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"Edmund Burke was both right and hard right. He was as in favor of the American Revolution as he was horrified by the French; he believed in pluralism, modest but necessary reform and the dispersal of power." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/books/review/edmund-fawcett-conservatism.html
"He could be as rhetorically brutal as he was intellectually supple. He had Irish fire and English sense."
"Burke could defend liberalism because it emerged organically in English and British history — and therefore was a conservative inheritance."
"And this conservative defense of liberal democracy is in many ways the history of conservatism in the West, and a core reason for its endurance and resilience, as well as its remarkable success in winning governmental power."
"But what liberal democracy eroded — the authority of religion, the coherence of a community, a sense of collective belonging, home, meaning and security — could prompt far more radical responses."
"Seeing the British conservative who most shaped Margaret Thatcher’s worldview, Keith Joseph, described as a domestic neoconservative makes blinding sense when you think about it."
"The survival of a moderate conservatism, a conservatism that accepts and is comfortable with modernity and liberal democracy, is indispensable to the stability of our polity as a whole."
"But, unchallenged by moderate conservatism, populist or 'hard right' conservatism will be deeply destructive. In that sense, the battle for moderate conservatism is now inextricable from a battle for liberal democracy itself."
