2 thoughts on “The “Good Populism””

  1. “Despite the difficulty of finding a systematic political orthodoxy in Burke’s vast body of largely forensic speeches and pamphlets, we are told that Burke serves as a model of modern conservatism in our own uncertain age.”

    And how. I remember when I was a conservative, in YAF. The traditionalists (or “trads” in the movement) used to wield Burke as a club, in the tactic known as “the Argument from Authority.” If the trads said, “Burke said” or “Burke wrote,” you were supposed to run up the white flag of surrender and slink off into the night. And yet, as VDH points out, if you try to sift through the Burkean rhetoric for some hard nuggets of principle, you tended to get . . . air.

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