Today in the New York Times:
When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book.
I, by contrast, read Burke my freshman year, fell in love, and wrote my bachelor’s thesis on his philosophy. One peculiar thing about the neoconservatives is that they’re the court jesters of liberalism and are mostly ex-liberals seeking to make conservatism respectable in the eyes of liberalism by removing most of the issues that appeal to natural conservatives, i.e., those who when they first read Burke found much to agree with, as well as those who are less educated who find a great deal to be uneasy with in the dominant liberalism of our times. Neoconservatives like Brooks may occasionally say something interesting, but they’re really just moderate liberals in the mold of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy. With their passion for American Empire and contempt for much of America’s history, they are in many ways less conservative even than the Democrats of old.
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You did keep reading the rest of the column, didn’t you? Where Brooks goes on to say how he later came to see that Burke had a point?
Neoconservatives have been self-conscious Burkeans, on domestic policy (Brooks’ subject here) if not foreign, since their very beginning in the 1960s. The “reality” that mugged them was the unintended consequences of Great Society social engineering. They understood from bitter experience Burke’s view of society as a complex organism, not a machine to be engineered.
Burke appealed mostly to skepticism (as Brooks mentions) and hardly ever to natural law or religious doctrine. In that one way, neoconservatives are even more Burkean than real conservatives (whatever they are). Look at the neoconservative and paleoconservative opposition to gay marriage. Neocons oppose it on Burkean traditionalist grounds, paleos on natural law grounds. (I happen to find the Burkean arguments convincing and the natural law arguments totally unconvincing.) On domestic policy, at least, the neocons have a right to claim Burke as an influence.
I read the whole thing. But the late education these young radicals obtained suggests something about their liberal roots and persistent liberal worldview. I’ll concede a certain Burkean skepticism with regard to their views on domestic policy. But I don’t believe that Burke rejected a transcendent moral order or a quasi-Aristotelian view of natural law that places certain limits on what a state and people can rightly do as evidenced, not least, by the following passage from the Reflections:
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights, but not to equal things.
And:
But history in the nineteenth century, better understood and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future times the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiescent state, is more than punished whenever it is embraced. It will teach posterity not to make war upon either religion or philosophy for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who in all things eminently favors and protects the race of man.
I wrote a great deal on this subject at the link below:
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/an_imaginary_edmund_burke/
Ploni Almoni – you say that you find the natural law argument for homosexual marriage entirely unconvincing, but the traditionalist grounds for rejection more convincing.
If you concede the natural law arguments in favor of homosexual marriage, you are essentially saying that its prohibition is merely a societal evil that we should tolerate for the sake of social stability while we cautiously work to rid ourselves of it. It’s sort of equivalent to how you might reluctantly put up with the stoning of adulteresses if you lived in a tribal Muslim culture instead.
Also, from a pure matter of tactics, publicly giving up the natural law argument against homosexual marriage is a recipe for instant failure, as the Burkean traditionalist argument holds no weight in the modern West’s simplistic pseudo-rational mindset.
Re Mr. Roach’s reply: Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that takimag post of yours. I see my comment there now, too (“Excellent post!” etc.). I’m with you, Burke’s principles can’t in any way be reduced to just gradualism. I’m just saying that, traditionally, neoconservatives have often followed his basic, substantive principles. I’d add foreign policy too, during the Cold War: the analogy between the “armed doctrines” of the Soviet Union and revolutionary France is valid.
Obviously Burke never rejected the concepts of a natural order and natural law. He even accepted the existence of “metaphysic rights.” I’m just saying that he didn’t appeal to any of them very often to prove his points, compared to conservatives today, for instance at Chronicles. The examples you gave (and I could find more, for instance in the impeachment of Warren Hastings) are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Re Mr. Manley: I don’t concede any natural law arguments in favor of homosexual marriage. I don’t accept any natural law arguments on homosexuality or homosexual marriage at all, pro or con. I think homosexual marriage would be bad in 21st-century America, but not because of natural law.
I disagree on tactics. Natural law arguments are preaching to the choir, in this case. If you don’t already believe that homosexuality is wrong because it’s against God’s law or because it’s unnatural, you’re probably not going to be convinced by any Thomist arguments. But there may be hope in convincing some people who (like me) don’t believe that homosexuality is immoral, that nevertheless homosexual marriage would be harmful to contemporary American society.
The point on tactics isn’t necessarily that you are going to convince the other side through natural law arguments, its just that we as a society only debate issues in a rationalist framework. If opponents of gay marriage were to say its OK by itself but has harmful effects on society, it would be an instant concession, as even most of our well educated citizen are unprepared to grapple with a contradiction like that.
Imagine, for instance, trying to make that argument on NRO.
Actually it was on NRO or some neocon site where I did see the best argument against homosexual marriage. I think it was by Kay Hymowitz (a neocon), but I’m not sure. She said that in our left-liberal society, once homosexual marriage is legal, there will be enormous pressure to stop “privileging” heterosexual marriage over homosexual marriage in the media, school textbooks, government forms, etc. I think that’s a classically Burkean unintended-consequences argument, by the way.
Rhetorically you don’t have to even address the morality of homosexuality per se, and you shouldn’t. You don’t have to concede that homosexual marriage might be OK in some healthy societies, either, though I think it would be a rhetorical plus, not a minus, to go ahead and say so when you’re trying to persuade certain people (moderate Republicans, for instance). You’re not trying to change people’s minds on homosexuality, only to show that homosexual marriage would cause big problems even by their own standards. Even if you do believe in the natural law case against homosexual marriage, you’re better off rhetorically if you don’t even bring it up.
My biggest argument against homosexual marriage is that marriage is about kids, kids do best with two parents, the general loosening of sexual morality since the 1960s has had all kinds of unintended consequences, and the burden of proof should be on those that ask for change, not those that dare to defend the status quo. Liberals, by contrast, think that any vestiges of distinction or discrimination have the burden of proof, a principle that I reject.
I Googled the article but didn’t come up with it. There is nothing wrong with making arguments about the dangerous social consequences of gay marriage and leaving the natural law issue untouched, so long as you don’t concede the natural law point. Since I didn’t read the article, I don’t know which approach she took.
It may be that you convince this or that moderate Republican through your approach, but the broader issue is that once we as a society make a judgment on something in and of itself as moral or immoral, that is generally the end of the argument, regardless of the second and third order consequences etc.
Look at abortion. There’s all sorts of second and third order consequences on either side of the argument, but it really all comes down to an argument over two values, life and “choice”.