The Washington Post editorial board has described Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a true conservative, explaining that his greatest contribution was to defend and preserve the best of America's values and principles.
"Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was despised by many conservatives of his day, helped keep American society from succumbing to the radical ideologies that brought death and devastation to much of Europe and Asia, Dr. King worked to turn back extremism, violence and racial nationalism at the height of the civil rights movement, and to keep the cause of essential and long-overdue change in the American mainstream," the editorial explained.
King was crucial in refining a national creed that became accepted after a long and painful process.
"Americans are united not by race or by a particular religious belief or ethnic origin, but by our devotion to the concepts of popular government and individual rights," the editorial wrote.
Declaring that King had the ability to use the power of language and persuasion to better ourselves and renew the nation's attention towards advancing equal justice, the editorial bemoaned that "unfortunately, we've heard precious little of it, if any, in our national political discourse this past year."
To illustrate King's conservative values, the editorial quotes from a sermon he gave to a Detroit congregation in 1954 that "if we are to go forward today, we've got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we've left behind.
"That's the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be."
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