An exceptionally comprehensive and systematic analysis! You show how politics is grounded in the entirety of human nature, where liberal politics are our "better angels" and the extremes either way are our devils -- our "platonic" and animalistic impulses.

Taking the best parts of Burke's thinking, a picture emerges of a political spectrum of pragmatic empiricism in the middle and pathological ideologies on either side -- pathological in the sense of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results -- their visions of "paradise" leading everyone into living hell.

An ideologue cannot be a reformer by practical definition, and Burke correctly notes a society can only preserve itself (avoid living hell) by reforming, which by practical definition is an empirical process.