How I am a Conservative

I realized this morning that when I called myself a conservative, in my last post, I was using an archaic idiom. "Conservative" has come to mean "a lickspittle lackey of corporate interests, defender of provincial intolerance for difference, and uncritical admirer of the military-industrial complex, with a fundamentalist literalism about founding documents" and I am, I hope, not that.

I am however an ideological conservative, by which I mean that I think liberty and justice are better and more durable when they grow organically out of custom and tradition, than when they're designed theoretically (by some) and imposed by violence (on others). I am a conservative, that is, as opposed to a revolutionary.

That's all.