Once upon a time I was a fairly conventional conservative. That experience has made it possible for me to speak to conservatives with an ear to their concerns and in a way that has borne some fruit in bringing people to a more consistently anti-state position.

Here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago along these lines; I was reminded of it in the course of my various replies to the Cain and Perry supporters who have stopped by my site. A few excerpts:

We need government to uphold the norms of morality, I am told by people who specialize in the unintentionally funny. If the moral condition of society has reached a level at which we would look for relief to the kind of men who can succeed in a political system like ours, then the patient is terminal. On the other hand, had the churches not turned their attention these past 45 years to lettuce boycotts and excited pronouncements about the wondrous prospects of the modern world, they might have done more to arrest the moral decline for which we are now told we need the state….

Society has managed rather well without slavery, an institution that at one time was taken for granted by nearly everyone, and which many Christian thinkers thought could be purged of its worst abuses but probably never eradicated. I am likewise confident that individuals and communities would not only survive but flourish without being taxed and harassed by an apparatus of exploitation that does nothing but consume wealth and ruin people’s lives, here and around the world; that punishes what is excellent, productive, and decent; and that successfully propagandizes the public into blaming private scapegoats for problems government itself creates. That a supposed lack of regulation could seriously be proposed as the cause of the mortgage crisis was as predictable as it is idiotic….

Grandiose plans for society and the world brought into effect by the modern state – “national greatness conservatism,” in other words – have nothing to do with conservatism as historically understood. It is leftists rather than conservatives who have typically been unsatisfied with the prosaic pursuit of bourgeois life. As I wrote in a symposium for Modern Age last year, conservatives delight in and defend those finite but noble (and attainable) virtues we associate with hearth and home. That is all very mundane and uninteresting to those who would urge “greatness” upon us, but it is also much less utopian and yields far fewer corpses….