President Obama's conduct toward the unrest in Iran is in accord with the classical conservative tradition.

President Obama has received no short supply of blows by his right-leaning opponents over his stance on the results of Iran's most recent election and the fallout that has ensued in its wake. The President, his critics charge, has been insufficiently supportive of Iranians who, tirelessly and angrily demonstrating in massive numbers, are, quite possibly, on the brink of another revolution. Because it is "democratic ideals" for which they are battling, his opponents' reasoning continues, the President's failure to express "solidarity" for the Iranians amounts to a failure to support, on behalf of America, "democracy" and "human rights."

For what it's worth, I believe that the President's initial remarks were well-measured, reflecting as they did an appropriate but, regretfully, most uncharacteristic sense of restraint on his behalf. Remarkably — or perhaps not so remarkably, depending on one's perspective — it wasn't his right-leaning detractors whose conduct during this episode was in keeping with the conservative tradition that they purportedly champion, but the President's!

The conservatism with which Obama's demeanor vis-a-vis the Iranians was consistent, but from which his critics wildly deviated, is the conservatism to which the 18^th century British thinker Edmund Burke gave the most famous, eloquent, and enduring expression. And since it was in response to the French Revolution that, to no small extent, the conservative vision with which he has become forever associated emerged, Burke's statement of that vision is particularly instructive for the purpose of observing the gulf that lies between it and the worldview implicated by the unqualified enthusiasm for another Iranian revolution expressed by contemporary "conservatives."

Many of Burke's contemporaries also waxed orgasmic over the thought of "Liberty" — their unbridled adulation over the French revolution was a function of this.  Burke, however, considered this euphoria both profoundly misplaced and gravely dangerous, for it stemmed from lofty and "false" metaphysical speculations.

While he insisted that his "love" for "a manly, moral, regulated liberty" rivaled that of "any gentlemen," Burke confessed that he could not "give praise or blame to anything" — like the Liberty of the French revolutionaries that was being celebrated throughout Europe — "which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." Judgments, either of "praise or blame," rooted in "metaphysical abstraction" are both misplaced and dangerous because such purely intellectual speculations ignore "circumstances" which "give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect." "The circumstances" of time and place "are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind."

As an illustration of this point, Burke rhetorically asks: "Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty?"

Against the Revolution's supporters, those whom he describes as "political theologians" and "theological politicians," Burke counsels prudence — the cardinal virtue of classical conservative thought. And what he says to the French, today's self-proclaimed "conservatives" would be well served to bear in mind as they contemplate the scene unfolding in Iran.

I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners.

After all, Burke reminds us: "All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long."  Thus, it would behoove everyone — Burke's contemporaries and ours — in whom "the wild gas, the fixed air" of "the spirit of liberty" inspires "sentiments of exultation and rapture" to recall that while "the effect of liberty to individuals" is that it enables them to "do what they please," first "we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints."

The conservatism of which Burke's thought is the paradigmatic expression possesses a humility that is sorely lacking in today's political climate.  It is lamentable that for this virtue neither contemporary "conservatives" nor their opponents indicate any appreciation, for while it is false that all instances of prudence are a function of humility, it is impossible that humility should not be accompanied by prudence.  Thus, a humble governor, acutely sensitive as he is to the severe limitations with which both his own knowledge and the apparatus of power by which he governs must contend, will find most unpalatable the taste — indeed, the lust — for grandiosity characteristic of American establishmentarians (whether professional politicians or otherwise). 

Be it a sweeping nation-building project carried out in the Middle East for the ostensible purpose of bringing to fruition the ideals of "Democracy" and "Human Rights"; the nationalization of significant swaths of the private sector here at home in the name of the same goals; or the redistribution of material goods for the sake of achieving "fairness" or "equality," the proponent of a politics of humility will have none of it.  All such attempts to construct a tower of Babel, he well knows, by reason of the Pride that motivates them, are destined to fail, for Pride, blinding the prideful to their limitations, engenders within them a recklessness that promises that success will remain forever elusive.

Humility is a distinctively religious value.  Most of the world's great religious traditions affirm it, and the dominant religious tradition of the West in particular treats it as a premiere excellence.  The proponent of a politics of humility, then, isn't untouched by a religious sensibility insofar as his disposition in favor of a humble style of governing reveals a prejudice against what could be and has been regarded as a proclivity for idolatry on the part of his counterparts.

By seeking to rid the world of evil, whether through an overambitious military effort to make "Democracy" a reality in historically non-democratic nations, or overambitious domestic policies intended to make "Democracy" a more "perfect" reality here at home, those on the Right and Left betray a confidence in their abilities to remake the world in their own image that is excessive to the point of being idolatrous, for the pursuit of such utopian projects, supposing as they do that human beings have both the knowledge, the power, and the authority to make the universe conform to their expectations, is appropriate for gods, not men.

The great eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had noted that just because an action is in accord with duty, this doesn't mean that it was done for the sake of duty. Similarly, while President Obama's conduct toward the unrest in Iran is in accord with the classical conservative tradition, with its endorsement of a politics of humility, it is certainly not undertaken for the sake of that tradition. The President has, or had, his own reasons for his blatantly atypical self-restraint.

In reality, however, Obama personifies the antithesis of a politics of humility. Unfortunately, while the vast majority of our contemporary "conservatives" take issue with the specific purposes in the service of which he's enlisted his politics — a politics of "pride" or "idolatry" — their own alternative proposals much more often than not reflect that same style of politics.