It’s difficult on Election Day for me to not get historical and philosophical about the big day. This year there seems to be a lot at stake for people across the country and right here at home. When I consider our democracy I can’t help but think about Edmund Burke, perhaps the most overlooked of thinkers about democracy. When I am at my most frustrated with City Hall, to the point that wish we could have a revolution, my frustration is always tempered by Edmund Burke’s take on social and political change.

The American story is frequently told as one about a group of smart, motivated and even inspired men, taking a stand against an absolute monarch, and succeeding in overthrowing that regime, inventing a new one, and implementing that in the form of a written constitution. However, this popular conception is simply false. Far from being an overthrow of an absolute monarch, the American Revolution might be better named the American Revision; the revolution was predicated on the fact that the men in question argued that they weren’t getting what they deserved under the existing English Constitution.

I’ve written much more about this elsewhere, but simply put, the motivation of the American revolution wasn’t about overthrowing tyranny as much as it was about reclaiming what was due, just like people protest and agitate in our own time in our own country because they feel their existing and undisputed rights are being violated. This kind of agitation is far from a revolution but rather an assertion of the rights due under the constitution and the law; it is an affirmation of the existing assumptions about the bedrock and foundation of the society. It is like claiming an inheritance, an analogy that will be important later.

Burke’s view on rights, freedom, and change is probably best found in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a long letter to a young man who supports the French Revolution. Unfortunately, the Reflections are almost unreadable today both because of Burke’s 18^th century writing style and his extensive historical references that are challenging to track even for someone who has studied English and European history. Here’s a quick summary.

In the Reflections, Burke challenges a mischaracterization of the Glorious Revolution in England of 1688 as being a revolution that somehow elected William and Mary King and Queen. The settlement, argues Burke, was not anything of the sort. Rather, the revolution was the establishment of liberties and the succession of the monarchy, not an election of a King by the parliament. Burke’s view is that the orderly succession of monarchs was inextricably linked with liberties. Without the predictability of orderly succession freedom would be impossible.

The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution (41).

Furthermore, this orderly transition of power was more than a tradition but an inheritance, something that derived from many generations of evolution and something passed on from one generation to the next.

The idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives (56).

So as unhappy as we may be with the results of our current iteration of democracy, it is still our inheritance. Burke might say that if we inherited a house we didn’t particularly like, we wouldn’t burn it down, we’d improve it even if it were at some expense. Why? Because it is something we’d have to leave to the next generation, to our successors. We have an obligation to maintain and improve what our system has given us and to hand it to the next generation in better shape than we found it.

This is why Burke bitterly opposed the French Revolution, an uprising that essentially burned down the house; meanwhile he supported the American Revolution because the founders were fighting for their inheritance of rights that belonged to them in the first place through the English Constitution. It is a distinction easily lost more than 200 years later but one that is still critical to understanding social change. This view is what makes Burke a founder of what we call today conservatism, social change that recognized the importance of tradition, the needs of today, and future generations along with a liberal view of economics.

A Burkean view of the city would be one that would hallow a city’s history without privileging its past over its future; it would value the needs of current residents without shutting out the interests of future residents; it would recognize that efficient use of limited resources like land ought to be incentivized while excesses would be discouraged. This vision of the city would be one that would manage and improve the lives of people today and ensure others might enjoy it into the future.

Instead, our leaders today have a fearful view of the future and a nostalgic view of the past. To them, conservation means burying what we have in a mattress, slowing growth and housing production with rules and taxes. But I have hope that, over time, if we stay engaged with the system we have, no matter how imperfect, Burke’s view will prevail; it’s the only sustainable option we have.