Thank you for that very informative essay. I understand that it is but a synopsis of a thesis, but I was surprised that it didn’t include more about the post-modern nature of post-modern conservatism.

One impetus of the post-modern paradigm has been to ‘emancipate’ people from the ‘hegemony’ of ‘the rational’. That led to (as I see it) ‘emancipation’ from all ‘given’ meaning; not only “Truth,” but any received knowledge became “suspect” (from Lyotard). In the name of emancipation ‘experts’ were derided, if not denounced (a process that has been common to the establishment of all newly founded totalitarianisms). As a result, while post-modernism has provided salient critiques of the Modern ‘condition’, such as the impossibility of objectivity (as a state of mind any human can attain in which no extraneous subjective influences are operative), it unleashed a cultural revolution that tore down both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ with equal disdain for concerns about consequences.

Post-modern conservatism has been built on the smoldering ruins of the epistemological foundations of modernity. While liberals have retained some regard for rationality, post-modern conservatism is an unconstrained embrace of the purely subjective made possible by the excesses of post-modernists in their zeal for the ultimate ‘emancipation’.