Dr. Esolen in the Land of the Corralled Geldings

I'm trying to type out a rough taxonomy of traditionalist conservatism for a new friend, but I haven't read enough to do the job right. I'm trying to cover Burke and De Tocqueville broadly, then Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss (&co.), Alasdair MacIntyre, and perhaps John Finnis and Robert George. I wish I had more to say about Voegelin and Oakeshott than I do.

At any rate, Anthony Esolen has come up with a way to distinguish between the sort of conservatives I like and the ones I can't stand. Here's the whole paragraph, because I just love it when Dr. Esolen goes off on our culture:

“…I've been on a few radio shows to talk about The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Naturally, most of the shows are what is called conservative, meaning that the hosts believe that there is something they ought to conserve: traditional morality, American sovereignty, some shreds and patches of civic liberty in our nation. I have enjoyed these interviews, yet I have wanted to cry out, ‘Don't be fooled! Detach yourselves from the flies of the day! Read Kirk, read Eliot, read something written by men of letters before last week, something written by people whose long view of history included Thucydides and Tacitus.’ That might not make me too popular a guest -- though I do try to pepper the interview with what my students would recognize as typical lines, as for instance that a man has more freedom of speech in the bar across the street from the college than in the college itself. Still, I'm beset by that disjunction between keeping one's eyes on those Permanent Things, the truths of human nature that do not change, and following, wide-eyed and gaga and breathless (hey, we are all blondes now) the latest chatter of the latest political nonentity. Back in the day, when a William McKinley blathered, though he was a regular Edward Gibbon compared with our ‘orators’ now, he at least blathered in the style of a responsible man of the world, who had read a lot, fought in a terrible war (the Civil War, wherein he attained the rank of Major), ran a business or was the child or neighbor or friend of dozens of people who owned farms or ran businesses, and was old enough to know what people were like, and religious enough to know what to think of it. Now we blather like spoiled and ignorant children; our political discourse is below the juvenile. And ‘conservatives’ take part in it, too.”

In other words, there are those who have some impulse to conserve the past, and there are those who have taken the time to find out what parts of the past are truly worth conserving. I could do without the first group.