Of course there’s a long-running conservative critique of the cult of progress – it’s comes from the cult of tradition — and in the 20th century in particular this critique of progress was mostly ineffectual; which is why I’m surprised it’s so lovingly embraced here. One of the great contributions to conservatism made by the neoconservatives was in recognizing the limits of the trad argument in a post-Enlightenment age; neocons encouraged a turning away from the obscurantism of trad con writing and thinking. What is different today that would convince crunchy cons that trad arguments will have any greater resonance than when neocons replaced them with a reliance on empiricism?
