/lit/ - Literature

>>11881200
Try this on for size

Post conservative books, excerpts, etc.

From "A Disquisition on Government", by John Calhoun

>It follows, from what has been stated, that it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is, and ought to be the case. On the contrary, its greatest praise—its proudest distinction is, that an all-wise Providence has reserved it, as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving;--nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law—and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow—and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it.

This is corroborated by the blunter Joseph de Maistre

>Wherever any religion other than Christianity is practised, slavery exists as of right, and wherever religion grows weak, the political power becomes proportionately more dominant and the nation is less fit to enjoy general liberty.

Even many of America's rather liberal Founding Fathers knew this

John Adams wrote:
>Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.


John Jay wrote:
>No human society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian Religion. Should our Republic ever forget this fundamental precept of governance, we will then, be surely doomed.


Gouverneur Morris wrote:
>I believe that religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free governments.


Fischer Ames wrote:
>Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits...it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the heart, and on the influence all these produce on public opinion before that opinion governs rulers.

conservative /lit/ discord if you fancy
https://discord.gg/c5Vga4E

Anyone here read Paul Gottfried?/I find his critiques of classical liberalism and democracy to be very interesting, especially the idea that the latter makes the former impossible.