“The reason conservatives like Burke – and you see similar arguments throughout the 19th and 20th century – believe that the established elites need to be renewed by a band of outsiders is that they believe comfort and privilege are corrupting: not in a civic republic sense (i.e., people become more private and selfish) but in the Nietzschean sense of decadence: elites become weak, sclerotic, unimaginative, and so on”
