Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.I first read Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France a few years ago, and noted that many of Burke's concerns about the sudden and topsy-turvy changes in France were applicable to what we were doing in Iraq. Right or wrong, spreading democracy in the Middle East is not a conservative endeavor, and today's conservatives who defend President Bush's cause have more in common with the liberal French revolutionaries than with the founder of modern conservatism. This doesn't mean that they are wrong, only that they are not Burkean conservatives.
When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.
Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.
Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”
Yuval Levin in National Review Online argues that Brooks misreads Burke and defends contemporary conservatives against the charge that they are not Burkean:
Brooks hinges a lot on his reading of Burke, and returns to it throughout the column. But his description of Burke just doesn’t ring true. Brooks seems to want to make conservatism purely an attitude, rather than a political cause. But that’s not what Burke argued.Read both columns, if you can. As one formed by Burke's political philosophy, I applaud and appreciate the discussion of the 18th Century statesman in the pages of the New York Times and National Review. There is some hope for the media if it can transcend the present moment and apply the wisdom of the past to contemporary situations. Now, if only we could get the mainstream media's political commentary to be informed by Plato and Aristotle.
Burke’s conservatism was not essentially temperamental. It was political, too — perhaps first and foremost. (Remember that Burke is the father of modern political partisanship, as well as of modern conservatism, and not by accident.) He argued that a society needed to progress by building on what has successfully provided it with peace, virtue, and freedom in the past, and so by building on the best fruits of its own traditions; and he argued that to do this a society needed to preserve and sustain the sources of its strength.
Burke’s “disposition,” therefore, is precisely to defend and uphold a society’s particular explicit and (especially) implicit creeds (he sometimes called them “prejudices,” long before that word was robbed of its full and complex meaning). These deeply held and widely shared premises are what holds a society together and what sustains unity, peace, and sensible reform in the otherwise raucous atmosphere of an increasingly democratic politics.
Like it or not, and conservatives don’t always like it, America’s traditions are idealistic, and are in some respects also ideological. And they tend to be expressed in more explicit creeds than Britain’s. Ours is a young nation, so some of our age-old wisdom is young too. Brooks criticizes American conservatives for being American conservatives, and thus engaging in their work of preservation and progress with American materials. But it is the strange fate of American conservatives that the tradition that is ours to defend is a liberal tradition. A good conservative, a good Burkean, would defend what is best about it (like freedom and independence) and seek to build on that while drawing also on what is best about our other, older traditions (like faith and family).