Atheists, agnostics, long-haired winters, short-haired winters, bandwooligans.

I'm the government, hot the government-love.

The government-government-government love.

Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.

I'm Trey Orndorf, a political scientist at Oklahoma Christian University, and I am joined again

by Justin Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Northern Iowa. Justin,

welcome back to the midweek show. It's good to be back. It is good. And so we have been, the last few few weeks started a new series, Justin and myself.

We've been going through contemporary political ideologies. And it's been a lot of fun.

We started in our first episode talking about what ideologies are and how they work.

Last time, we had the opportunity to then get into the details of

liberalism. And this week, we're going to move on to our second ideology, which is conservatism. And so

I'm really excited that you guys are all here to join us for this show. Now, conservatism is a little bit different in some ways than the other

ideologies like liberalism that we've already looked at and some of the other ideologies

that we will look at because, as Russell Kirk puts it, it's not a fixed or immutable body of dogma. Instead, its idea is,

is that communities are kind of these organic bodies. And as a result, you have to be careful

about kind of recasting them. And so the way I oftentimes talk to students about this,

Justin, is to say there is an essence to political bodies

the same way that you might say, well, something's wrong with Trey's arm. Let's put on a better

arm. You know, let's cut it off and put a new one on. That's what other ideologies would do, say,

from the conservative point of view. And conservatives will say, look, we got to accept the arm. What can we do based on the arm that we

in fact have, or on the leg that we exact have? Or as Kirk put it, it is the preservation of the

ancient moral traditions of humanity. And so I often start students and I start people who are asking me

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