pragmatic, prudent way of governing and orienting society. While our philosophies will regardless be perceived as radical by our opponents, it is a joyous burden to pragmatically outmaneuver and neuter their efficacy, rather than sound the clarion call of radicalism and gain naught but hollow victories of false conscience.

In these senses, we have already moved, in many ways, from the "liberalism" of our political youth.