I'm Thinking About Writing A Series on Traditional Conservatism

The term "conservative" has largely lost any meaning in the modern age. Conservatism used to be a coherent philosophy. I guess it is just in the nature of the thing that it must erode as times change.

Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and John Ruskin were of a different era than we are. They were of an era when industrialization and capitalism were just getting underway. They admired the beauty of the Gothic era, the simplicity of the Late Middle Ages. They saw religious natural law theory as the moral foundation upon which a good society must be built. They admired agrarianism and could see farming as a spiritual practice. They saw all art as a re-creation of divine creation. They saw the emergence of consumerism, urbanism, centralization, and the division of labor as a tragedy. The division of labor fragments the human mind, keeping one from becoming a well-rounded individual. While they praised the individual, they thought that an individual could be nothing without community. That was the mindset of traditional conservatism. The anti-materialism, anti-consumerism, and anti-industrialism of the traditional conservatives gives them some common ground with anti-capitalists, such as distributists, socialists, and anarchists. To some extent, I might even venture to claim that distributists and the Catholic Workers are the last traditional conservatives, as paradoxical as that may seem since these groups seem so "liberal" by modern conservative standards.

Modern conservatism is quite different, having nothing in common with traditional conservatism. The conservatism of Donald Trump doesn't praise the distributive justice and elegance of the Late Middle Ages but looks back to the era of Jim Crow as "the good ole days." Modern conservatives might not openly admit as much, but their "good ole days" is the 1950s and 60s and maybe a little of the 80s, time periods that really weren't good for minorities. Modern times have seen the total fragmentation of conservatism, so that conservatives no longer know what they want to conserve—they don't know what they stand for, they only know that they stand against progressives and liberals, whatever the hell that means! As for modern conservatism, damn it all to hell! The old traditional conservatism, however, is a movement I can respect, even though I cannot agree with it. Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Richard M. Weaver, and John Ruskin are the kind of conservatives that I can respect. I think, perhaps, that Francis Schaeffer and Wendell Berry can be counted as the last of the traditional conservatives.

At some point, I think I am going to write a series of posts on traditional conservatism. This project won't be happening any time soon, since it will require me to reread some things that I haven't looked at in years. The posts in the series will probably be as follows:

Intro post with background on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas
1st post on Edmund Burke
2nd post on Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
3rd post on John Ruskin
4th post on Russell Kirk
5th post on Richard M. Weaver
6th post on Wendell Berry
7th post on Francis Schaeffer
8th post on the shortcomings of traditional conservatism, explaining why I reject conservatism
Final post on the decline of conservatism, detailing William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol's roles in killing conservatism, and possibly addressing the Trump phenomenon.

This will be a huge task and require a lot of research to pull off, but it might be worth it. This series of posts will be published with the title "Traditional Conservatism (Part _): ..." and there will likely be months between posts within the series, but hopefully it will all come together eventually.

Is anybody at all interested in such a series? Any suggestions about other things/persons that ought to be covered by such a series?

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Update:
Upon giving it further thought, I realized that the ideas of Aristotle, Jefferson, and Madison would be outside the skope of the topic of this series.
This is what the current outline for this series is looking like it will be:

1st post on Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Burke
2nd post on John Ruskin
3th post on Russell Kirk
4th post on Richard M. Weaver
5th post on Wendell Berry
6th post on Cornelius van Til (?) and Francis Schaeffer
7th post on the shortcomings of traditional conservatism, explaining why I reject conservatism
Final post on the decline of conservatism, detailing William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol's roles in killing conservatism, and possibly addressing the Trump phenomenon.