elfs | Question: Why isn't this a quote-mine?

Brad DeLong makes the case that Burke wasn't a conservative, and that "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is not the paeon to conservatism that conservatives make it out to be. He says this in response to Jacob Levy's complaint that there are no conservative writers in the 20th Century who can stand alongside the socialist Rawls or anarcholibertarian Nozick and make so strong a case for adherence to tradition as Nozick or Rawls do for their own ideologies. DeLong respons to Levy, saying, "There are no attractive modern conservatives because conservatism simply is not attractive!" [Bold in the original] This is from a usually, sometimes begrudgingly, freemarket economist. (I often think of him as coming from the "Damn, the market not only works, it's the most efficient mechanism there is; how do we exploit it for social justice without killing it?" school of liberal economics.)

DeLong quotes a long paragraph from Burke and then writes:

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its ancestral traditions. Burke's argument is, instead, that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were better than in 1788, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke sounds like Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science...

To my untrained eye, it really does look as if Burke is saying what DeLong claims he's saying. Which, if true, is quite a poke in the eye of modern "Burkean" conservatism. Burke himself seems to be saying that he'd be perfectly pleased with a high-minded quest for the best among known traditions rather than either blind acceptance of existing traditions or the blind dismantling of traditions with only academic theory to drive what happens next.

So help me, oh Intarwebs, to explain how Leo Strauss and William F. Buckley could claim to descend from a "Burkean tradition of tradition."

(Is it just me, or is Burke here advocating a program for selecting good tradition in almost exactly the same way Christopher Alexender advocates the selection of good architecture and urban development?)

(Good grief; I think that's a PhD thesis right there.)