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Jonah Goldberg has a short piece in the Dispatch making this assertion. I believe the current mess is right wing populism not conservatism.
But the incompatibility of conservatism with conspiracy theories is more fundamental. One of the central tenets of conservatism is the idea that society is too complex to be easily controlled by a despot or even cadres of well-intentioned social engineers and bureaucrats, or what Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, dubbed “sophisters, calculators and economists.” Burke’s argument was more about the nature of a just regime, but it rested on the belief that government planners, no matter how smart, cannot simply will into existence whatever they want the world to look like through raw intellect. This insight was fleshed out by Adam Smith, the Founding Fathers, Friedrich Hayek, and scores of other conservative sociologists, economists and philosophers. It’s central to every serious explication of conservatism and the free market and every conservative critique of socialism, communism, technocracy, and progressivism.
Last edited by griff (12/05/2020 12:08 pm)