The death of a conservative
I've read Tanenhaus' "The Death of Conservatism" in a bookstore today. It is his expanded (and largely misunderstood) essay in "The New Republic." His thesis is that classical conservatism of Burke and Disraeli (and Chambers and Buckley) is dead, being eclipsed by ideology-based movements that are conservative in their name only. The idea of civil society as the foundation of actual rights and Burkean rejection of ideology in favor of naturally evolving institutions and tradition are marginalized. Instead, various utopian visions of perfection are pursued.
...What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to Burke, who, in the late 18th century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums. Robespierre and Danton, the movement ideologues of their day, were inflamed with the Enlightenment vision of the ideal civilization and sacrificed to its abstractions the established traditions and institutions of what Burke called "civil society." They placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation," Burke warned. The task of the statesman was to maintain equilibrium between "the two principles of conservation and correction." Governance was a perpetual act of compromise --"sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil."
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/conservatism-dead
I must be a dying breed, and it does feel this way. I am not interested in the visions of the ideal projected into hazy future or building the perfect edifice from the set of rigid principles. I do not expect world to be perfect according to my view or anyone else's view; and I do not want it to be forced to fit someone's preconceptions of perfection. I believe this approach to be doomed from the start and find no evidence that it is working or had ever worked. This whole liberal idea of civil life built upon majestic visions and infallible principles is a terrible mistake, an aberration of rationality overestimating its own reach, the appeal of logic unhumbled by the reality check. Yet this view that looks so obviously unidimensional to me, contradicting every grain of my own personal experience, is winning on all sides. Perhaps there is indeed no place for people like me in the future. It is going to be a polarized world of ideologues fighting their pitched battles for the perfect society carved to fit their principles and not willing to accept that the imperfect and the chaotic world we live in is already the work of the greatest perfection.
...What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to Burke, who, in the late 18th century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums. Robespierre and Danton, the movement ideologues of their day, were inflamed with the Enlightenment vision of the ideal civilization and sacrificed to its abstractions the established traditions and institutions of what Burke called "civil society." They placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation," Burke warned. The task of the statesman was to maintain equilibrium between "the two principles of conservation and correction." Governance was a perpetual act of compromise --"sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil."
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/conservatism-dead
I must be a dying breed, and it does feel this way. I am not interested in the visions of the ideal projected into hazy future or building the perfect edifice from the set of rigid principles. I do not expect world to be perfect according to my view or anyone else's view; and I do not want it to be forced to fit someone's preconceptions of perfection. I believe this approach to be doomed from the start and find no evidence that it is working or had ever worked. This whole liberal idea of civil life built upon majestic visions and infallible principles is a terrible mistake, an aberration of rationality overestimating its own reach, the appeal of logic unhumbled by the reality check. Yet this view that looks so obviously unidimensional to me, contradicting every grain of my own personal experience, is winning on all sides. Perhaps there is indeed no place for people like me in the future. It is going to be a polarized world of ideologues fighting their pitched battles for the perfect society carved to fit their principles and not willing to accept that the imperfect and the chaotic world we live in is already the work of the greatest perfection.