Joyce Appleby: David Brooks is wrong about the origins of conservativism
[The writer is professor emerita of history at U.C.L.A.]
David Brooks has gracefully summarized the Burkean conservative temperament, but his analysis is flawed. There is absolutely no connection between Edmund Burke, who wrote at the end of the 18th century, and contemporary American conservatives. Their historic roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century and the passage of legislation protecting children, women, workers and consumers from the dangerous excesses in business practices in the era of the robber baron.
Then Republicans wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of freedom to repel interference with their aggressive profit-seeking. The religious conservatives migrated to the Republican Party much later in the 1960s, when many Americans abandoned strict sexual mores in the name of a different kind of freedom.
Hardly any American then or now would side with Burke in his famous exchange with Thomas Paine. Burke, revealing his deep respect for monarchy, lamented the treatment of Marie Antoinette by the French revolutionaries, to which Paine, in reference to the suffering of the French people, replied, “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”
Read entire article at Letter to the editor of the NYT
David Brooks has gracefully summarized the Burkean conservative temperament, but his analysis is flawed. There is absolutely no connection between Edmund Burke, who wrote at the end of the 18th century, and contemporary American conservatives. Their historic roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century and the passage of legislation protecting children, women, workers and consumers from the dangerous excesses in business practices in the era of the robber baron.
Then Republicans wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of freedom to repel interference with their aggressive profit-seeking. The religious conservatives migrated to the Republican Party much later in the 1960s, when many Americans abandoned strict sexual mores in the name of a different kind of freedom.
Hardly any American then or now would side with Burke in his famous exchange with Thomas Paine. Burke, revealing his deep respect for monarchy, lamented the treatment of Marie Antoinette by the French revolutionaries, to which Paine, in reference to the suffering of the French people, replied, “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”