Edmund Burke and Traditionalist Conservatism

Despite the fanaticism of Breivik, Guillaume Faye, or the League of the South, some of the extreme right's formative ideas about heritage and tradition emanate from more mainstream right-wing discourse. The extremists make explicit what is at times implied by mainstream traditionalist conservative discourse concerning the triumph and superiority of white European culture. To both, the Middle Ages often serve as the bedrock of an “authentic” cultural heritage. In certain strands of European and American political discourse there is a search and a desire for historically grounded, organic traditions that embody the core of a national and cultural spirit. It is in this sense that the medieval plays a key role in the politics of the right today. Yet political medievalism is not a solely con-temporary phenomenon. The Middle Ages have been central to the imaginations of conservative thought in Europe since the late eighteenth century.

So entrenched is the notion of tradition to conservatives that it can serve as a shorthand for conservatism itself; the term “conservatism” implies a conservation of things past. In lamenting the progressivism of academia, Roger Scruton starts his right-wing instructional manual, How to Be a Conservative, by juxtaposing the materialist, socialist left with “traditional values” or “any claim that might be made for the high achievements of Western civilization.” Conservatives take comfort in enjoying a “settled and affirmative culture,” by which Scruton appears to mean a non-contested and sacred space where grand narratives of triumph are considered holy truths. We must be proud of that culture and history: Greek and Roman, Judaism and Christianity, and medieval epics and romances make us who we are: “they are ours … they form part of what made us, and convey the message that it is right to be who we are” (91). For Scruton, Western culture needs no justification or qualification. It must be championed.

Some on the hard right see modernity as a betrayal of tradition. For Enlightenment thinkers, the traditional was equivalent with dogmatic ignorance, yet “tradition” and the “traditional” today can stand in as euphemisms for nativism, nationalism, and chauvinism.