...Beginning with Burke as conservative touchstone, Nisbet claimed, one could readily find eight tenets of conservatism, culminating in a ninth that tied all of the previous eight together.
First, the primacy of religion in the life of any people....
Second, the centrality of the natural two-parent family....
Third, the need to recognize distinctions in human abilities, achievements, and excellence....
Fourth, the understanding that property rights are not merely the rights to own land, but, even more importantly, to own one’s self....
Fifth, that human persons find their identity only in relation to time, space, ancestors, friends, and neighbors.
Sixth, that all political power should devolve to the lowest and most immediate level possible....
Seventh, that laws should derive from tradition, habit, and custom....
Eighth, closely related to number six, but certainly not identical, all national authority should possess “the highest possible degree of decentralization and diffusion of power.”
Finally, Nisbet wrote, claiming that his ninth point was really a summation of all of the previous eight points: “Separation of society from political state, that is, preservation of autonomy of society and its groups, along with the economy, from what Burke called ‘arbitrary power’ in the state.”
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