We have an all-too-powerful president, warring and dysfunctional Congress, and disintegrating local government. It’s a woeful picture, especially set against the backdrop of opioid addiction, familial breakdown, and declining religious and civic participation. Things are broken, it’s true. But how do we respond to the brokenness? We’re at a moment in which, like the French, we’re tempted to disband and destroy—to “despise everything that belongs to us.” 

 For some progressives, this translates into a deep contempt for the constitutional principles we’ve inherited. Bernie Sanders progressives advocate for a system of government that is deeply antithetical to America’s tradition of limited government and subsidiarity. It’s analogous to installing an IKEA kitchen in an eighteenth-century manor house. 

 But many so-called “conservatives” are also eschewing Burke’s vision of conservatism. In their zeal to destroy political correctness and progressivism, they’ve embraced executive power, seeking a charismatic leader who might destroy all their cultural and governmental pet peeves in one fell swoop. No matter if that requires executive orders or messianic assurances of political salvation.

Gracy Olmstead, "Why We Need Edmund Burke Now More Than Ever"

In Justin Dyer's "Seven Political Lessons from C. S. Lewis," Lewis's political views look a lot like those of Edmund Burke.

An enormous portion of Burke's (and the conservative) worldview becomes clearer in light of the importance he places on the basic facts and character of human procreation, and an enormous portion of Paine's (and the progressive) worldview becomes clearer in light of the desire he evinces to be liberated from the implications of those facts and that character. Almost all of what we loosely call "the social issues" have to do with the dispute about whether such liberation is possible and desirable and, because it raises the question of the relation between generations, that dispute also shapes a surprising portion of our other prominent debates. Burke takes the human person to be embedded in a web of obligations that give shape to our lives.

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, p. 103

Edmund Burke on the oppression of the minority in a democratic system:

Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority; whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single scepter. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than any other.

Qtd. in Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Equality itself should not be a primary goal of politics. Social peace, prosperity, and stability are more important for everyone, and are often not well served by the pursuit of equality--especially because true social equality is ultimately an unachievable goal. 

"The idea of forcing every thing to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it," Burke writes. "It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth." But it is ultimately both misguided and impractical. "Believe me, sir," he writes in the Reflections, "those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost." The only question is which element will predominate, and in a society that makes leveling and equalizing its central principle, the great middle will tend to predominate, overpowering both the rich and the poor. But this middle, especially in a society focused on equalizing, will be badly suited to rule. "The levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. They load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which, by the worst usurpations, an usurpation of the prerogatives of nature, you attempt to force them."

As this passage demonstrates, for Burke the question of political equality--or of who has the right to rule--is even more important than that of social or economic quality. In a society with an egalitarian idea of rule, there will not be true equality, but rather a disorderly rule by the unfit. Because it will organize itself around an idea of equality that it can never truly achieve, such a society will also always be in disarray and flux. The idea of eliminating all social distinctions in society, Burke argues, is a "monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men designed to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it can never remove . . . 

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Roger Scruton on T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding":

These lines take us back to the core belief of modern conservatism, which Burke expressed in the following terms: Society, he wrote, is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And, he argued, only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations. Eliot’s complex theory of tradition gives sense and form to this idea. For he makes clear that the most important thing that future generations can inherit from us is our culture. Culture is the repository of an experience which is at once local and placeless, present and timeless, the experience of a community as sanctified by time. This we can pass on only if we too inherit it. Therefore, we must listen to the voices of the dead, and capture their meaning in those brief, elusive moments when “History is now and England.” In a religious community, such moments are a part of everyday life. For us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice upon which everything depends. Hence, by an extraordinary route, the modernist poet becomes the traditionalist priest: and the stylistic achievement of the first is one with the spiritual achievement of the second.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Prufrock and The Sacred Wood already help us to understand the paradox of T. S. Eliot—that our greatest literary modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative. The man who overthrew the nineteenth century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation, and experiment was also the man who, in 1928, was to describe himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This seeming paradox contains a clue to Eliot’s greatness as a social and political thinker. For Eliot recognized that it is precisely in modern conditions—conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief—that the conservative project acquires its sense. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this fact lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but rather his desire to live fully in the concrete present, to understand the present in all its imperfections, and to accept the present as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"