Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney on American conservatism

“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom.”–Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney on American conservatism, 1897

Sad but true!

Dang, that guy got it a long time ago.

Amazing isn't it?
Dabney rode with Stone wall Jackson.
After Virginia lay in ruins he went to Texas and helped found UT at Austin iirc

Spot on.

Wasn’t Dabney Jackson’s personal chaplain during the war?

From the little that I know of Dabney and the bit of his writing that I’ve read I wonder if he thought that Lincoln was the original progressive or that he opened the progressive door.

The progressive movement today, has hijacked the term "Progressive" after they turned the term "Liberalism" into a garbage theory that people tired of.
But to resist "progressiveness back when this was written, I think was truly meant as risisting some positive changes.


https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/The-Progressive-era

YES he was Jackson's chaplain for a while.
His brand of Presbyterian ism made scholarly justification for black slavery. He talks of this for one full chapter in his bio of Jackson. A bridge too far for me, on that specific issue.

Nothing progressive there at all.

I think that we have to be careful not to engage in what C S Lewis called chronological snobbery. In their day the view of slavery across the globe was much different than today. It is the spirit of their day rather than theirs in which I consider those men. I think that each and every generation is guilty of one or two glaring blind spots. While slavery is always wrong in that context that was a different day and a different world.

The guy was a thinking man. He stood out in his day. He makes moderns in general look like knuckle draggers.

That’s my take on the issue as well. For civilized societies, owning another person as a property is wrong. Period. Regardless of ‘the times’ or ‘the culture’.