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Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 13, 2009
Analysis 2009 69(4):620-630; doi:10.1093/analys/anp097
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A problem for conservatism

Mark T. Nelson

Westmont College Santa Barbara, CA 93108-1099, USA manelson@westmont.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

President Anheuser W. Bush was having a bad day. His latest veto had been overturned, the economy was still in a slump, and his ratings were way down. But that was nothing compared to the problem on his desk right now. It was a doozy, and as usual the French were to blame. Even in the year 2076, with its stupendous technology and permanent conservative majority, this problem wasn’t going to go away. It had nowhere to go. Here it was, the eve of the American Tercentennial, and America had no place to celebrate it, because the last remaining piece of American soil had been sold off! How could this have happened? How would history remember him?

Oh, his administration had enjoyed some glorious moments, especially the constitutional amendments: banning flag-burning, banning same-sex marriage, banning progressive income tax, and pulling the USA out of the UN. These were the crowning . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   1. A problem for conservatism
 

   2. What the problem is
 

   3. How the problem arises
 
3.1 ‘That would be to destroy America, and that can’t be right!’
3.2 ‘But that makes America smaller, and that can’t be right!’
3.3 ‘OK, size doesn’t matter per se. What does matter is the strength of a country, and giving up America's land tends as a matter of fact to weaken America, and that can’t be right!’
3.4 ‘In selling the last piece of America, we have seriously harmed, or violated the rights of, our fellow citizens (by bringing it about that none of them now lives in the sovereign territory of the United States), and that can’t be right!’
3.5 ‘In selling the last piece of America, we have done something that individual private citizens are not to do! Whether or not it is ever permissible to make a nation larger or smaller or stronger or weaker, or even to send it out of existence, it is not for individual private citizens to do these things’

   4. The idea of nationism
 
4.1 Powers in relation to territory
4.2 Powers in relation to other nations

   5. Conclusion
 

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