From Kevin Williamson at National Review, The Decline and Fall of the 9/11 Republicans:

One of the paradoxes of American conservatism is that one of the things American conservatives seek to conserve is American liberalism, which is rooted in the Anglo–Protestant liberalism of Locke, Smith, et al. American conservatism is the political home both of American liberalism (which is distinct from progressivism and socialism) and the organic, pre-ideological conservative temperament that is rooted in prejudice, a word that here should be understood to carry no pejorative connotation. Temperamental conservatism is a prejudice in favor of the status quo and, in particular, the local status quo: one’s own people and community, their manners and habits, their traditions, their mode of family life, their economic means and economic interests, etc. This is a conservatism that is prior to political ideology as such and found on both sides of the American political divide, including at the extremes.

This temperamental conservatism often finds itself at odds with the classical liberalism at the heart of American conservatism. For example, it is often anti-capitalist in its orientation, seeking to use economic controls to prevent or minimize the social change associated with trade and commercial integration; it is at the moment industrialist in its orientation, seeking to preserve a partly mythical model of 20th-century factory work, but before it was industrialist it was anti-industrialist, seeking to protect agriculture and craft from the modernizing ravages of factory capitalism. (T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien are two exemplars of this school of thought.) That temperament is not naturally or reflexively aligned with freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other liberal projects, though it may seek to defend them from secularist or progressive interference.

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