Edmund Burke Would Like Donald Trump

[From article]
Conservative intellectuals like George Will and Charles Krauthammer are always telling us to read Edmund Burke, the founder of Anglo-American conservatism. Burke (1729-1797) was an Irishman who became a leading member of Parliament in London, forging a political course that condemned the murderous French Revolution and wholeheartedly supported the American Revolution. Burke was a brave and principled man, who had genuine faith in the basic intuitions of everyday people.
The value of moral intuition is the key to Burke, and if Burke is the key to conservatism, as George Will keeps telling us, that makes moral intuitions important to understand.
An intuition is a powerful conviction that most of us feel without even thinking about it, even if we can't justify it in words.
[. . .]


Donald Trump

If liberals were ever chased by a Muslim mob in Paris, they would instantly change their minds, because in the end, reality beats fantasy. But they never risk their necks, so they keep living in a morally superior fantasyland.
It's pretty clear that Obama and our political class don't share our everyday intuitions on morality and politics. Obama has no real idea about everyday people, having avoided them assiduously every day of his life. Obama is a cult elitist, who hasn't done a day of hard work, nor ever served as a cop or a soldier. He is an arugula liberal. Burke would have placed him along with the French utopians who ran the Terror in Paris.
[. . .]
French revolutionaries conducted the first great Terror of modern times, the prototype of all future Marxist, Nazi, and jihadist Terrors. Like all revolutionary terrors, this one was stoked deliberately, with the aim of overturning society forever. Marx's "revolutionary terror" took off from the French example.
[. . .]
The U.S. Declaration of Independence is solidly in the Anglo-American conservative tradition, which relies on the common sense of ordinary people, not on some utopian never-never land.
In his book On the Revolution in France, Burke argued that the French revolutionaries were not ordinary people endowed with strong moral intuitions. They were utopian theorists, like Karl Marx, the Nazis, and the jihadists. They lived in their heads. Normal people don't imagine that overthrowing a political class will create Paradise on Earth. Utopians do.
[. . .]
Now here's the point: Donald Trump is most intuitive person to run run for president since Harry Truman. Trump pretty much says what he thinks, in language that is not exactly elegant, but it's the way normal people talk in New York.
Trump gets his message across to millions of Americans in spite of all the intellectual liars of the New York Times and their pathetic followers. His fans intuitively trust Trump more than Obama, because Trump is just like their Uncle George, the big talker who is really a nice guy at heart.
[. . .]
People actually like him, because he starts off every show with provocative bluster, and then, by the end, he turns out to be a good guy after all. Plus he's funny. He makes people smile.
[. . .]
Most of his audience is not college-educated – which these days should be called "college-indoctrinated." People who live by their wits and common sense can make it in America without going to college. PC indoctrination might ruin their careers.
...which is why George Will and Charles Krauthammer just don't understand Donald Trump. He doesn't talk like an intellectual

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/edmund_burke_meets_donald_trump.html

December 14, 2015
Edmund Burke Meets Donald Trump
By James Lewis