With the hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest the corpus of English and American laws – for the two arise for the most pat from the common root o… - Russell Kirk

And, substantially they hope to supplant the "disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination" by what they call "education for democracy." ...

The very banality of the expression helps to ensure its triumph. Who could be against education? Who could be against democracy? Yet the phrase begs two questions: What do you mean by "education"? And what do you mean by "democracy"? The school of Dewey has long been fond of capturing words and turning them to their own purposes: they tried hard to capture "humanism", and even laid siege to "religion" Now I am convinced that if, by

Liberty, prescriptive freedom as we Americans know it, cannot endure without order. Our constitutions were established that order might make true freedom possible. For all our American talk of private judgment, dissent, and individualism, still our national character has the stamp of a respectful order almost superstitious in its power: respect for the moral traditions inculcated by our religion, and for the prescriptive political forms which we, more than any other people in the world, have maintained little altered in this time when Whirl is King of most of the universe. I think that we would do a most terrible mischief to our freedoms if we ceased to respect our established order and began, instead, to run after an abstract Jacobin liberté — in this age of the triumph of technology, of all times.

The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.