The Aristocrat’s Shadow: Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism-A Ten Part Series, Nr. 3
From Burke to Buckley, Conservatism’s Fear of the Mob
“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”-Voltaire
This essay is part of The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism, a ten-part exploration of the ideas, myths, and moral compulsions that shaped the American Right. I’m not here to sneer or to support it, but to understand how a movement that began with sermons and self-discipline grew into a politics of grievance and spectacle. Each essay stands on its own, but together they form an autopsy, not of a party, but of a moral psychology that still thinks it’s the soul of the nation.
I occasionally wonder when I first realized conservatism had an accent. Not a regional one. Not even a British one. More of a tonal expectation. A certain glow that surrounded the men and women who spoke as if order and refinement were cousins of virtue. I think I felt it long before I understood it. Maybe it was the first time someone corrected my pronunciation of a philosopher I’d read three times before discovering I’d said his name wrong the entire time. Maybe it was the way people reacted to certain books on my shelf. Or maybe it was the simple fact that I grew up in a world where neatness was next to godliness and godliness was next to moral authority.
I remember serving in an early posting where senior leadership believed order was the highest expression of public duty. Every desk gleamed. Every shirt had a crease sharp enough to divide a room. There were unspoken rules about tone and posture. If you spoke too loudly people suspected you were losing control. If you spoke too slowly people suspected you were hiding something. And if you spoke with too much feeling people suspected you were about to lead a mutiny. I learned that the appearance of refinement could often be mistaken for wisdom.
Years later I’d see the same instinct in the world of conservative thinkers, only with more expensive vocabulary. It made me ask a question that’s stayed with me. Why does so much of the conservative tradition treat order as a moral category and refinement as a sign of trustworthiness. Why did a movement that claims to stand with ordinary people come to sound as if its natural habitat was a drawing room.
Burke Enters the Room Again.
Whenever I ask that question, Edmund Burke walks into the room. He appears with that familiar expression that says he’s already seen the worst and he’s disappointed we haven’t listened to him about it. Burke watched the French Revolution and believed he was witnessing the moral equivalent of a wildfire. The mob terrified him. Not because they were hungry or oppressed but because they were unpredictable. Passion without manners. Energy without restraints. People without refinement.
Burke worried that once the public stepped outside the boundaries of order, civilization would crumble like wet plaster. Reading him now, I sometimes imagine him covering his eyes while peeking between his fingers, horrified and fascinated at the same time. And part of me sympathizes with him. Chaos is frightening. A society without any guardrails can tear itself apart in an afternoon.
But the more I return to Burke, the more I realize that his fear wasn’t just about violence. It was about taste. He believed social order was a kind of spiritual shield and that the unrefined couldn’t be trusted to hold it up. I think he genuinely believed he was protecting civilization from a great unwashed tidal wave. And maybe he was. But I also find myself asking whether this early fear hardened into a deeper suspicion of the public itself.
The Founders Step Forward with Their Contradictions.
When I shift my attention to the American Founders, I discover that same suspicion dressed in finer clothes. The Republic was founded on the best language ever written about human equality and also on a quiet belief that only a certain class of men could be trusted with power. It’s one of the great contradictions of our national story. The country that preached equality limited voting rights to those with property. The country that celebrated liberty trusted governance to people who owned the right kind of land and wore the right kind of shoes.
I sometimes imagine sitting with Hamilton and asking him why he didn’t trust the people more. I imagine him leaning in and explaining that the passions of the masses are too dangerous to unleash without the supervision of their betters. Then I imagine Adams chiming in with a long sigh because he always sounded like a man worried that everything would collapse if someone sneezed in the wrong direction.
Their caution came from real fears. They’d seen revolutions. They knew nations could fall. Yet I can’t help noticing that their concerns often turned into judgments about who counted as refined enough to participate. It wasn’t simply that they wanted a stable Republic. It was that they believed stability required the hands of the well bred.
When I look at early American politics with this in mind, I see the outlines of an aristocratic shadow following the Republic from the start. It shaped our political languages. It shaped our institutions. And it shaped the conservative instinct that’d flourish in later generations. The belief that order is noble and that nobility often looks suspiciously like a classical education paired with an expensive chair.
Buckley Settles into His Leather Chair.
By the time I reach the twentieth century, that instinct has matured into something both polished and theatrical. There stands William F. Buckley, perched in a studio with a grin that suggested he knew something the rest of us hadn’t discovered yet. I remember watching him as a younger man. His diction seemed to glide through the air like it had spent the morning at finishing school. He radiated confidence, charm, and the pleasant assumption that civilization could be saved if people simply learned to speak correctly.
Buckley created an entire subculture of conservatism where intellectual confidence was tied not just to ideas but to aesthetic performance. You could almost see the velvet rope. If you were fluent in the vocabulary, you were welcomed as a fellow guardian of the Western tradition. If you weren’t, you felt as if you’d wandered into a private club wearing the wrong shoes.
Now and then I wonder if Buckley realized what he was building. I don’t mean a movement. I mean a style. A way of performing thought that signaled virtue through elegance. People often say he was elitist. I don’t think elitist is the right word. He was theatrical. He believed ideas looked better in a tuxedo.
And conservatism absorbed that performance so deeply that even today I can hear its echoes in how many conservative writers describe dissenters. The unrefined. The coarse. The vulgar. These aren’t political words. They’re aesthetic judgments. Which means they’re class judgments.
The Movement’s Two Impulses Collide.
This is where my own life experience keeps poking me in the ribs. I’ve spent decades in environments that worship order. The military taught me that there’s a difference between chaos and danger. Chaos is what happens when systems break. Danger happens when people break. And the two often collide. Later, in government service, I met leaders who believed authority required decorum. If someone looked disorganized, they were assumed to be untrustworthy. If they spoke with too much emotion, they were assumed to be unstable. If they used the wrong fork, they were quietly invited to training.
These assumptions weren’t malicious. They were structural. They were the habits of institutions that depended on predictability. But they also revealed how easily order can turn into snobbery, especially when no one notices it happening.
Conservatism inherited this reflex. It prized order so fiercely that disorder became synonymous with moral decline. It prized tradition so fiercely that change felt like vandalism. And it prized refinement so fiercely that anything loud or unpolished felt like a threat.
Sometimes I think class resentment in American politics is really resentment against this quiet, refined authority figure that keeps telling everyone how to behave. And I think conservatism didn’t realize how deep that resentment ran until the last decade. The old aristocratic wing still whispers about the need for decorum. But the populist wing shouts over it with the fury of people who were tired of being told their lives weren’t tasteful enough.
In this tension I see the two great impulses of modern conservatism. One impulse wears a suit and speaks in calm tones. The other impulse wears a baseball cap and speaks with an impatience that borders on insurgency. Both claim the same heritage, but only one still believes refinement is a sign of virtue. The other believes refinement is a sign of betrayal.
I’ve stood in rooms where these two impulses collide. It feels like watching distant cousins argue over a family heirloom neither of them actually wants but both refuse to let go of. The old guard keeps repeating that civilization needs dignity. The new guard keeps insisting dignity is a luxury reserved for people who’ve never had to patch a roof in the rain.
And in all of this I hear Burke’s ghost worrying that the mob has finally broken through the doors.
A Deeper Question Rises.
Which raises a question I keep returning to. When did the conservative attachment to order become a fear of ordinary people. Because that’s what this story keeps circling. Not fear of chaos. Not fear of violence. Fear of the unrefined. Fear of the ones who don’t speak with the right cadence or read the right books. Fear of the public, with all its sprawling contradictions and its refusal to sit politely while history undergoes repairs.
I think about how often our political disagreements disguise themselves as moral concerns when they’re actually concerns about taste. It’s much easier to call someone irresponsible than admit you simply don’t like their accent. It’s easier to blame a community for lacking discipline than admit you don’t value their culture. And it’s easier to claim you’re protecting civilization than admit you’re protecting your own comfort.
The truth is that taste and morality have been dancing together for so long inside conservatism that it’s hard to tell them apart. You can hear it in the way certain voters talk about respectable neighborhoods. You can hear it in the way pundits describe acceptable ways to behave in public. You can hear it in the quiet sneer that appears when someone mentions reality television.
And I admit I’m not immune to this instinct. I’ve caught myself assuming that a tidy room means a tidy mind. Then I remember that some of the wisest people I’ve known kept offices that resembled archaeological digs.
Maybe that’s why I find myself returning to a more generous question. What would it look like for a political movement to trust the public without romanticizing them. What would it look like to see ordinary people as holders of wisdom rather than guardians of chaos. What would it look like to build a civic culture that values order without using it as a measuring stick for worth.
Because if we can’t imagine that world, then we remain trapped in the aristocratic shadow we inherited. A world where distrust is hereditary. A world where hierarchy is instinctive. A world where refinement feels like virtue and everyday life feels like a disqualifying condition.
I don’t believe conservatism must remain trapped in this shadow. I think it could evolve into something more democratic, more inclusive, more trusting. But I also know the tension between refinement and populism isn’t going away. It’s part of the movement’s DNA. And you can’t change DNA without changing identity.
As I reach the end of this long reflection, I see Burke standing at the edge of the Revolution and Buckley sitting in his leather chair. I imagine them both wondering how the world they shaped has changed beyond recognition. Burke might say the mob’s grown louder. Buckley might say the vocabulary’s grown thinner. And I might say both of them underestimated the public, not because the public’s always right, but because the public’s always human.
And maybe that’s where the real work begins. Not with the right fork. Not with the right tone. Not with the right pedigree. With the recognition that a democracy can’t survive if it treats the unrefined as a threat. The unrefined are the country. The unrefined build the roads and raise the children and fix the engines that keep the rest of us from walking.
If we ever want to step out of the aristocratic shadow we inherited, we might start by admitting something simple. Taste isn’t virtue. Refinement isn’t morality. And the people who don’t know the rules of polished life are no less worthy of trust than the people who invented those rules.
Perhaps someday we’ll find a way to build a culture that honors order without worshiping it. A culture that values refinement without weaponizing it. A culture where the public isn’t feared as a mob but welcomed as a community.
If that day ever comes, the shadow that’s followed conservatism from Burke to Buckley might finally begin to fade. And we might discover that the strength of a nation never depended on pedigree or posture, but on the simple human truth that wisdom lives everywhere, even in the places that’ve never heard of proper forks.
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Your writings are filled with profound wisdom. I was raised in an environment where being tidy, speaking correctly, performing in classical music recitals, and attending "Charm School" were sacrosanct. This foments rebellion. As the song goes, "I've looked at life from both sides now". I tremble with fear for America, yet clutch onto a tiny grain of hope. Thank you for speaking to my heart.