Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Oliver Revilo Pendleton
Title : America's decline The education of a conservative
Year : 1981

Link download : Oliver_Revilo_Pendleton_-_America_s_decline.zip

Preamble. Conservatism, when that word was first used in a political sense, correctly implied the maintenance of existing governmental and social institutions and their preservation from all undesirable innovation and substantial change. In Europe and the United States, however, the term has now acquired a quite different and linguistically improper meaning : it implies the restoration of political and social institutions that were radically changed and subverted to produce the governmental and social institutions that now exist. Strictly speaking, therefore, 'conservatism' has come, paradoxically, to mean reaction, an effort to purge the nation's social and political organization of deleterious accretions and revolutionary changes imposed upon it in recent times, and to restore it to the pristine state in which it existed at some vaguely or precisely defined time in the past. The persons who now call themselves conservatives, if they mean what they propose, are really reactionaries, but eschew the more candid word as prejudicial in propaganda. ...