5 November

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he predicted. We've destroyed our institutions. Trump is the current flag-bearer of this destruction, though the boomers more generally are mostly to blame. “What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself. A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it."