The Courage to See

Iwill not be the first to draw upon and endorse Winston Churchill’s defense of Edmund Burke against the charge of inconsistency. As Churchill wrote in his magisterial 1932 essay “Consistency in Politics,” “mean and petty” spirits cannot appreciate how Burke fought against “a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system” at home as the intellectual leader of the Whig Party and yet sympathized with the just demands of the American colonists, fought imperial abuse in India, and opposed the oppression of Irish (with whom he had deep ancestral roots[1]) while, at the same time, fighting with all his eloquence and might a “brutal mob and wicked sect” that was destroying France and unleashing war in the whole of Europe.