No Whining

Published April 8, 2016 7:00am ET



If you’re a conservative, you admire Edmund Burke—and you may recall this passage—a bit hyperbolic perhaps, but stirring and powerful:

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Thus Burke in 1790, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. At that very time, the American rebels of 1776, by contrast with their French successors, were vindicating their revolution by becoming Founders of a successful experiment in self-government. It has always been the claim of American conservatives that here, on this side of the Atlantic, glory is not extinguished, the spirit of an exalted freedom is not dead, and manly sentiment and heroic enterprise remain possible, consistent (if in some tension) with the principles and practice of a modern republic.

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