Update: Text a good deal more edited than it was when first posted.
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| In the Forest of Illusion. |
My tentative answer (and I very much look forward to reading this piece by @nytdavidbrooks):
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 8, 2021
1. Conservatism isn't what it once was.
2. Conservatism was never quite what we thought it was. https://t.co/gH6pQm8daS
Yes he does. Basically calls US conservatism a moral crime.
— Nathan Newman 🧭 (@nathansnewman) December 9, 2021
Newman, the sociologist and labor-left Substacker who's been influencing my own thinking an awful lot lately, posted a response to Brooks's big Atlantic article on his great awokening, or final departure from the conservative fold, around the same time I was writing my own.
My post was mostly about Brooks's outline of the history of conservatism, in which Burkean "modesty" was invented decades before Burke was born, in reaction to the terrible religious wars in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when they all decided to abjure fanaticism and have governments that did less, which would have come as a big surprise to intolerant Catholic Louis XIV and equally intolerant Protestants William and Mary, who all probably would have thought they were pretty conservative if anybody had been using the term at the time.
