Bookbag: David Bromwich on Edmund Burke and "mercantile interest"

In the course of reading up on Edmund Burke as quintessential "party man," I found this passage from David Bromwich's introduction to his volume of Burke's speeches and letters:

What used to obstruct an appreciation of Burke was his unembarrassed apology for high politics. But the face of things has changed tremendously in our democratic politics in the past decade. The prevalence of leaders who declare, with neither pride nor humility, that they are utterly bound by popular mandates, is one sign of the change but there are others more ominous. Politicians and lawyers together have gone far to set the vocation of politics on the usual trajectory from status to contract. In keeping with that pressure, and obedient to the tendency of all contracts, political interest is on the way to being swallowed up by mercantile interest. The political elite in the two centuries preceding ours kept up a nervous suspicion—if never entirely antagonistic, still powerfully self-defensive—toward the ambitious and increasing power of the commercial elite. That suspicion is dying out at a time when the facade of democracy becomes more and more an affair of plebiscitary temperature-taking and polls.

The one thing that can always put me out of the writing mood is having the wrong voice: when my internal monologue sounds like an eight-year-old's, I am put off. The best cure is to read someone whose prose style I enjoy, and Bromwich is on the short list of reliables. (I like to mix them, like Des Esseintes with his perfume symphonies. Take in a cocktail of Oscar Wilde and Patricia Highsmith and everybody dies.)