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“Trump supporters call for revolution after guilty verdict” ran the news headline as backers of the 45th United States president voiced their anger at the outcome last week of his hush-money trial. Clearly, they haven’t been reading their Edmund Burke.
The 18th-century Irish political philosopher and statesman is best known for his essays against the French Revolution but he is also a thinker frequently associated, rightly or wrongly, with The Donald.
The media mogul Conrad Black, who wrote a biography of Trump and considers him a friend, has drawn parallels between “Burkean Toryism and Trump’s popular conservatism”. From a different vantage point, left-wing author Corey Robin lumps Burke and Trump together as exemplars of “The Reactionary Mind”.
Burke was born in Dublin to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother (who was related to the famed educator Nano Nagle). The richness and variety of his thought – encompassing science, arts and politics – has made him ripe for being co-opted for different ideologies. Frequently he is labelled “the father of conservatism” but this side of him is “over-egged”, according to Ross Carroll, assistant professor of politics at Dublin City University.
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Burke was “retroactively enlisted” for conservatism – a 19th century ideology – and “would not have recognised the term”, says Carroll, who is author of a newly published book Edmund Burke (Polity). “He was a child of the Enlightenment who very much believed in change. He was a moderniser.”
Burke opposed the French Revolution not because he wished to keep the status quo but rather because he saw such violent rebellion as “anti-progressive”, Carroll adds. “He predicts, in the case of France, that if you do get rid of all these institutions and create a vacuum it will end in military dictatorship – and he is not wrong about that. He dies before the rise of Napoleon but he sees that on the horizon.”
Carroll identifies three criteria Burke uses to judge whether or not to bring about change:
1 Is the timing right? “One of the misconceptions about Burke is that he is just in favour of gradualism and slowness.” However, in some cases Burke believes early and “more aggressive” reform is better. “If you think about where we are with climate change and the drastic measures governments are having to contemplate – and we are already seeing backlash – Burke would say you should really have been more aggressive about this 20 years ago; then you might not be in a position where you have to push so aggressively now.”
2 Is there joined-up thinking? “He has a holistic approach to reform. By that he means, if you become fixated on a single issue, or a single abuse that you’re trying to rectify, that can cause you to lose sight of the knock-on effects when your reform is implemented.” For example, there was a push in the 1780s for more regular parliaments in Britain, with some arguing for annual elections, but Burke believed a high turnover of MPs would lead to a loss of institutional knowledge and a weaker legislature.
3 What are the long-term consequences? “He didn’t think politics was about implementing an ideal theory, or blueprint, where you decide what an ideal society looks like and then work towards that. For him, it was: What are the effects of the reform in the society you’re in now?”
Carroll says: “He is really resistant to what I call generational narcissism, where you think your generation is the one that is enlightened and has all the answers, and disregards everything that has gone before as outmoded and also doesn’t really think about what happens for future generations.
“He anticipates what is sometimes now called cathedral thinking – projects that span generations, and thinking about whatever your contribution is as an individual in society towards a long-term goal that you will never see yourself but which future generations can hope to see.”
In this manner, Burke helps us to evaluate what it means to be, not only conservative but also, radical today.
The idea that revolution is required to tackle injustice used to be a leftist principle. But nowadays calls for tearing down the institutions of state and society – in Ireland and internationally – come mainly from the extreme right.
For Burke, the key consideration is rationality rather than ideology. Informed by a scientific outlook, “he sees, in institutions, repositories of knowledge that are accumulated over time”, Carroll says.
“He believes progress is advanced collectively and the stock of reason in any individual is small – and this is why individuals have to draw on the bank and capital of nations and ages. That’s why tearing down institutions is anti-progressive.
“He says at one point early in his career: The individual is foolish but the species is wise, and the wisdom of the species is made known or manifest only over several generations.”
Burke’s message is not only calming. It has a hopeful air and encourages us to trust people’s intelligence in the long run. Buffoonery is commonplace in the political sphere but collectively we’re not such a bad lot.