corrente

James O. Goldsborough on the Brooks mutiny and the leaky "conservative" ship of fools.

In our quest to understand, to give the word "conservative" meaning, we return to the roots. Edmund Burke is recognized as the first conservative, whose pro-monarchist, anti-democratic views in England would give birth to the Conservative Party. Whigs, by contrast, were progressives who sought to weaken the monarchy.

To be conservative in Burke's time was to defend traditional things – values, institutions, above all the pound sterling, for society's stability was built on bonds. Change was the enemy, which led to unrest, even revolt, the enemy of tradition, of conservatism.

[...]

Our distillation of conservatism leaves the vat almost empty. Economic conservatism is gone, and social conservatism under attack. What's left to bind together the fraying brotherhood, to keep government halls filled with dyspeptic fulminators and the airwaves with angry ranters?

Even robbed of doctrine, conservatives have a unique glue to bind them together. It is the thing that identifies them in every setting and separates them from others. It is the one thing left in the vat when all else is boiled away, disappeared into the ether.

It is their anger, anger at a world that doesn't fit their ideas of it, that will evolve as it sees fit.

Read full article, mirrored here -- What's Left of Conservative Values?
by James O. Goldsborough