Constitutionalists are not Conservatives

Robert Curry has an article today at the American Thinker entitled The Trouble With Conservatives that speaks to a problem I have wrestled with, but have not come up with an entirely satisfactory answer. The trouble with the term "conservative" is that it doesn't really express what we are. It meets William Buckley's idea of "standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"," but there is more to it than that.  Curry states that conservative embodies a state of mind, a way of being, that applies in principle do different people in different circumstances differently.  As Curry writes:

The classical liberalism of the American founders focused on reining in the powers of government. The purpose of the founders' design of the government was protecting our unalienable rights from encroachment by people in the government. Taking their cue from the German thinker GWF Hegel by way of Woodrow Wilson, the Progressives instead put their faith in the state. They rejected the idea of the American Republic root and branch. But the original Progressives understood the American people well enough to know that overthrowing the Republic by force and violence was out of the question. So they set out to overthrow it little by little, progressively.>

...snip...

Probably every society and every time has its conservatives, with tenets specific to each society's traditions. For example, English conservatives today might want to preserve the monarchy, the Church of England as the established church, and the British aristocracy. In the same way, those Iranians who opposed the revolution that changed Iran from a monarchy to a radical Islamist theocracy or those Russians who long for the return of the Soviet Union are often referred to as "conservatives." However, to call them conservative is not to suggest that they hold similar political principles or that their political principles are similar to those of an American dedicated to the principles of the American Founders.

Exactly so. Our founding, and Constitutional order was born out of a successful revolution and an idea that the government that governs least, also governs best. The term "conservative" does not describe the people who want to return to living under such an idea. Do you know how unlikely a revolution is to succeed?  Oh, sure, the old order may be overthrown, but waiting in the wings are always those who seek to pounce upon a good idea and turn it to their own purposes. Look at France, and Russia. Look at the English revolution, for crying out loud. No, one must ascribe the outcome of the American Revolution to God's providence.

I have struggled with what to call ourselves.  Conservatives, we are not.  Oh. I will admit to a certain prudence in adopting new ideas.  I was not an early adopter of many of the electronic gizmos that we surround ourselves with today, but I did adopt them as they became part of the mainstream.  As a result, I don't have any old Betamax tapes.  This is known as "prudence."  And when I have violated the laws of proper prudence, I have always lost money.  Every time.  However. while I have that conservative tendency to hold back, to turn a new idea all around and look at it from its various angles, that is not the spirit that makes me want to return our government to its Constitutional roots.  For that, I think the term "Constitutionalist" applies.  I shall use that term from now on.