LETTER


*Editor's Note: This letter has been published exactly as submitted with no changes.

David Iverson’s recent Open Range Record piece, “Wyoming Conservatism Is a Knockoff Stetson That Will Never Be the Real Thing,” gave me a lot to think about. I found myself agreeing with him at several points. But I kept coming back to his central premise: conservatism does not somehow change when it crosses the Wyoming border.

I think it does.

That does not mean words have no meaning. It does not mean politicians can take any policy they want, slap the word “conservative” on it, add “Wyoming values” to the press release, and suddenly make it so. Iverson makes a fair point that a policy does not become conservative simply because the people defending it have decided to call it conservative.

Where I part company with him is the idea that conservatism can somehow be separated from the people, place, economy, history, and circumstances in which it is practiced.

Wyoming does not have its own laws of logic. Two plus two still equals four whether the calculation is performed in Massachusetts or on a ranch outside Rawlins. But Massachusetts and Wyoming do not have the same economy, geography, population, industries, relationship with the federal government, or political history.

Those things matter.

I am not arguing that Wyoming invented a new dictionary definition of conservatism. I am talking about the way conservatism operates within Wyoming politics and the daily lives of Wyoming people. Conservatism is not practiced in a vacuum. Neither is liberalism, progressivism, libertarianism, or any other political philosophy.

Interestingly, I think one of Iverson’s own examples helps make that point.

He reaches back to William F. Buckley Jr. as an example of a firmly grounded conservatism. Yet the modern conservative movement Buckley helped build was itself an attempt to bring together different strains of conservative thought. Traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists did not agree about everything. The resulting “fusionism” sought a balance among freedom, order, justice, and tradition.

That word—balance—is important.

Freedom and order can both be conservative principles. What happens when they conflict? Individual liberty and traditional morality can both be conservative principles. What happens when they conflict? Free enterprise, preservation of community, private property, limited government, and local control can all matter to conservatives. Eventually some of those principles are going to point toward different answers.

That does not make the principles meaningless. It means governing requires judgment.

Perhaps conservative principles are better understood as a compass. A compass gives you direction, but a compass is not a map.

It does not tell you there is a mountain in front of you, that a bridge is washed out, that you have crossed onto private property, or that three feet of snow has closed the trail. Two people can agree completely about where north is and still choose different routes because they are traveling through different terrain.

Conservatism can provide the compass. Wyoming provides the terrain.

Wyoming’s terrain is unique. Our state has spent generations balancing conservative political instincts with an economy deeply connected to government. Mineral extraction produces severance taxes, federal mineral royalties, property taxes, and investment income that help finance state and local government. We have enormous amounts of federal land. Our communities are separated by great distances, and many depend heavily on industries affected by decisions made in Washington and changes in national and international markets.

Those realities do not make every government program conservative. They do mean that Wyoming policymakers cannot simply ignore economic realities in order to satisfy an abstract definition of limited government.

Sometimes governing requires government to do something.

There is another side of that limited-government argument that I think deserves equal attention. If we are going to judge conservatism by its suspicion of government power, we should apply that standard consistently.

Government intervention in an economy is government power. Subsidies and regulations are government power. But government intervention into personal behavior is government power too. Government deciding what may appear in public-school libraries, regulating curriculum, or restricting how individuals conduct their lives also uses the power of the state.

A person may believe those exercises of power are justified. That is a legitimate political argument. But calling the desired outcome socially conservative does not make the government exercising that power any smaller.

That illustrates why I have trouble accepting the idea that there is one fixed conservative answer waiting to be discovered if only everyone returns to first principles.

Sometimes the first principles are arguing with each other.

I also think Iverson puts too much weight on how conservatism is marketed during campaigns. Wyoming candidates talk about Wyoming values, family history, ranching, energy, freedom, and local control because campaigns are attempts to communicate ideas to voters in ways that connect with their experiences.

Sometimes that is shallow branding. Sometimes it is pandering. Sometimes it is authentic. That is politics.

Being a fifth-generation Wyomingite certainly does not automatically make someone conservative or make a particular policy conservative. But generational knowledge is not irrelevant either. Someone whose family has spent generations ranching, mining, working around federal lands, running businesses, or watching boom-and-bust cycles change Wyoming communities may understand something about applying political principles here that cannot be found in a quotation from Buckley or Goldwater.

Experience does not make someone's argument automatically correct. It does make that experience relevant.

And that brings me back to “Wyoming conservatism.”

Wyoming conservatism developed because conservative-minded people had to apply their principles to Wyoming. They had to govern a state dominated by federal land, manage an economy heavily tied to minerals and agriculture, finance schools and roads across enormous distances with a tiny population, and maintain communities whose economic survival can turn on forces far outside Wyoming.

That history produced its own political culture.

So I agree with Iverson on something fundamental: merely calling a policy conservative does not make it conservative. Political branding should not be allowed to empty words of meaning.

But the opposite mistake is treating conservatism as an algorithm that produces exactly the same policy answer regardless of where it is applied.

Buckley himself is an interesting reminder of that. The conservative movement he helped build contained competing traditions. The challenge was not simply identifying principles. It was balancing freedom, order, justice, and tradition.

Wyoming has been doing its own version of that balancing act for generations.

So yes, conservatism changes when it crosses the Wyoming border.

Not because two plus two suddenly equals five. Not because Wyoming gets its own dictionary. And not because anything a Wyoming politician does can magically be declared conservative.

It changes because the terrain changes.

The compass can still point north.

But conservatism, like governing itself, is ultimately about figuring out how to get there.

RJ Lennox

Laramie County