Order

The third pillar of American Politics is that of order, and is the central concern of the conservative.  Distrustful of any “grand design” as the late Michael Oakeshott states (“On Being Conservative”), the conservative is effectively an antidisestablishmentarian at heart.  He prefers to rely upon established institutions and policies to resolve public problems, and is suspicious of broad, sweeping changes in the extant social and political order. In this sense the conservative owes a debt to the 18^th Century thinker Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thoughts on Present Discontents offer a strong argument against dispensing with long-established institutions.  In his Reflections, Burke extols the stability of an established order and expresses suspicion of change:

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views…the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement…By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.  The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order.  (Burke, Reflections, 29-30)

Furthermore Burke holds that a reliance on the established political order is “placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts…the whole at one time is never old or middle aged or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy.” (Reflections 30)  Nevertheless, Burke to a limited degree preserves an attachment to liberty, but that liberty can only be ennobled as long as it is restrained, held in check, or moderated by “reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age and on account of those from whom they are descended.” (ibid.) Thus, while the conservative may be a lover of liberty, it is largely because that love of liberty is a part of a long-standing tradition within the established political order, and will react strongly against what he perceives as threats to a “way of life” that he holds sacred.   For Burke, liberty itself is perhaps less important for a regime than that its government contain provisions for security and preventive measures against the abuse of power. “Every good political institution,” he says in his Thoughts on Present Discontents,

Must have a preventive operation as well as remedial. It ought to have a natural tendency to exclude bad men from government, and not to trust for the safety of the state to subsequent punishment alone—punishment which has ever been tardy and uncertain, and which when power is suffered in bad hands, may chance to fall rather on the injured than the criminal.   Before men are put forward into the great trusts of the State, they ought by their conduct to have obtained such a degree of estimation in their country as may be some sort of pledge and security to the public that they will not abuse those trusts (Thoughts, paragraph 59)

Indeed, even the Declaration of Independence pays respect to long-held traditions: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long Established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly Experience hath shewn that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable.”  (DoI) Consequently, a moderate conservative in the United States is more likely to extol the virtues of prudence than either the libertarian or the liberal and is sometimes described as cautious, seeking to anticipate the necessity of establishing or maintaining a particular order for the sake of security.  This political sense reflects a similar sentiment embodied in the writings of Alexander Hamilton concerning the need for order and authority: 

No friend to order or to rational liberty, can read without pain and disgust the history of the commonwealth of Greece…the jealousy of power hindered the people from trusting out of their own hands a competent authority, to maintain the repose and stability of the commonwealth, whence originated the frequent revolutions and civil broils with which they were distracted.  This, and the want of a solid foederal union to restrain the ambition and rivalship of the different cities, after a rapid succession of bloody wars, ended in the total loss of their liberty and subjugation to foreign powers. (Hamilton, The Continentalist #1)

Finally the American conservative is frequently a religious man, as organized religion provides authority and order to moral action that government institutions are ill-equipped to accomplish.  However, one cannot assume that because one is conservative he is also religious; indeed, he need not be, depending upon the circumstances of his position in an established social and political order.