I guess I do not understand the centrality of Edmund Burke whenever a discussion arises concerning the meaning of conservatism. Maybe it is because I am much more interested in the meaning of Republicanism than any malleable ideological underpinning. As I see it, in a country with a basic two-party structure, there will be one party that caters primarily to the workers and wage earners, and one party that caters to the employers and financiers. And, in a representative system of government, the employers and financiers will always be outnumbered, which means that they will always have to divine some strategy for peeling off a significant subset of the workers and wage earners.
I guess I should amend this construct to take into account our country’s history of regional factionalism. For most of our history, for example, the South has operated with a one-party system rather than a two-party system. From the Civil War until the Civil Rights Movement, the South was monolithically Democratic, not because it took the side of the workers and wage-earners, but because it opposed black autonomy and equal citizenship. More recently, it has been monolithically Republican because it opposes the federal government’s role in protecting black civil rights and in redistributing wealth to the minority underclass.
But this phenomenon is precisely what the employers and financiers took advantage of in building the modern conservative movement. It is the melding of the anti-regulatory and anti-tax interests of the employer class with the anti-federal government sentiments of the embittered South that has given the Republican Party the numbers it needs to be a viable national party. What put them over the top was their ability to extend the Embittered Coalition to include white working class voters outside of the South. The only other part of the coalition is the high-paid white collar workers who are not technically employers, but who feel themselves to be part of their class.
So, for me, conservatism isn’t some coherent ideology that cares about tradition so much as it is a conglomerate of interests cobbled together to make a majority. What is going on right now is that the Embittered Caucus is asserting itself and taking control of the Republican Party at the expense of the financiers who put the coalition together.
Conservatism is basically a construct rather than an ideology, but insofar as it has a mind of its own and real interests, it is not wedded to any particular political party. When its interests were best served in a monolithic southern Democratic Party, that is where it stayed. When its interests were better served by joining itself by the hip to Wall Street, it moved over to the GOP. It is the latter condition that we understand as the modern Conservative Movement. It’s a mistake to think of conservatism as something that applies to the employer class, except as the employer class binds itself to conservatism to advance its interests.
If the conservative id actually succeeds in capturing the Republican Party from the financiers, that will be a new development, because the Republican Party, since its inception, has always been the vehicle for advancing the interests of the financiers. If they lose their vehicle, they will either move over to the Democrats or be forced to build a new vehicle.
In any case, discussion of Edmund Burke just strikes me as impertinent.
