In Defence of Your Parents' Conservatism
Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine built the scaffolding of the modern political spectrum. It's all but gone now.
Illustration by Paul Lachine.
In 1790 and 1791, respectively, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France and The Rights of Man. Burke, a British statesman and political theorist, was alarmed by the tumult and violence of the French Revolution. Paine, a pamphleteer and, in modern terms, political operative, was a passionate defender of the European Enlightenment and of democracy.
What’s remarkable about their exchanges, apart from that they set the frame for the political spectrum, Right to Centre to Left, that held sway in the democratic world until sometime in 2015, was their civility. Both were articulate and learned. Both hewed to facts and reason in crafting their arguments. And both explicitly sought to uphold and further the common good. That’s what makes their debate so interesting: It was apples to apples, two more-or-less evenly matched tennis champs tapping the ball back and forth within established lines, according to an agreed set of rules.
As a young man I loved reading Paine for his fire, idealism and flair with words. Now, not young, I admire Burke for his sobriety, decency and a quality that can only be called wisdom. Burke, the father of modern conservatism, was the original cautionary voice, warning about how the tempest of revolutionary zeal could sweep everything good, along with much that was bad, away. Burke was warning, in effect, about the perils of rule by mobs, and the tyrants who inevitably rise to lead them. He was soon vindicated, when Maximilien Robespierre transformed what had been a populist overthrow of absolute monarchy in France, into the Reign of Terror.
There’s no telling what Burke would have written about Donald Trump. But we can extrapolate, based on the metamorphosis that has consumed and all but destroyed American Republican conservatism in the 21st Century. It has occurred at a revolutionary pace that would have surprised neither Burke nor Paine. As with so many great political and economic movements in the United States, it has its echo in Britain and less extreme shadow in Canada.
Consider that, until June 16, 2015, the day Trump declared himself a contender for the White House, there were three reigning paradigms for an American Republican president; Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was elected the year I started high school in Chatham, ON, in 1980. He won a second term in 1984. In Canada, Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney rose to power that same year, defeating Liberal John Turner. Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979 and having routed the Argentinians from the Falkland Islands in 1982, was firmly in control in Britain.
Each of these leaders and their nearest conservative antecedents – in particular Eisenhower, US president from 1953-1961, and John Diefenbaker, prime minister of Canada from 1957-1963 – operated philosophically within an unmistakably Burkean frame. That is to say, they articulated values of individual liberty and merit, patriotism, tradition, community, decency and the rule of law. Say what one might about Reagan’s mental acuity – and many Canadians did, in the 1980s – but a read of his collected speeches reveals a bedrock of principle. Most obviously, Reagan was an American patriot who set himself the task of confronting Soviet Communist imperialism, and succeeded. The Fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire are his monuments.
The diametric shift from a Republicanism that led the world in opposing Russian Soviet aggression and expansion in Europe from 1945 through 1989, to meek Trumpist acquiescence to Russia’s brutal attempt to conquer Ukraine, has been shockingly quick. Even more stunning is the alacrity and ease with which leading Republicans, many of whom are old enough to remember Reagan, have cast aside everything he stood for. Sometime in late 2019, as Trump geared up for his 2020 re-election bid, the GOP establishment -- fully aware of the depths of his narcissism and chaos-magnetism – shrugged. Oh well. He’s what we have and where we are. Gotta run with it, right? It’s either that or get steamrolled by his people.
And of course, American democracy very nearly did get steamrolled by Trump’s people, on January 6, 2021. The assault on the Capitol is unlike any other event in American history, perhaps stretching back to the British invasion of Washington D.C. in August of 1814, when the Red Coats burned the White House. It was, at its heart, an insurrection against the American Constitution, which means the rule of law. Every fibre of the Burkean conservative world view advocates for the rule of law, and against its dissolution. That is why political conservatives from Lincoln forward – including Eisenhower, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, in Canada Diefenbaker, Mulroney and Stephen Harper, have been advocates for the rule of law.
There can be no rule of law in a mob – whether of the Left, the Right, or indeterminate. That applies today in Britain, as the fear of anti-immigrant gang violence keeps people indoors; it applied in D.C. in 2021, as the MAGA mob defiled the halls of the Capitol, baying for vice-president Mike Pence’s head; and it applied in Ottawa in 2022, when the so-called Freedom Convoy paralyzed Canada’s capital city for a month.
Laws, whether national constitutions or parking bylaws, only exist in the human imagination. Like currency and borders, they’re real because we believe they exist; the writing or codification is an afterthought. This is the potentially mortal risk to democracy in the Trumpist movement, and its echoes elsewhere. Burke appreciated, and observed in his own lifetime, that populist enthusiasm can morph into catastrophic mass violence in the blink of an eye. Plus ça change.
But the greater risk perhaps, is in the erosion of democratic institutions that occurs over a period of a decade or two, incrementally, to the point when the roof and siding remain, but the posts and beams are gone.