Looking back, and pressing forward

Often, while roaming the mountains (and I often am ... roaming the mountains!), I’ll see a peak and be magnetically attracted to it, no matter how difficult the approach, as a high point to survey the landscape — where I’ve been, where I’m headed … looking both back and forward to get a perspective on my journey.

I find the Christmas/New Year’s season to stand out similarly unique as a surveillance point each year on life’s journey. It combines the reflective quiet family traditional focus of the “silent night” holy day with the “full steam ahead” fireworks celebration of the New Year holiday, bringing with it the dual emotion-eliciting drivers of tradition and aspiration.

Tradition and aspiration also have political equivalents — the Faith and Freedom Coalition per se. Combining belief in the spiritual traditions of our fathers with the hope of continued freedom to build your individual life dream unencumbered by the heavy hand of government.

I recently found a new word to describe my political belief system — I’m a “conservatarian.” The word is new, but my beliefs go back many a year. Long before I ran for office, as a radio talk-show host, I publicly declared I’m halfway between a conservative and a libertarian — conservative in that I believe there is great benefit in conserving the traditional beliefs (political, economic, and spiritual) of our fathers, libertarian in that I believe government should only regulate individual freedom when absolutely necessary.

Here’s the fine line — Law without liberty is a left-wing, loathsome life; but liberty without law is license to lunacy. Let me restate this without the attempted poetic alliteration. Ironically, a hard-core statist conservatism which enforces moral exactitude under penalty of law ultimately leads to a leftist society — where the freedom of the individual is subjected to the superior interests of the state to the point where every minutia of life is regulated in the interests of the “larger good” of society (witness Obamacare). But on the opposite extreme, liberty without law is license to lunacy. An ultra-libertarian view which rejects all moral communal codes in favor of individual subjectivity about right and wrong is a ticket to chaos. The traditional moral code of our fathers is wisdom and must be preserved.

The Judeo-Christian tradition of right and wrong is the glue which holds civilization together. It sprang to life that first Christmas, but rolls on down through history. Without the moral tradition ... if there is no right or wrong, ultimately Sandy Hook school is where society is headed. (Mass murderer Adam Lanza attacked his own grade school precisely because that’s where he learned everything he knew about “nothing” … The great “nothingness” of a moral vacuum ... There are no moral absolutes … no objective standards of right and wrong … everything is subjective and relativistic. Schools aren’t Gun-Free Zones, they’re God-Free Zones.)

So when I talk about the “conservatarian” balance, I’m talking about rejecting that morally lowest common denominator, rejecting that low point, and reaching for the high-point peak of civilization; walking that fine-line ridgeline where society functions best — the freedom that comes with minimal government regulation combined with the self-regulation that comes from spiritual tradition, each individual inculcated with an internal moral compass — that there is a right and wrong, that each individual life is sacred and must be protected, that the purpose of government is protection of life, liberty, and property; so that each individual is free to work hard and pursue happiness free of fear from confiscation by the anarchical mob … or by government itself.

As John Adams said so many years ago at the beginning of this grand experiment, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

A free society can’t long exist apart from the individual members of that society each being guided by their internal moral compass. Moral tradition and freedom are joined at the hip like Christmas and New Year’s … the holy day and the holiday … you can’t have one without the other … That’s why I’m a conservatarian.

Happy new year, everyone.

Balyeat, of Bozeman, is a former Republican state senator and previously served on the Montana Shooting Sports Association board of directors.