I’m in the midst of a grueling road trip that finds me today in the last place I want to be right now—Washington DC. Fortunately, I get to leave town first thing Thursday morning before the Official Madness Meter gets cranked up to 11. I tweeted a couple days ago that what the Kavanaugh matter needed was more cowbell. We got quite a lot more of it today.
Thursday afternoon I’ll be making a return appearance at Yale, where I’ll be lecturing for the William F. Buckley Program as part of a year-long series I am doing for them on “Conservatism from Burke to Bannon.” This week’s lecture is on “Edmund Burke: The First Modern Conservative” (see description below), which will be a nice respite from the news of the day. If any readers in the New Haven area would like to turn up, it is open to the public, and will be at 4:30 pm in W.L. Harkness Hall, room 116, which is at 100 Wall Street in the middle of campus. I imagine parking is a challenge, so give yourself extra time to find a spot and walk to the building if you come.
Here’s the summary description of the lecture:
The British statesman Edmund Burke is considered to be the first “modern” conservative, though in some respects he represents an Enlightenment-era adaptation of the true “first conservative,” Aristotle. Burke’s legacy attaches mostly to his strenuous reaction to the radicalism of the French Revolution, but he had a subtle outlook that, inter alia, supported the American Revolution, opposed slavery, criticized British colonial rule in India, supported the idea of partisan political parties, and had a theory of positive change that demonstrates he should not be thought of as a mere “reactionary” against all change.
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