Underpinnings

A review of a review of a book:  Anglachel examines Mark Lilla's article reviewing The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

It helps that there is almost no true conservatism in the US, as Lilla points out, "Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves." Our collective view of human nature is liberal. This is how you can end up with a "conservative" Eisenhower endorsing Social Security because it has now become part of the warp and weft of the (modern, abstract, liberal, rights-based) US society into which particular human beings are accidentally born. Perhaps ironically, the liberalism that venerates and celebrates the centrality of freedom to the human condition is committed to the preservation of formal structures that cannot be changed very easily, lest the space for the enactment of freedom be endangered. The duty of a liberal institution is to conserve.