{"id":20586,"date":"2016-05-14T09:37:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T14:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20586"},"modified":"2016-05-14T09:37:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T14:37:39","slug":"a-few-notes-on-burkean-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20586","title":{"rendered":"A Few Notes on Burkean Conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2016\/05\/a-few-notes-on-burkean-conservatism.html\">A Few Notes on Burkean Conservatism<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Several times recently, in posts on this blog discussing the vagaries of current American politics, I\u2019ve had occasion to reference my own political philosophy by name. This has caused a certain amount of confusion and curiosity, because the moniker I mentioned\u2014\u201cmoderate Burkean conservative\u201d\u2014falls nowhere on the narrow range of political opinions allowed into our collective discourse these days.<\/p>\n<p>Now of course a good part of the confusion arises because the word \u201cconservative\u201d no longer means what it once meant\u2014that is to say, a person who wants to conserve something. In today\u2019s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate.\u00a0\u00a0The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon. Putting meaning back into the words can be a risky proposition, in turn, because so many Americans are used to waving them about as arbitrary noises linked to an assortment of vague emotions, the common currency of what passes for thought in so much of modern American life.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, I think the risk is worth taking, if only because a genuine conservatism\u2014that is, a point of view oriented toward finding things worth conserving, and then doing something to conserve them\u2014is one of the few options that offer any workable strategies for the future as the United States accelerates along the overfamiliar trajectory of a democracy in terminal crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s start with the least familiar of the terms I mentioned above, \u201cBurkean.\u201d The reference is to the Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797), generally considered the founder of the Anglo-American conservative tradition.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Few Notes on Burkean Conservatism Several times recently, in posts on this blog discussing the vagaries of current American politics, I\u2019ve had occasion to reference my own political philosophy by name. This has caused a certain amount of confusion and curiosity, because the moniker I mentioned\u2014\u201cmoderate Burkean conservative\u201d\u2014falls nowhere on the narrow range of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3463,13803,157,13804,1758,2957,482],"class_list":["post-20586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-archdruid-report","tag-burkean-conservatism","tag-conservatism","tag-edmund-burke","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-kleptocracy","tag-liberalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20587,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20586\/revisions\/20587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}