Paine, Burke and the Political Economy

"I think Conservatives today don't often enough make the simple point: that [capitalism] has been the best thing that has ever happened to the poor in human history."

"I think if there's a fundamental distinction at the end of the day about how [Edmund] Burke and [Thomas] Paine talk about their visions of government, it's that all of Paine's metaphors are metaphors of emotion. There's a sense of 'that's where we have to go and we need to progress in that direction constantly.' Burke's metaphors are metaphors of space. He thought of government in terms of building a space for society to thrive. That was the role, the purpose, the goal of government.

I think that difference is still very much a difference between Left and Right."

That was from EconTalk with Yuval Levin. 

The "business plan" coherence and simplicity of individual policies developed by the Left makes the connection between means and ends easy to follow -- in theory. In practice achieving desired ends is fraught with difficulties.

Conservatives, on the other hand, do not attempt the "monumental task" of engineering solutions. They emphasize marketplace solutions, which are generally superior to technocratic solutions, but "arise" over an uncertain period of time and in unknown form.   

Yet the practical "reality" is that in times of immediate crisis, people want established authorities to act with measure and competence. This is the challenge of the Right, who, taken at their word, would have advised against a bailout package in 2008. Given the Conservatives' predisposition do "do nothing," they are viewed as callous.

Here are some reasons why an unwavering Conservative cannot maintain political success in today's society: 

At the time of an urgent decision, there is already a lot of momentum behind the status quo such that one must play by those rules; 

Long-term social/economic optimums are constantly thwarted by political short-termism; 

People like immediate answers and action, even when not well-considered and ultimately destructive;

The scale of institutions in Civil Society are limited and a large number of them are currently the responsibility of government in modern societies . 

A little explanation on the last point -- if there is a diverse set of non-government associations which can help manage peoples' affairs, then shocks can be absorbed with relatively little bureaucratic involvement. However, if the central government has a near monopoly on institutions, people must look to the central government for action because there is no where else to turn. Such a situation requires a Captain of action, a calling which does not suit the Conservative.

This from Levine was also interesting:

"Paine had written a book, his last book, called The Age of Reason, which was a scathing attack against organized religion, a scathing denunciation of Christianity. He wrote it while he was in France. And obviously enough it was very poorly received in the United States. And so when he returned, he was very poorly received in the United States. And by the time he died in 1809 he was living in a kind of boarding house in Brooklyn and his funeral was very poorly attended. People certainly still held close the memory of all he had done for the Revolution; and he had a lot of admirers. But he also thought that there was a great risk that he wouldn't be well-treated after his death.

He actually asked in his will to be buried in a Quaker cemetery. His father was a Quaker, though he was not. And the Quakers, again, because of what he had written about Christianity, declined. Refused to allow it. And so he was buried on his farm in New Rochelle. And he actually was just a few years later dug up by--not in the way he expected. He was dug up by an English radical who was a great admirer of his, who wanted to take his body to Britain to build a monument in the town of his birth. He took the body to Britain but the British government didn't allow the monument. Again, Paine had not only argued against Christianity but against monarchy. And so this English radical, William Cobbett, couldn't figure out what to do with Paine. And ultimately we actually don't literally don't know what happened to his remains. The ultimate disposition is not known. Everyone presumes he was buried somewhere in Britain, but no one quite knows where."