The revolutionaries thought reason alone explained everything. Burke, on the other hand, argued that society needed to progress slowly, listening to the wisdom of the ancients. One could actually borrow from Wolfe and call this the impossibility of liberalism. The ranks of the Left are overflowing with people who believe in what they call monocausal explanations. Race, class, gender, whatever, are the lenses through which so many on the left see the whole history of humankind.
Conservatives are very good at saying that s stupid.
There s no contradiction or hypocrisy to be found in the fact that we can t come up with our own versions of race, class, gender, etc. Anti-enlightenment conservatives believed in such bunk and we threw it overboard. As for Wolfe s assertion that conservatism is a failure because it didn t come up with a bunch of right-wing government programs, there s not much to say. It s sort of like arguing that if football were really as good as baseball, quarterbacks would score a lot more home runs. Conservatism is not about coming up with new government programs, in the same way that it s not about coming up with new grand explanations of the universe.