Texas Independence Day & Some Thoughts on CPAC

On this day one hundred seventy-three years ago, as the Alamo was under siege by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's 4,000-man Mexican Army, a group of Texan patriots gathered at the town of Washington-on-the-Brazos and declared the independence of the Republic of Texas, choosing David G. Burnet as President, Lorenzo De Zavala as Vice President, and Sam Houston as the commander of the Texan Army. Independence for Texas became a reality when Santa Anna's army was routed at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. Texas remained an independent republic until joining the Union on December 29, 1845 as the 28th state.

The memory of the Republic of Texas lives on in the hearts of many of my fellow citizens, and I myself carry a card in my wallet, upon which is inscribed the Texas Pledge of Allegiance:

Honor the Texas flag.
I pledge allegiance to thee,
Texas, one and indivisible.

Texan patriots like Sam Houston, Lorenzo De Zavala, and Juan Seguin held dear such ideals as liberty, freedom, and independence, but nowadays some - like our current president - seem to think that such concepts should be viewed as antiquated, and thus subordinate to such ill-defined terms as community and equality.

Regrettably, there are even some self-described conservatives who believe it necessary for conservatism to chart some sort of new path for the sake of political expediency. In a recent blog post, Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher criticized Rush Limbaugh's stem-winder of a speech, delivered to the 2009 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), this part in particular:

Let me tell you who we conservatives are: We love people. [Applause] When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don't see groups. We don't see victims. We don't see people we want to exploit. What we see -- what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government.

Sounds good to me, but not to Dreher, who writes:

This is a comforting lie. It is Rousseau conservatism: the idea that man is born innocent, but corrupted by society, or government. Remove the chains of government, and man will return to his natural, good state, which is one of limitless possibility. This denies two bedrock truths of philosophical conservatism, which are that 1) human nature is fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits. A conservatism that is not founded on a conscious recognition of those two truths is a false conservatism, and has a shaky foundation from which to criticize liberal utopianism.

Now I can understand where Dreher is coming from, but to essentially say that Limbaugh is advocating some sort of French Revolutionary nihilism is a false characterization. Limbaugh and most other mainstream conservatives, would not argue that liberty alone is a panacea for what ails humanity, but rather that it is an essential component of harnessing the best of human nature.

Like Limbaugh, the Texan patriots of the nineteenth century understood this. They did not put their lives on the line to prove man's fallen nature and demonstrate that man must learn to live within limits, but to secure the the individual liberty to which all men are oriented from birth, and for which have fought for generations to keep.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Where liberty dwells, there is my country."

And my country is Texas. Long may it live.