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The Far Right
The far right is a loose label for political movements to the right of mainstream conservatism that reject liberal democratic norms, organise politics around ethnic or racial identity, and treat...
The Constitution of the United States
The Constitution of the United States is the oldest written national constitution still in force. Fifty-five delegates drafted it in Philadelphia between 25 May and 17 September 1787, thirty-nine signed...
The Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party is the older of Britain's two governing parties and, measured by time in office, the most successful electoral organisation in the democratic world. It governed for roughly...
Term Limits
A term limit is a legal ceiling on how long one person can hold a particular office. The device is old, republican, and blunt: it removes an officeholder on a...
Technological Change
Technological change is the process by which new tools, methods, and machines are invented, adopted, and spread through an economy, displacing the arrangements that came before. Conservatives hold two positions...
Supreme Court Reform
Supreme Court reform means changing the composition, tenure, jurisdiction, or procedures of the United States Supreme Court by ordinary legislation or constitutional amendment. The proposals in circulation include expanding the...
Supply and Demand
Supply and demand is the account of how prices form in a market: sellers offer more at higher prices, buyers want less, and the price settles where the two schedules...
Suffrage
Suffrage is the right to vote in public elections. Its extension from a narrow property-holding electorate to nearly every adult citizen is the central political fact of the last two...
Substance Abuse
Substance abuse is the sustained use of alcohol or drugs in a pattern that damages the user's health, work, and obligations to others. Every society that has produced an intoxicant...
Sociocultural Evolution
Sociocultural evolution is the study of how societies change their institutions, technologies, and moral habits over time, and of whether that change follows any discernible pattern. The nineteenth-century version held...
State Ownership
State ownership is the holding of productive assets, firms, land, utilities, railways, banks, mines, by government rather than by private persons. Conservatives distinguish it from regulation, which leaves ownership in...
Socialized Medical Systems
A socialized medical system is one in which the state does not merely pay for care but owns the facilities and employs the clinicians. Britain's National Health Service is the...
Latest articles
Westernization
Westernization is the adoption by non-Western societies of institutions, technologies, laws, manners and habits of mind that originated in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots. It has taken the form of deliberate state policy — Peter the Great's reordering of Russia, the Ottoman Tanzimat, Japan's Meiji reforms, Atatürk's republic — and of unplanned diffusion through trade, missionary work, schooling and mass entertainment. Conservative thought approaches the subject from two directions that pull against each other. Conservatives hold that the Western political inheritance is a real achievement rather than an arbitrary local custom: the rule of law, secure property, representative institutions...
War Crime
A war crime is a serious violation of the law of armed conflict for which an individual bears personal criminal responsibility. The category covers the deliberate killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians and civilian objects, the taking of hostages, the use of prohibited weapons, pillage, and the perfidious use of protected emblems. It is distinct from the question of whether a war was just to begin with: a soldier fighting in a righteous cause who executes prisoners has committed a war crime, and a soldier fighting in an unjust one who observes the rules has not. Conservatives have a...
Voter ID Laws
Voter identification laws require a person presenting to vote to prove who they are, usually by producing a government-issued document. The requirement is unremarkable across most of the democratic world: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands all issue national identity cards and expect them at the polls. In the United States it has become one of the most litigated questions in election law, and in Canada and the United Kingdom it has been settled by legislation within the past two decades. The conservative case rests on a simple proposition about administrative design: an entitlement exercised without verification is...
Voter Fraud
Voter fraud is the deliberate corruption of an election by unlawful means: impersonating another voter, casting ballots in the name of the dead or the departed, buying votes, coercing or forging absentee ballots, or altering counts after the fact. It is a criminal category, and the conservative interest in it is an interest in a criminal-law and administrative question rather than a claim about any particular election result. The conservative argument holds two propositions at once. Election fraud is a documented feature of American and Canadian political history, not a modern invention, and the procedural safeguards that suppressed it were...