What Does It Mean To Be A Conservative?

Ever since I landed in Atlanta after working overseas for nearly twenty years I have been struggling to find my place in American politics. I've always been a conservative, which is both a bit odd and quite natural I think. Odd because my Dad was a Democrat and mostly liberal. Quite natural because I attended a Catholic school through the first eight years and the Franciscan Nuns who taught me were mostly conservative by my definition of conservatism. Still, when I got to Atlanta I started supporting the Republican Party and attended some fundraisers, contributed some cash and talked up the Party. But there has always been a sense of discomfort with the Party and it wasn't until just recently that I got a grip on that discomfort, which is essentially the religious element sometimes defined as the fundamentalists element. Part of my discovery came from a book I recently read called "The Conservative Soul" by Andrew Sullivan. Andrew is said to be a bit controversial, but that has been said about a lot of Brit's and quite frankly I didn't find anything radically revealing from a personal perspective. It just helped me focus my thinking about my politics and I realized that I am indeed a conservative and I'm uncomfortable with the Republican Party because it or they no longer represent the soul of the conservative movement. I'd highly recommend the book and then you can go visit Andrew's blog at www.andrewsullivan.com. I can tell you though that it hasn't moved me to the left.........it has just made me recognize that I need to do more as a conservative to influence the thinking of the Party and to get more involved in order to achieve that goal.