Charlie Rose

REMant  01/13/2010 12:58 AM Report

Burke was a WHIG not a Tory. He was no more a conservative than Churchill. I wrote the following when this guy appeared on Moyers' show Sep 18:

"Actually Gouverneur Morris made that comment about a people getting the govt they deserve in Paris in the midst of the French Revolution long before Disraeli, and I'm sure he was not the first. But this man IMHO is a fake, and I might add, I think, a typically NYC type of fake. You would do much better to talk again to Kevin Phillips. No wonder he was so excited to get free publicity here. I am getting tired of seeing so many of them on this program, and have explained the social and psychological divisions in politics far better myself in the pages of this blog.

There are only three parties, if you will, and always have been: aristocracy, monarchy-democracy, and republicanism. Aristocracy equates to the Tory idea of natural or historical class structure, and, BTW, they are the revanchists, seeking to defend territory. They are, of course, patriarchal and the family is the social unit. Both the old South and the old Arabs are examples. And yes it is not a surprise that many of them flirted with communism because of its connection to a feudal socialism. C B MacPherson and E P Thompson are examples, but also many of the neo-cons. They were the kind of people who attacked Hobbes and Locke for their individualism. Burke was not really one of them. Rather he was a monarchical-democrat. This party represents the polity created when aristocratic feudalism was at an end and the pact the prince made with the commercial interests, i.e., the people, to finish them off or at least head them off as a new commercial aristocracy was being formed. This is Utilitarian, mercantilist, Progressive (in most respects), and it is what we call liberal in this country today. The last category is, of course, the individualism of Hobbes and Locke, which most of the founders embraced, as did Rousseau, Adam Smith and the Manchester School of classic Liberalism. This sees society basically as revocable social contract based on natural law rights, and is enshrined in the Declaration, and really, when it is properly understood, the Constitution. These three categories have religious counterparts in Arianism or Socianism, evangelicalism, and pantheism. And in psychopathology: paranoia, obsessive-compulsive [actually all neurosis], and narcissism. The current crop of writers about civic virtue and civil society are more liberals than anything else, Fukuyama not much different from Daniel Bell, and opposed alike to Toryism and Republicanism."

I find he had told Meacham in a Sep 7 Newsweek interview: "I claim no expertise as a political thinker, and even less in the realm of policy." That is certainly evident. In addition to Phillips, one might read E J Dionne for popular accounts of contemporary politics.