Anglo-American conservatism is a rich intellectual inheritance. It is a tradition that has been cultivated and stewarded by towering intellects — John Adams, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, and dozens of others. The list of great conservative minds includes philosophers such as Roger Scruton and Willmoore Kendall; sociologists such as Robert Nisbet and Alexis de Tocqueville; novelists such as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton; and poets such as Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. And, of course, it includes great statesmen like Adams, Burke, Lord Acton, Benjamin Disraeli, and … Kamala Harris.
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you” — these are words that will echo into eternity. But they did not originate with Burke, nor Kirk, nor Voegelin, nor any other luminary of conservative political philosophy; they came from “Vice” President — quotation marks for dramatic effect, given the events of the past week — Harris. (WATCH: The Spectator P.M. Podcast Ep. 61: Kamala Harris Isn’t Fit to Run)
Readers may be surprised to hear Kamala Harris discussed in such terms, given her history as a left-wing Democrat. But conservatism transcends petty partisan politics. Sure, Harris may happen to support the unregulated mass murder of unborn children; she may favor poisonous cultural toxins such as gender ideology and critical race theory; she may vote for the unfettered growth of the Leviathan state; she may have even helped to orchestrate immigration policies that will fundamentally transform the nation via the imported masses of the Third World. But her philosophy gestures towards something higher than terrestrial squabbles over this or that policy. She reaches beyond her time, driven by a vision of what can be, unburdened by what has been.
In his seminal tract Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke conceived of society as a contract between past, present, and future — a “partnership,” he wrote, “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” It is precisely this vision that Harris is referencing when she proclaims that “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” (That in which you live — i.e., the “living” — and what came before you — i.e., the “dead”). “We begin our public affections in our families,” wrote Burke. “No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connexions,” eventually expanding outwards to “love to the whole.” Or, as Harris put it: “We know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community.” (READ MORE: The Sum of All Democrat Fears)
Society, as Harris so eloquently reminds us, is an organic, rooted thing. Our individual selves, and our relationships with one another, are shaped and mediated by the past — “modern people,” as Kirk put it, “are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.” Or, as Harris succinctly stated: “Everything is in context.”
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was a polemic against the Jacobin radicals of the French Revolution, who sought to cut themselves off from their history, wiping the slate clean and beginning anew. (They even went so far as to abolish the old calendar and begin again at Year 1.) Burke lambasted the Jacobins for their ambition “not to fit the constitution to the people, but wholly to destroy conditions, to dissolve relations, to change the state of the nation, and to subvert property, in order to fit their country to their theory of a constitution.” The revolutionaries “chose to act,” Burke charged, “as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew.” In short, they acted as if they just fell out of a coconut tree.
Why is coconut tree trending on TikTok? pic.twitter.com/lm8KSAErCd
— @amuse (@amuse) July 22, 2024
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