The sad reality is that traditional conservatism has been replaced, the new Right. People like Harper and Tony Abbott are of the "new Right." You can let Edmund Burke demonstrate why.
Friday, November 21, 2014
Harper's no Conservative. Not remotely. He's Something Well Past Anything Conservative.
The father of true conservatism is, has always been, Edmund Burke. What I find most interesting about Burke and his conservatism was the underlying grasp of decency.
The sad reality is that traditional conservatism has been replaced, the new Right. People like Harper and Tony Abbott are of the "new Right." You can let Edmund Burke demonstrate why.
The sad reality is that traditional conservatism has been replaced, the new Right. People like Harper and Tony Abbott are of the "new Right." You can let Edmund Burke demonstrate why.
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5 comments:
.. well said .. Edmund Burke ..
Pointless to seek a shred of wisdom out of our fragmented PM Harper.. the witless desperate hysterical one.
Nothing from Burke regarding closets ? That Harper specialty? Perhaps some day Ray Novak will enlighten us
Well, seems Lynne Quarmby et al have come from the blue to poke Harper - Christy Clark - Ethical Joe Oliver in their arses.. and their precious Kinder Morgan that emerged from the wreckage of ENRON.. all in order to get the precious dilbit to China via supertankers
Somehow I don't see the mealy utterings of that dark dark bunch looking very good contrasted against real Canadians like Quarmby, First Nations, credible scientists and biologists, angry military Vets and ordinary citizens or schoolchildren..
Shame about that PC Association guy of Harper's, caught trying to vote twice in Ontario.. during the last federal election.. but like the In/Out perps he avoids a criminal record via some arcane compliance plead. That's how they roll.. and how they cut and run, like the campaign manager from Guelph, still hiding put in Dubai or Kuwait
By the way.. thought your list of the Harper creeps was excellent.. but it gets hard to even list or name them all now
One of the interesting things about Edmund Burke is the manner in which he moved from his youthful Liberalism to the Conservatism of his more mature years. This movement grew out of a deep and fundamental fear and misunderstanding of the Revolution in France rather than from some well thought out change in his thought process. Like so many with a Conservative turn of mind, Burke failed to understand that as society becomes more educated and advanced, inequalities must be continually evened out in order to preserve society (particularly without a decline into terrible violence). It is this important factor that Harper and the New RIght have in common with Burke; they both fail to understand that you can't preserve modern society by preserving or going back to a time of structural inequality. The radicals who opposed Burke in England during that era (like Godwin, Thomas Spence, Thomas Paine, Wollstonecraft, Thelwall, etc) all had different political approaches but they shared in common the instinctive realization that modernizing and preserving society meant we must have greater levels of economic and political equality. It is this equality that rightwingers, from Burke to Harper, oppose.
Sal, Harper has no sense of the Burkean injunction to conserve and to leave the country in a better condition for future generations than he himself found it. Harper's outlook is extractive whch is inherently exhaustive, depleting and with real urgency.
Toby, I wonder how Burke's views would have changed had he any sense of the rise of the corporate state and the decline of popular democracy it causes.
Wellll, I'm not sure democracy was all that "popular" in Burke's day. Hardly anyone could vote. I'm thinking of the Blackadder episode with the rotten borough and Pitt the Even Younger.
Mind you, I expect he'd be horrified that the world was being run by a bunch of Nabob mushrooms with no roots.
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