An interesting take from a blogger on the politics of inconsistency. He really goes for Jonah and argues that Burke would be on my side asking, at least, for some kind of practical reason why gambling is much less socially destructive than, say, private gay sex or (another Bennett bugaboo) watching “The Simpsons”:
Goldberg’s Burkean argufying is wrong-footed. Burke objects to mysterious, metaphysical crashlandings from outer space into the organic lives of peoples. For example, ABSOLUTE RIGHTS. His point: just look how these huge, rigid things will fit in, or, rather, will not. I think this Burkean impulse to reject such things can be construed as a serious (if not decisive) objection to, say, Dworkinesque ‘taking rights seriously’. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the case at hand. In the case at hand, there are certain primary attitudes – ABSOLUTE WRONGS, which amount to metaphysical principles at best; biases at worst – against homosexuality, but not gambling, so forth. And you have folk like Andrew Sullivan taking, in effect, the Burkean line. They are saying: look at how all this fits in with the lives of people. Why should that guy, gambling, be worse than me, having sex with other guys. Just think about it; by which he means, not, ‘become a completely barking mad metaphysician’ but, ‘put these forms of life in the context of “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence.”‘ You will see that it makes no sense to maintain these harsh, humanly hurtful exclusionary principles. And the answer comes back: but we must. These absolute differences came from outer space and crashlanded on our planet long ago. There is no earthly reason to accept them but here they are. So if Burke supports anyone in this dust-up, it’s Andrew Sullivan against those inhabiting a cloud cuckooland of metaphysical pieties about which things are OK to put into which slots, which cranks are OK to pull, which not.
Quite. Burke, of course, was extremely consistent in many ways – and fought hard against the conservative grain in his own culture, on independence for Americans, for example. (Can you imagine what an eighteenth century John Derbyshire would have said about that?) But then, as some American conservatives seem to have forgotten, Burke was a Whig, not a Tory. I like to think that if were around today, Burke would be an “eagle.” And certainly not a theocon.
The Dish 