Conservatism and Capitalism, Part II III

The Tanenhaus reactions are coming in fast and furious. Here‘s Damon Linker. Here‘s a certain Dr. Russell Arben Fox, someone I’ve never read before, and someone I’ll be adding to my RSS feed today:

The essence of Tanenhaus’s thesis, which plays out across an ideological history which most who have read anything about conservatism know the basics of (Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, etc.), can, I think, be pretty much summed up by the following statement: modern conservatism (meaning, the conservatism that formed around Burke’s legacy in Britain during the 19th century, the conservatism that takes its bearings from the French Revolution), whenever it has attempted to be something more than an Oakeshottian disposition, whenever it has attempted to address modern life as a political ideology, has been troubled by capitalism. Which should be apparent to anyone who understands either the basics of capitalist economics or the fundamental meanings of words. After all, what kind of social order can be “conserved” in conjunction with a market economy that encourages the evolution of tastes, the invention of labor-saving devices, the expansion of opportunities, the shifting of investments, the move to mass production, and all the other elements of that “creative destruction” which bring about so much diversification and wealth (and corruption)? Certainly not one that can be left to its own devices! [emphasis mine]

I still intuitively think this is the seam at which the modern conservative movement will come apart. More soon…