Apr 28, 2008 02:12 AM
Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic has written an intriguing essay on the Burkean conservatism of John McCain, most of which I find astute:
As eclectic a reformer as [McCain] has been in the Senate, he has been consistent in his incrementalism. Though he was known to sound hot-headed on campaign-finance reform, his legislative work produced a reform that was mostly modest in its aims and that mostly attained them. He has been an old-fashioned budget balancer, not a newfangled supply-sider. He defends his global-warming efforts as gradualist and as modeled on emissions-trading systems that have already been tested. In the presidential primaries, he showed little interest in grandiose promises.
Where I think the analogy flounders is in its almost total disregard for the one policy to which McCain has been and will be forever tethered -- the war in Iraq. Of this seismic event, Rauch correctly observes that Edmund Burke, though a foe of tyranny, would have blanched at the "[forcible] uprooting the authority structures," with the attendant promise that "a mini-America [would] spring forth." The short way of putting this would be to say that regime change is an intrinsically revolutionary project, and the prescient critic of revolution would almost certainly have opposed it. The bringing of parliamentary democracy to a hitherto autocratically ruled country -- and a non-Christian one -- riven by religious sectarianism and besieged on all sides by aggressive neighbors would have struck Burke as a headlong folly "built upon a theory" and anathema to the hard lessons of patience and experience. He was a man of the law-and-liberty tradition, par excellence, and to him Iraq would have been a darker shade of France.
Burke favored and facilitated the American Revolution in his capacity as a member of the House of Commons not because he thought it was a radical endeavor but -- and here is where he agreed with his future celebrated antagonist Thomas Paine -- it was the timely and logical conclusion to a long-frayed colonial relationship. The metropole had denied fundamental rights to its faraway subjects and thus forfeited the right to rule them.
The revolution in France was different, according to Burke, because it made a vice of abstraction and cant (talk of "Liberty" and "The Rights of Man" being cover for the sanguinary activities of the godless mob), and because it attempted to upend the ancien regime without due consideration of the consequences for the future, or due reverence for the institutions of the past. Also, it was only the beginning: Burke disdained the term "French revolution," which implied an isolated event. The revolution, rather, was now "in" France but could very well spread beyond its borders and engulf all of Europe -- as indeed it did, in denatured or counterrevolutionary form, under the generalship of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose advent Burke predicted with uncanny exactitude. His greatest fear was that domestic sympathy with the Jacobin cause would lead to a similar cataclysm in England, and it is worth remembering that he wrote in his masterpiece polemic in 1790 in response to Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister and leader of London's Revolution Society, which had called for solidarity with the French National Assembly and the followers of Danton.
Well before Thermidor and the executions of King Louis and Marie Antoinette, Burke had observed, "The spirit in [the revolution] is not impossible to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true, that this may be no more than a sudden explosion... But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them."
To the contemporary reader, such a pronouncement prefigures one underlying trope of the current antiwar sentiment in America, which believes the Iraqi -- not to say "Arab" -- character is unfit for representative government and requires a strongman to keep it in check. McCain's paeans to the universal longing for democracy and freedom, themselves echoes of President Bush's rhetoric, would have had struck the wrong chords in Burke's overcautious ear. History and peoplehood mattered to him profoundly, and it was with the utmost disappointment that he took stock of the blood-stained chaos to which a "a nation of gallant men...men of honour, and of cavaliers" had since descended.
In the post-Thermidor period, and shortly before his death, Burke wrote a series of Letters on a Regicide Peace, in which he warned the Pitt government not to enter into a treaty with the Directory of France, which was headed by morally bankrupt men who were still apt for war:
"Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its object, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it. It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured the center of Europe; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious."
Thus does the forefather of modern conservatism warn against his country's involving itself in a fratricidal foreign dispute hijacked by a sect of messianic participants who dream of world conquest... McCain's thoroughgoing argument for not quitting Iraq is based on this same minatory premise, where Al Qaeda is a stand-in for the "sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists," and the grim aftermath of the country's implosion would surely affect the United States.
There is at least one more irony in comparing Burke to McCain. The 18th century Irishman was not merely defending the church in France out of an a fortiori defense of monarchy as being inextricable from divine right. Apart from his general esteem of the ecclesiastical tradition, Burke was acutely concerned with the denomination of church in question. His mother was a Roman Catholic and his father, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has brilliantly argued, was in all probability something of a "closeted" one, too. Richard Burke may well have been confirmed to the Protestant Established Church of Ireland only to protect his legal practice and to indemnify himself and his family against England's viciously anti-Catholic Penal Code. Burke fils spent the better part of his political life agitating for Catholic rights and suffering no small amount of obloquy and persecution for it. He at one point lost his Parliamentary seat in Bristol following the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was the fruit of his singular labors. Burke was also personally blamed by the psychotic Lord George Gordon, imago and populist egger-on of the anti-Catholic riots which swept London in 1780 and bore the aristocrat's name.
In short, then, he was well attuned to the anti-Papist subtext of the banners of 1789. The Revolution Society was after all founded to celebrate England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic King James II was ousted in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband William III. Here is O'Brien:
"This particular combination of defending 1688 while attacking Roman Catholicism hurt Burke deeply, for it hit him along a fundamental fault line in his political personality. Burke was a Whig, and thus ex officio committed to the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the Protestant succession. But at the same time he was disqualified from sharing the feelings of normal English Whigs toward that Revolution: Burke needed to play down its anti-Catholic elements. When the Revolution Society played up the latter, Burke suffered and needed to strike back."
As the descendant of a long line of Scotch-Irish Protestants, McCain hasn't the motive or inclination to wed his philosophy to so covert an "agenda" for the safeguarding of a religious minority. Rauch mentions that Burke would have found more to choose among the current crop of Democratic candidates for president than he would the highly radical movement conservatives who have never gelled to McCain because he is too temperate and respectful of old, if imperfect, state institutions -- he is a "liberal," in other words, in the classical sense of the term. We may look skeptically on this proposition as well. But it is true that the president whose arraignment over his publicly suspected religion Burke would have instantly responded to with solicitude and dread was a Democrat: John F. Kennedy. And here it may be worth recalling the most forgotten point of Burke's biography: He was never a Tory but a Whig.