In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes:
But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American conservatives, who in declaring his candidacy for the presidency in 1979 repeated Paine’s words that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” a sentiment that taken literally should be utterly repugnant to any Burkean. Indeed, one way to read America’s own political development is as a progression from the Burkean conservatism of the Founding—which, as Michael Barone has shown, preserved so much of the British legal and constitutional settlement of 1688—steadily forward to the modern populist embrace of Paine.
Indeed, the irony is that as the federal government has grown, so has the number of self-professed Burkeans of the left seeking to preserve the status quo; while it is the Paineans of the right who seek to begin all over again. Needless to say, this misreads both Burke and Paine; indeed it makes one despair for the future of Burkeans in American politics. . . .
I am familiar with Corey Robin's mission to demythologize Edmund Burke and to paint him as little more than an apologist for free markets and oligarchic entrenched interests. But free markets were progressive in the anti-Tory, anti-landed gentry/aristocrat sense in the 1790s, and I wonder if Burke would have had the same opinion of free markets had he lived to see what was happening in Lancashire by the 1830s. His younger soul mate de Toqueville was revolted by it. Nevertheless, without getting into arguments about who was the "real" Burke, I think we can talk about a Burkean temper of mind, and so a Burkean left and a Painean Left. As Norman points out, Burke was considered a man of the Left before 1789:
The French Revolution had been widely celebrated amongst intellectuals, radicals, and bien-pensants in Britain, and many people naturally assumed that Burke would join his protégé, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, in acclaiming it. It came as a profound shock for them to read not merely that he was bitterly opposed, but opposed in terms that combined soaring rhetoric with what was quickly recognized as a profound statement of political philosophy, including a devastating critique of revolution itself. As that critique came under fire—and the Reflections became a bestseller—Burke himself was denounced as a turncoat and traitor to the progressive cause. His reaction was to redouble his efforts, in a desperate bid to halt what he saw as the canker of Jacobinism from spreading to Britain.
To none was the shock of the Reflections greater than to Thomas Paine. He had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776, stiffening American popular resolve for war against the Crown. Returning to Britain, he stayed for several days in the summer of 1788 with Burke at the latter’s house near Beaconsfield. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man, whose two parts were an even bigger popular success, if not quite as big as Paine claimed. There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the issue, while the revolution in France descended—as Burke had predicted—into anarchy, terror, and war.
So before the French Revolution Burke was perceived as what might be anachronistically called a Progressive. Fox and Paine saw him as their ally and were shocked to learn that he opposed from the beginning what was happening in France. They thought that he was one of them, because on issues like slavery, the American Revolution, Ireland, and other issues he was with them, so why would he depart from them on this, the most fantastic eruption for human progress and liberaton from tyranny in the history of the world?
It is understandable from the perspective of 1789-1792 why honest thinkers alive then might embrace the Revolution in France--I'm sure I would have been among them. But can anyone on the left argue now in a post-1989 world that Burke was wrong and Paine and Fox were right? For clearly Burke was more prescient, and his fundamental insight explains also why the Jacobin principle of social change--to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch--while appealing to a certain kind of naive idealism--has proved itself over and over again to lead to even greater evils than those they were designed to eliminate.
The essence of the French Revolution and the others inspired by it is radical discontinuity with what preceded it. The American Revolution was about continuity, about being left alone to govern themselves as they were wont to do before the encroachment of a meddling monarch (and parliament) after the French and Indian War. But the spirit of discontinuity inspired by 1789 defined for the rest of the world what it meant to be progressive, and those who were uncomfortable with the assumption that progressive social change equated with radical discontinuity were forced into the opposition and branded reactionaries.
This is, I think, the key to understanding why the temper and spirit of American progressivism is different from progressive movements inspired by the spirit of 1789--it is more evolutionary and experimental, more about continuity than discontinuity, and at its heart it is resistant to meddlesome centralizers and technocrats, be they monarchical or revolutionary. All progressives embrace freedom and equality, but in American culture freedom is primary, equality secondary. For societies inspired by the the spirit of 1789, I'd argue that in most cases equality is primary, and freedom secondary.
For me the politics of a social social democracy is not about the dominance of one or the other, but it accepts that there is a dynamic tension between freedom and equality, and that continuous adjustments are necessary when there is too much freedom at the expense of equality or too much equality at the expense of freedom. Neither is absolute; both are defined in relation to the other. In America that means that progressives most often find themselves fighting to increase equality, because there is too little of it as the American temper is biased toward freedom.
Progressivism in the late 19th Century through the New Deal and Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Gay Rights eras has been about fighting inequality. In the beginning it was about redressing inequalities in the economic sphere; toward the end it has been about redressing inequalities in the social sphere. And my argument here for some time has been that the American left's focus on social inequality has provided cover for economic elites to push for egregious inequalities in the economic sphere in the name of freedom.
So now we find ourselves back where we were in the early Progressive period. Elites in either party have little problem with the push for social equality, but they are very reluctant to embrace adjustments to inequality in the economic sphere. That's a much tougher adjustment, because it's one thing to fight against relatively powerless old white people who listen to FOX and quite another to fight Neoliberals in the think tanks and foundations, and on Wall Street. They are not powerless, and they pretty much own the Democratic Party.
And so another question arises, and that is whether, especially now in a post-1989 world, the spirit 1789 provides an adequate frame for progressives now, and whether it can provide an adequate counterbalance to the Neoliberalism that has has emerged triumphant since 1989. My argument here for years is that the secular spirit of 1789 was never was indigenous to American progressivism, even though since the sixties it has become the spirit of the cultural and political left in this country. And I would argue that Main Streeters who otherwise want progressive change reject alliances with the left precisely because it is not home grown. Americans are allergic to Jacobinism in all its forms. Jacobins might win temporary victories, but if progressive change is to be framed in a way that can be embraced by the broad American public, it has to be framed in terms more consonant with 1776 than 1789. There is a difference.
The American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution in Britain were Burkeish revolutions because they were about taking steps forward that were continuous with their pasts; the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were Jacobin revolutions in that they emphasized discontinuity and the imposition of abstract social blueprints in ruthlessly top-down ways. It's the discontinuity that leads to anomic, social vacuums that too often lead to barbarism. Jacobin revolutions led to the Terror and to Napoleon's military dictatorship, to Stalin's purges and the holodomor in the Ukraine, to Mao's forced famine and his Cultural Revolution, and to Pol Pot's killing fields.
There are less dramatic examples, and I'd argue that technocracies everywhere run by earnest idealists, the best and the brightest, people who sincerely think they know better and have a plan to make it better. Such people are Jacobins in the temper of their minds. A toxic, elitist, puritanical paternalism shapes the Jacobin mind. Jacobins always think they are doing the right thing; they justify their atrocities because they were necessary to promote positive change, and they can do this because they have the temper of mind that characterized Tom Paine's--they see truth in a decontextualized, absolute, black and white way. Norman quotes Paine here:
Time with respect to principles is an eternal NOW … what have we to do with a thousand years? Our lifetime is a short portion of time, and if we find the wrong in existence as soon as we begin to live, that is the point of time at which it begins to us; and our right to resist it is the same as if it had never existed before.
Is it any wonder that such a way of thinking is embraced by intelligent people of good will in every generation since. But can you also see how this temper of mind leads to and justifies the paternalism of every technocrat from Robert McNamara to Arne Duncan and why both sincerely see themselves as progressives? Norman explains that
[Paine] is deaf to the rationality of existing arrangements and constantly prey to the idea that because humans ought to be able to decide on a given problem using abstract reason—itself an often rather questionable premise—they will do so. . . . He constantly calls for evidence, yet despises experience. His insistence on the power of reason becomes a recipe not for sober statesmanship, but for individual and generational arrogance.
It's such rationalistic, abstracted and arrogant thinking about social change that leads to hubristic policies that lead to the deaths of millions in Russia or China or tens of thousands in Iraq or to the destruction of a localist K-12 educational system whose foundations are sound. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out some time ago:
If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial. And the abolition of memory, as we have come to know in our own time, is an aspect of the totalitarian that spares neither right nor left. In the cult of "now," just as in the making of Reason into an idol, the writhings of nihilism are to be detected.
There is no eternal now in which what is right must be imposed. Historical context is everything. Societies evolve, and so there are moments in every society where crises arise and present opportunities to move forward in a progressive way. And very often these moments require top-down interventions. But an intervention is not the same thing as trying to reengineer an entire society. There is a kairos for such interventions--the pregnant moments in the development of any society when adjustments are necessary.
The 1780s were deeply kairotic for the development of American society, but the kairos then was not to abolish slavery. That moment came in the 1850s. The 1930s were a moment when there was a possibility for the development of social democracy in the US, and the 1970s, alas, a moment when Neoliberals saw their opportunity to dismantle it. As I've argued before, 2008 presented a kairotic moment to push back against Neoliberalism, but the Obama administration failed to respond. But the point is this: How humans respond or fail to respond to these moments is critical, and the worst possible response follows when Jacobins or Fascists with big, radically discontinuous ideas get the upper hand. Better no response, which is essentially what we got from Obama, whose administration's mission was to return to the status quo ante.
My argument here is that the temper of mind that promotes the best possible outcome is Burkean, not Painean. By this definition, despite Norman's discomfort with the idea, FDR was indeed a Burkean and Reagan a Painean. The social democratic system that developed in the 1930s was not Jacobin social engineering, but Rooseveltian pragmatism in responding to a massive, historical economic crisis. And, yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Jacobins in the Roosevelt administration pushing him harder to the left than it was possible or healthful to go, but FDR was no Jacobin.
Reagan's and Thatcher's radical mission to dismantle social democracy after the crisis of the seventies was not at all conservative in the Burkean sense. But neither was it fascistic. Whatever might be repugnant in it, Reaganism/Thatcherism is not that. Its goal is free market anarchism. That anarchy eventually leads to inequalities of wealth and power is common sense, and with that too often a fascistic subjection of the weak to the powerful is the flaw that sincere, Neoliberals and Libertarians seem not to understand.
Social Democracy, if it can be developed in a subsidiarist, non-technocratic key is the only sane form of government possible in a complex, globalizing world. Robin's critique notwithstanding, I think that Burke would have been smart enough to understand how things look differently now than they did in the 1790s, but even if today he would align with the reactionary right, it's possible for others with his temper of mind to develop their own ideas about what the historical moment demands. I think of myself not as a Burkean--I concede that label to those on the right. But I do think of myself as Burkeish, especially if the alternative is the temper of mind that typifies Paine and the Jacobins.