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Social Stability
Social stability is the condition in which a society's institutions, expectations, and habits hold steady enough that people can make long commitments: marry, raise children, build a firm, sign a...
Social Media Regulation
Social media regulation covers the statutes, agencies, and liability rules that govern how platforms carry, rank, and remove user content, and how they handle the data and attention of the...
Social Media Censorship
Social media censorship describes the removal, demotion, or suppression of lawful speech on privately owned platforms that function as the main forum for public argument. Conservatives distinguish two things that...
Social Programs
Social programs are publicly funded schemes that transfer income or services to citizens on the basis of need, age, employment status, or contribution — pensions, unemployment benefit, health insurance, housing...
Social Media
Social media are networked platforms on which users publish to an audience assembled by algorithm rather than by acquaintance. In two decades they have absorbed a large share of the...
Social Inequality
Social inequality describes the uneven distribution of income, wealth, status, and opportunity across a population. The measurement is uncontested; the moral question is not. Conservatives hold that unequal outcomes are...
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is the name given to the claim that competitive struggle among individuals, classes, or races is a natural law that public policy should permit to run its course....
Social Credit Systems
A social credit system is a state-administered scheme that records the conduct of citizens and firms and attaches consequences to the record — restrictions on travel, credit, procurement, schooling, or...
Social Conservatism
Social conservatism is the position that a society depends on institutions it did not design and cannot replace at will: marriage, family, religious practice, local association, and the moral habits...
Single Payer Healthcare
Single-payer healthcare is a system in which one public insurer pays for medically necessary care for the whole population, financed by taxation, with private billing for covered services prohibited or...
Senate
A senate is the upper chamber of a bicameral legislature: a body designed to review, delay, and sometimes block what the popular chamber has passed. The United States Senate seats...
School Types
School types are the institutional forms through which a society educates its children: district public schools, charter and academy schools, independent fee-paying schools, religious and parochial schools, grammar and selective...
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...