From time to time I dip into George Will’s writing to see what the Burkean wing of the Republican Party is up to. Actually, I’m not sure the Republican Party any longer has a Burkean Wing; it may have only a few Burkean feathers left.
This week Will had a piece about the varying rules that the Clinton campaign has suggested for deciding who wins the current Democratic primary. While I seldom agree with Will about politics, I almost always agree with him about baseball. In 1960, he reminds us, the New York Yankees played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the steroid-free World Series. In the seven game series the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27.
Unfortunately, baseball’s rules — pesky nuisances, rules — say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.
Which is why the game is up for Senator Clinton. Senator Obama is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. Clinton could borrow Yogi Berra’s assessment of the Yankees’ play in the 1960 series, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” But let’s get to the Burkeans.
Burkean, of course, refers to Edmund Burke of England. Burke is widely, and with some justice, viewed as the father of modern Anglo-American conservatism. He famously abhorred the French Revolution. Change, being inevitable, should come slowly. More, liberty is just one of many benefits that civil societies confer and the French, to Burke’s mind, were ignoring all the others, which would result either in tyranny or civil chaos. As it turned out, the French got both; no surprise to Burke. He just as famously chided the British government for goading the American colonies into war and eventually supported their move for independence.
Law, for Burke, guarantees the interests of the governed because it is law passed and secured by their representatives. Law is legislative command combined with protection of the civil rights of the governed. Prudent governing requires gradual and moderate reform of existing institutions; suddenly changing or replacing them is a bad idea, as is governing in abstractions unmoored by concrete experiences. (And concrete nouns) It is a bad idea for an empire to slap a colonial tax on tea merely because it is within Parliament’s “right” to do so. Worse is a government exercising its power for an abstraction. Invading a country to bring “democracy” is a bad idea, especially if that country has no democratic institutions to begin with. Our “neo-cons” are not Burkean conservatives. To them he would apply his aphorism, “. . . a great empire and little minds go ill together.”
By Burke’s lights, the Bush administration’s leaders are not conservatives at all; they are radicals. Our Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are free-thinking judicial activists. Originalism, as practiced by Thomas and Scalia, is not conservative; the changes they seek would be rapid and immoderate, supplanting overnight a legal order now decades old. You can pick the first ripe tomato or pull the plant up by its roots to get at the tomato; if you pull it up, you won’t get any more tomatoes. Radicals pull up the plant, real conservatives — and liberals — wait for more tomatoes.
For Burke the real indignity of steroids in baseball would have been the rapidity with which they brought change. Over time, athletes improve naturally. Change is slow, as it should be. It was decades before Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Greg Maddux’s 350th victory is sweeter than Roger Clemen’s. Even if our political conservatives are no longer Burkean, when it comes to baseball, all fans are Burkean; no matter what their politics.
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The photo at the top is of Bill Mazeroski hitting his walk-off home run to end the 1960 World Series.
The Golden State 