Edmund Burke: Father of Modern Conservatism?

[Selene]

"Contrasted with natural Liberty and natural Religion, the author sets three general forms of government, which he describes with the same emphatic detail as used in the Satires of Juvenal: Despotism, the simplest and most universal, where 'unbounded Power proceeds Step by Step, until it has eradicated every laudable Principle'; Aristocracy, which is scarcely better, as 'a Genoese, or a Venetian Republick, is a concealed Despotism'; and giddy Democracy, where the common people are 'intoxicated with the Flatteries of their Orators':

'Republicks have many Things in the Spirit of absolute Monarchy, but none more than this; a shining Merit is ever hated or suspected in a popular Assembly, as well as in a Court.'

Having employed fulminating rhetoric to dispense with the artificial Political Societies— 'after so fair an Examen, wherein nothing has been exaggerated; no Fact produced which cannot be proved'—the author, it might be expected, will turn to his idea of Natural Society for contrast. Instead, he turns his critical eye upon the Mixed government, which combines monarchy, aristocracy and a tempered democracy, the form of politics this essay's British readers would immediately identify as their own. His satirist's view takes it all in, painting once again in broad strokes the dilemmas of the law courts or the dissatisfactions of wealth, and closes— without actually having vindicated natural society at all.

Embedded in the whirl of extravagant invective, Burke is able, like all writers of Menippean satire, to express some subversive criticism:

'You may criticise freely upon the Chinese Constitution, and observe with as much Severity as you please upon the Absurd Tricks, or destructive Bigotry of the Bonzees. But the Scene is changed as you come homeward, and Atheism or Treason may be the Names given in Britain, to what would be Reason and Truth if asserted of China.'"

I wonder about the underlined observation of Mr. Burke, as it relates to this year's watershed election.

Would, as always, appreciate any thoughts, etc. from this forum.

Adam