Beyond Libertarianism, a true conservatism?
I’m taking the pulse of several conservative articles, from the Telegraph and other places. Conservatism seems on the backfoot at the moment, but not only might appearances be deceptive, these events may force conservatism to define itself in a more hard and sharp fashion. For good or for ill remains to be seen.
My view has been similar to that of Patrick Deneen for a long while now.
In his book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argues that modern culture, characterized by the push for individual self-realization free of the constraints of tradition, family, and religion, has failed, and is now implicated in a moral and social implosion. Deneen’s alternative has similarities with Robert Nisbett’s associational laissez-faire and MacIntyre’s local communities of the virtues, intimate communities of practice based on small-scale practical reasoning and love of home. He thus argues for a smaller, more local, more artisanal economy and a return to the virtues of self-control and self-mastery. The view is similar to conservative writers of the past such as Nisbett, but with this difference. Whilst Deneen notes the reduction of liberty in face of the state, he also recognizes the cogency of the marxist critique of the diminution of individual freedom in face of untrammeled economic forces. Conservatives have tended to be big on restricting the ‘big’ state and government as inimical to individual liberty, but silent on the ‘big’ economics of capital in likewise undermining the senses of belonging and community human beings require for a free and fulfilling life.
Deneen thus marks out a future for conservatism that is more than a mere apologetics for economic power in the name of freedom. That ideological project is implicated in the great moral, social, and ecological unravelling underway and has been found out. Conservatism sold its political soul to private economic power and individualism as socialism sold its political soul to culture and ideology and collectivism.
The conflict between conservatism and socialism here is a proxy war. At the heart of this is shadow boxing is liberalism, with politics taking the form of libertarians of the right vs. libertarians on the left – ‘free’ economics vs. ‘free’ culture. At the same time, the impossibilities of such libertarianism, detached it is in both aspects from essential social and moral realities, forces recourse to authoritarianism in practice. Both sides can only secure their impossible ends via the collectivist imposition of state, law, and regulation.
Deneen argues that liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering an extreme material inequality that divides society from within and rents it apart; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of the privatism of self-choosing individuals; it advances individual autonomy, but delivers the most extensive and comprehensive state system in human history. The commitment to ‘small government’ in the name of individual liberty has issued in the biggest state in history – and the explanation of the paradox lies here. Deneen warns that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure. In fine, Deneen’s argument reads like a conservative rendition of Marx’s alienation thesis. For Marx, those centripetal forces were the social powers of human beings in alien forms – ‘the abstraction of the political state’ (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State) and capital. In my doctoral work on Marx, I argued for a reappraisal of Marx as a social-ist, seeking to restitute power alienated to overarching forms and institutions to the social body and organizing that power as a social power. That self-organization was to be undertaken on the part of citizens exercising a co-responsibility which combined individual and communal effort. As such, my reading brought Marx much closer to Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ and Tocqueville’s intermediary associations than it did to Communism and Social Democracy and the ‘state socialist’ tradition. I emphasized Marx’s critique of the alien state and his demand for the dissolution of alien power into the self-mediating forms of society.
In defending my thesis, it was suggested to me that I had made Marx ‘sound like a conservative.’ The theme of social self-governance is strong in Marx. His work is full of organic metaphors. Beneath his emphasis on political revolution is an awareness of socio-economic evolution. In retrospect, it seems that I was attempting to do from the Left what Patrick Deneen is now doing from the Right – recover sociality, solidarity, and publicity from within the alienating and abstracting tendencies of liberal modernity.
Which approach offers the greater potentialities for restoring moral and social health – and political health seeing as these are the conditions for a genuine public life – can be debated. The greatest weakness of Marx, as Robert Nisbett argued in The Quest for Community, is to have rested unity and commonality on the most ephemeral and transitory of ties – economic self- and sectional interest. Sociality and solidarity need to be grounded in more enduring forms, bringing people together for more than instrumental and material reasons. We can talk about love and friendship here, culture, MacIntyre writes of narrativity and tradition, we can talk of the character-forming culture of family, work, place, and polity, we can talk of communities of character and of virtue, the habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, and exercised. All of those things are important, and point to something much more than a class interest based on economics.
Whatever ‘ism’ you may choose to define this as, its principal features are apparent. This approach is our best, and probably only, hope in face of a libertarianism that is winnowing away the forces of morality and sociality within whilst generating an alien superpower without. Against the abstraction of power governing by remote control, the critique above offers a vision of a global network of relatively small-scale, decentralized, varied, regionally integrated communities governed by small-scale practical reason in face-to-face interaction, personal contact, and co-responsibility, defining an organic order based upon neighborhood or kindred purposes and affections. I would still argue for an overarching and authoritative moral architectonic recognizing transcendent standards of justice and a substantive conception of the good, as well as a public realm infusing and orienting the parts and ensuring coherence and common ends. Loving one’s neighbour remains key, and requires that we become neighbours to one another the world over, from immediate units in close social proximity outwards to embrace all others. This is an organic conception, working with a social and cultural evolution and an innate creative purpose. This is a principle that has been out of fashion in an age of mechanistic reductionism and atomism – the basic principles of liberal metaphysics and ontology - but this age has also been the age of abstract power and war, monetarism and militarism, and is implicated in a moral, social, and ecological implosion.
Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed examines the profound discontent with existing society and the political establishment, and traces this discontent to its moral and social causes. He shows how liberalism, is not the emancipatory and revolutionary outsider challenging the iniquitous power of entrenched elites and authorities, but is itself the reactionary insider, the orthodoxy of political elites seeking to entrench power and influence apart from the people, whether these elites identify as right or left. Alasdair MacIntyre argues the same thing when he states that the conventional public sphere - the world of politics, culture and media - is liberal to the core, whether people designate themselves as conservative or socialist or radical. The central idea of this liberalism is the idea that there is no substantive good, only the various goods that individuals choose for themselves as a matter of irreducible subjective preference. Liberalism establishes a public framework that is neutral on ‘the good’ and which prescribes autonomy for individuals to “fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” That liberalism insists that commonality – ‘government’ - gets out of the way of economic interplay in the markets (the priority of the political right) and out of the way in personal morality (the priority of the political left). This libertarianism freeing the individual from constraints has been an unmitigated disaster, and is implicated in the destruction of the moral, social, and planetary ecology.
“Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” argues Deneen. Ruthless economic liberalization has left many people materially insecure; relentless cultural liberalization has left them unmoored. Communal ties are discouraged in order to encourage a mobile force of workers. Freedom has become something for an increasingly powerful government to grant or withhold, conditional upon increasingly concentrated economic power, exercised by way of anonymous, systemic force. The political and ethical commons have been lost, and with them universality, publicity, and commonality. The result is a Hobbesian war of all against all – the very thing which Hobbes thought that the Leviathan state would hold in check. Hobbes’ fear has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the very reason that the premise of civil society as no more than a sphere of universal antagonism and conflict sooner or later comes to encompass the social and moral fabric, shaping the psyche of the people. Instead of the cultivation of the virtues in the eudaimonic habitus, there has been the cultivation of the vices in the name of liberty, generating a collective force that is positively inimical to human flourishing, separating people from each other, from the sources of meaning and belonging, from social and moral supports, from their own selves. And that is demonic rather than eudaimonic. The malaise is so deep as to require something much more than institutional tinkering and redistribution. Deneen argues that we need to envision a future after liberalism, where local, preferably religious communities tend to the land and look after their own. These groups would cultivate ‘cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice and small-scale democracy.’ That view savours a great deal of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option reading of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a reading which MacIntyre himself has rejected. It sounds nostalgic and implausible to me. I share Deneen’s concerns, and support a great deal of his prescriptions. His critique is hugely important in the way that it criticizes economic libertarianism. For far too long conservatism has been little more than an apologetics for economic power, selling basic conservative principles of the sacred, community, tradition, authority, and order out to private power via ‘the market.’ In doing so, it has engaged in the wars of the liberals with ‘socialists,’ themselves selling out their political principles to individual freedom. Deneen even attempts to recover environmentalism for conservatism, emphasizing small-scale practical reasoning and love of home and place as a condition of the success of all ambitious environmental projects (which are also needed, I would add). ‘Short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty,’ Deneen writes, ‘forces our children to deal with shortages of such resources as topsoil and potable water.’
Deneen provides an acute diagnosis of the moral, social, and ecological failures of liberal modernity, but his suggestions for overcoming these failures fall short. They go an important part of the distance – arguments for withdrawal from the barbarian Megamachine and a process of reconversion via small-scale virtuous communities can be found not only in Alasdair MacIntyre, but in Lewis Mumford, a favourite writer of mine. The ideas also suggest a Tocqueville for an age inimical to co-responsibility in the associational space of civil society. But we know from the fate of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ that the modern terrain has become acidic to societal responsibility. And maybe Deneen – and Dreher’s – retreat recognizes this, as did Mumford before them. Either way, it seems a retreat, and a counsel of despair. It may be appropriate. There are reasons for thinking such ideas will not receive a hearing. To put the point bluntly, generations have been reared on self-interest and lack the capacity to build genuine solidarity and publicity beyond their own preferences and interests. We have a public realm in which miscellaneous groups organise and act to impose their good on others, now accompanied by a self-righteous insistence that the state authorize that imposition, or else protest continues. The public square is no longer a place of dialogue and fraternal exchange but a war in which victory goes to the loudest voice. So I can see the reasons for retreat and withdrawal – the terrain looks hopeless. But maybe, in the depth of crisis, there will be a recovery of public purpose and principle, and no more hiding. I therefore seek to extract the positive and rational core within the nostalgic mode of critique in an attempt to avoid reactionary conclusions that merely confirm defeat. Deneen’s rejection of liberal modernity is absolute; for him, the only hope for the revitalisation of community, sociality, and morality lies in those residues of past forms which continue to exist in the modern world. My own take on modernity is more positive, and takes the high road of modernity to an alternative future by affirming the continued emancipatory potential of freedom, reason, and democracy. That this optimism may well be misplaced is suggested by the extent to which I now emphasize a recovery of the virtues, character-formation, establishing solidaristic forms of the common life and modes of conduct, and transcendent standards within a moral architectonic – all of those things that liberal modernity discarded to free the individual from constraint. The task is to revalue what is described as ‘traditional’ morality in relation to those elements within the present order that point towards a future of both autonomy and solidarity. A genuine public community, then.
Which brings me to the debacle of today’s world, and the reasons for despair and hopelessness.
Nick Timothy writing in The Telegraph is spot on:
‘Riots and looting won’t bring racial justice, only peace can achieve that
The divisive actions of hard-Left protesters are making it harder to forge a better future together
7 June 2020
Protest against the death of George Floyd, in London
‘For the millions who observed the lockdown, the anti-racism protests seem to make little sense. The country willingly accepted economic and social sacrifice to stop the spread of Covid-19, yet now, after all this effort, thousands are on the streets and risking a new increase in infections. What’s more, the protests were sparked by the death of an American citizen far away from Britain. Many of the demonstrators are black, and therefore more vulnerable to the virus. And many politicians who had strongly supported the lockdown celebrated its demise as vast crowds gathered to protest.
However valid these concerns, there is little point dwelling on them. Lockdown is over. Distancing rules are impossible to apply. No law can survive its overt breach by so many citizens. With the virus, we must now hope for the best. With the protests, we must stop the violence. But then we should listen, and act....’
I will return to the collapse of authority, order, and respect. The point made with respect to this pathological hypocrisy that has been demonstrated on Covid-19 and lockdown is important.
Read this article and understand that this is gonna be the longest and hardest year (and beyond, for those who survive that long).
The pandemic is not over, and a second wave of coronavirus is on its way.
‘Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has.
‘the disease is slowly starting to recede from the public’s attention. After months of dominating media coverage, COVID-19 has largely disappeared from the front pages of most national newspapers. In recent polls, the number of people who favor “reopening the economy as soon as possible” over “staying home as long as necessary” has increased. And so it is perhaps no surprise that even states where the number of new infections stands at an all-time high are pressing ahead with plans to lift many restrictions on businesses and mass gatherings.’
For months now, there has been criticisms of the libertarians on the right who want the economy re-opened, leading the call of liberation against lockdown. And now, with mass protests and demonstrations, the erstwhile authoritarian left have reverted to being libertarians.
‘In the fullness of time,’ the article says, ‘of time, many books will be written about why a country as rich, powerful, and scientifically advanced as the United States failed quite so badly at coping with a public-health emergency that experts had predicted for many years.’
We can say the same thing about other countries in face of myriad crises, from social inequality to ecological destruction. I’m placing the focus here on the twin libertarianisms of left and right.
"Perhaps most important, it is now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to
impose a full-scale lockdown for a second time.
With public opinion more polarized than it was a few months ago, and the presidential election looming, any attempt to deal with a resurgence of the virus is likely to be even more haphazard, contentious, and ineffective than it was the first time around."
I feel like writing my last will and testament. As Gene Wilder repeated in ‘The Producers’ ‘no way out, now way out, no way out.’
What will make it well-nigh impossible to muster that political will is the evidence of the rank hypocrisy of the liberal left that has been most vociferous in calling for lockdown. I’m afraid the evidence is that conservative critics who shout hypocrisy with respect to this crowd – they are big on imposing rules and regulations on others, but exempt themselves according to political whim and preference. The same people who condemned the libertarians for making ‘liberty’ a principle of overriding concern now produce their own principles to justify a flagrant breach of the instructions. To even things up, leftist critics are also right about the hypocrisy of the conservatives, espousing liberty only to deliver the opposite, affirming the values of life on the single issue of abortion whilst justifying practices that are inimical to life in other areas. Hypocrisy all round on the part of libertarians who enslave us all to immediacy and sensualism.
The article gives a long list of reasons why the virus will win, one of which is this:
‘If the virus wins, it may also be because Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds as Floyd was pleading for his life, setting off protests that—as righteous as they are—could well result in mass infections.’
I’m interested in this, because it indicates the lack of character and discipline required to build and sustain a genuine public community.
Events of recent days have brought the curtain down on pretensions of public concern. One large group of loud and aggressive people encroach on the public square to shout abuse at another large group of loud and aggressive people. The police get it in the neck from both sides, and ‘ordinary’ folk stay at home, as ordered as per lockdown instruction.
This is not so much a social contract as a suicide pact between politicians and people. For all that people are crying out for a genuine public community, they don’t have the character, the discipline, the commitment to create let alone sustain such a thing.
I can’t switch FB on without some self-righteous angry person rationalizing the self-destructive hypocrisy away. Hilariously, one ‘friend’ boasts how her favoured ‘team’ in the war invading public space are all wearing masks on the mass protest, whilst the other team are not, thus making them socially responsible and the others not. This is errant nonsense. The other team don’t care about Covid-19 and have never made any pretense of ever caring. Your team did, and insisted on compliance, castigating the UK and US governments for being slow to act, micro-managed and policed individuals’ behaviour – people were not allowed to visit family and attend funerals etc. And now that mass protest and demos are back, it’s pillocks to principles, instructions, and ‘follow the science.’ That action undercuts the force of criticisms that may be levelled against the US and UK governments, for the reason that it damages the credibility of the critics. This is a hypocrisy of such a pathological character as to require an explanation. I would suggest comfortably off, complacent, sanctimonious haute bourgeoisie and their sense of entitlement. Either way, there’s no Left left. This is a rag-tag-and-bobtail of a liberalism gone decadent. Instead of committing to and building public order, this libertarian crowd take it for granted, presume its continued health and existence, and think it exists by magic.
The breaking of the covid lockdown and the disrespect of state authority should tell us that the situation with respect to climate crisis is hopeless. Neither people nor politicians have the discipline to hold the line. Effective action on climate crisis requires commitment to and respect for public authority. There is none.
Here is an article which warns that carbon emissions are set to increase once lockdown is over. It ends with this warning and hope:
‘If the lessons are not learnt, if adherence to data is avoided, then emissions will shoot up like in the aftermath of the 1970s, 1980s, the dotcom bubble and the global financial crisis. If facts can cause fears, then climate catastrophe is already upon us. The world needs to delay it as much as it can. The world needs time to prepare to deal with global warming. It will be gradual but more damaging than a pandemic. It's time to learn the Covid lessons. For starters, attach a carbon meter to each moving part of the economy. And act responsibly. There are lives at stake.’
Just because the emissions fell temporarily in April, climate change has not disappeared. The world faces that uncomfortable climate question today as much as it did at the start of this year. The global solidarity seen during Covid offers a window of hope. Collective climate action is the need of the hour.
The solidarity was hard won, grudging, for a short period and not the years required – and the liberal left themselves broke it in order to protest.
The collapse of respect for authority and willingness to subvert order indicate an unawareness and unconcern with respect to constituting and maintaining public community. This is not radical and emancipatory but thoroughly reactionary, creating a terrain in which the loudest voice and the strongest arm prevails.
I turn to another article in The Telegraph:
The political class cannot command authority. The police cannot guarantee order. Britain is a mess.
Churchill is boarded up. So is Britain.
Publicity is in retreat.
‘The decision to board up the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, to protect it from protesters, says much about the state of Britain today. The Prime Minister called it “shameful”: yes, Churchill held some opinions that belong in the past, but he led Britain to victory in the Second World War, defeating Hitler and his racist ideology. As some have pointed out, if the protesters think Churchill harboured questionable views, wait until they hear about the man he beat.
‘But it’s not only the vandals who come out of this badly, it’s also a political class that struggles to command authority and a police force that can no longer guarantee law and order – all in the middle of a pandemic that has triggered the greatest economic contraction on record. The monthly fall in GDP for April was 20.4 per cent; the biggest monthly drop before this crisis was just 2 per cent. The state has stepped in to carry the burden, but just because it is bigger doesn’t mean it is any more competent. The bureaucratic lockdown resembles quicksand. The harder we struggle to free ourselves, the more we appear stuck....
‘Three cheers for the residents of Poole for protecting Baden-Powell’s statue by the harbour. And three more for my alma mater, Oriel College, Oxford, for so far refusing to give into protesters demanding Cecil Rhodes be toppled.
‘At times, these last few days, law and order has seemed like an optional extra. Policemen bend the knee in front of a baying mob, get beaten up in the street, and run to escape pursuing crowds. Meanwhile, statues are toppled into rivers, war memorials are vandalised and our greatest ever war leader has “Racist” scrawled all over him.
To those who keep repeating that Churchill was a racist, then try the fellow he led the nation in defeating for size.
I don’t need any lectures on Churchill, I know his history and his record. I remember his actions in sending gunboats down the Mersey, guns trailed on the city of Liverpool, and I remember him in the General Strike saying he wanted the miners on their knees and eating grass. I know him for his naked class politics, which I vehemently oppose. As did people at the time. The same people who united behind him to fight the Nazis. There’s the difference. That generation could settle differences to make common cause to defeat a greater enemy. This generation can’t achieve unity. It can’t generate publicity, it has to bully conformity and enforce unity. It can’t muster the collective wit and will in face of climate crisis. It can’t generate the public community required. It lacks roots in the people. I have no intentions of being coralled into following a woke PC Taliban.
‘But is Britain’s sensible, silent majority now awakening from its slumber? Could it be that Poole and Oxford are the first signs of a great conservative fightback?
If there is such a thing, it has to come along the lines I adumbrated above, and not simply be another variant of the libertarianism and authoritarianism we have been swinging between in recent decades. That is the liberal order that is imploding from within.
‘At least the world has got a taste of what the new normal would be like under Greta Thunberg’s Green New Deal …
I went out on a limb last year in criticising the Greta phenomenon and Extinction Rebellion, on precisely this point – I didn’t see the building of public community and a commitment to dialogue in the approach, the very opposite in fact. The arguments I made there will no doubt distance me from my environmentalist contacts and associates, but I identified an anti-politics at the heart of this ‘follow the science’ and ‘tell the truth’ that points to the dangers of an austerian environmental regime being added on to an economic austerity and delivering us all to the Megamachine.
When progressive and emancipatory forces seem not to see the problem, and hence betray their principles so easily to a contrary practice, there seems nothing left but retreat and withdrawal, keeping values and virtues alive for an age that will be more appreciative.
Or abandon a left so incoherent and confused as to be a public menace when it is not merely useless and irrelevant in favour of a hope for a recovery of a genuine conservatism.
Times are hard. Working in my local community, listening to what ‘ordinary’ people have to say, I notice two things – most (I have yet to meet an exception) think racism bad, and most think protests extreme. People are beginning to resent being constantly lectured on things they already know. They certainly resent being bullied into having to accept policies and changes on account of being guilty as charged.
I saw the vandalism inflicted on the Penny Lane signs in Liverpool, damaged on account of a claimed association with slavery.
This is what happens when people take law and morals into their own hands, cutting out dialogue with others and the mediation of public institutions - they get it wrong and cause harm and foster further resentment and reaction.
In the first place, the connection of Penny Lane with the ship owner James Penny is not only disputed, local historians say there is no evidence of any connection at all; in the second place, even if there was a connection, that is not the connection of Penny Lane in the public imagination. Let's, for the sake of argument, say the road was named after a slave trader (there's no evidence for that connection), the fact that the road is now known all over the world as a brilliant Beatles song. This shows human possibilities to redeem the worst of all scenarios. But, no, we have to destroy those possibilities and reduce things to the worst, entrenching and extending the worst throughout the social and psychic fabric so that we are condemned to live it for all time. There is no sense of organic growth and change here, no sense of a living tradition, no hope for redemption. It’s infernal. Once the sin has been committed, it is never washed away.
This is losing 'ordinary' people big time and fostering division and resentment. As usual, it was ordinary folk in the local community who turned up and put a shift in to clear the damage. And that’s where hope lies – in the common moral sense of ‘ordinary’ people who have a good belly-to-earth understanding of reality and can check the fantasies of the ideologues.
I'm waiting for Elvis' turn to get it in the neck, cultural appropriator and racist as he is now condemned for being Oddly, at the time, he was both feared and celebrated as an integrator who broke down the boundaries between black and white. Give me a shout when these times have come back to their senses, presuming people haven't torn each other and what is left of society apart in the meantime.
Economies are crashing, the planetary ecology is unravelling, deathly viruses are hanging around for who knows how long, and politicians and people haven't got it in them to muster the collective wit and will to save their stupid selves.
But I am not surprised - this dissolution of public identity and public good is in the DNA of liberal modernity, as I keep telling anyone with ears to hear: "The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world’ in which "the ultimate and most sublime values, have retreated from public life" into private life. (Weber Science as a Vocation in Gerth and Mills ed. 1961: 155).
We live in a society of mutual indifference with respect to each others’ objects of veneration and devotion, which explodes into a mutual contempt and hatred whenever that celebration attempts to go public.
In other words, we don't have a public life and have lost the common ground, and putting that back together is the task that lies before us.
Frankly, human beings of all kinds are very disappointing. The blase attitude of comfortably off white liberals towards law and order is revealing. If you want to know why revolutions eat their children, begin with the naivety and complacency of these 'revolutionaries' - I know many of them, and I reserve the greatest contempt for the ones that go nowhere near a serious constructive politics – they are all surface and lip service, all flab and soft centre. People are crying out for a genuine public order, but have lost the character and capacity to actually generate and maintain one themselves. Build a new public community? Where is the serious commitment and capacity? Where is a the serious analysis and awareness of practicalities? Where is the relation to a real public?
‘Having lost the confidence of the working classes with their sneering disapproval of their concerns, liberal-Leftists rely heavily on a constituency largely confined to cosmopolitan urban islands. These are not the paternalists of old, but rather despots who would not hesitate to compromise freedoms if they could, recently illustrated by the censorious response to Michael Gove’s inadvertent revelation of the content of his private library. Book-burning doubtless to follow.
‘Covid-19 will not save the liberal-Left. Instead it will expose its irrelevance even more than its recent failures have done, and lead to further defeats of its agenda, initiated decades earlier in university lecture halls, sit-ins and anti-Vietnam protests that were supposed to usher in a red paradise on the ruins of capitalist turmoil. Ironically, notwithstanding the intellectual bankruptcy of Leftist dogma, it is this very tradition of defiance that is subverting the efforts of the modern-day comrades. Should California’s progressive Governor Gavin Newsom really be vexed by the non-compliance of so many residents with his lockdown given his long-standing disregard for the law, particularly over illegal immigration?
Emerging from the Covid crisis will be an attenuated liberal-Left. Though it wields disproportionate influence, it is bereft of any intellectual attributes, relying instead on weaponised PC rhetoric, a sure recipe to further deter right-thinking people from its repertoire of causes.
I have seen this very moral, intellectual, and political bankruptcy but have lived in hope that people whose causes and concerns I share could come to develop the appropriate and effective means to those ends. I now see that that hope is delusional and the task is hopeless. It’s not a victory for conservative critics, though, for the very reason that the social and moral order continues to implode and the planetary ecology continues to unravel. If the left is bankrupt, so too is the right. Both sides share in common a libertarian that frees individuals from ‘constraint’ and ‘inhibition.’ That libertarianism is bankrupt.
It may well be that a genuine conservatism is our only hope.
Here is another conservative article that correctly identifies the damage that libertarianism, or ‘ultra-liberalism,’ has wrought. If the left don’t pick up on this, and see the problem as one pertaining to morality and culture and not just to economics, then there are signs that maybe the right will.
‘THIS should be a golden age for conservatism. Brexit should have ushered in a truly socially conservative revolution. By allowing conservatives to build organically on Britain’s past traditions as a great maritime nation, it offered this country a unique escape route from the atrophy and decline of the western world. It should have been relatively easy to build a cultural narrative that was self-confident, can-do, generous, outward-looking, patriotic and inclusive of all. It did not happen.
Brexit was partially a consequence of ultra-liberalism’s many chickens coming home to roost, bringing with them a series of cascading instabilities seriously undermining social cohesion and economic calamity. Early indications that the liberal experiment was unravelling were the 2008 banking crisis and the 2011 riots, both consequences of years of ultra-liberal economic and social policies respectively. Of course, the metropolitan elites ignored the gathering storm clouds, and the economic stagnation and feral future of the knife crime epidemic they portended. You could go and on: about the rape gangs, Islamic terrorism, family breakdown, identity politics, the failures of diversity, about the fragility of global supply chains and our over-reliance on authoritarian China exposed by Covid-19. Liberalism, far from guaranteeing progress, has created a society both culturally unstable and economically moribund.
Suffice to say the case for rebuilding a more resilient, socially conservative society in terms of both culture and economics was there to be made, should anyone in politics have the courage to make it. Instead, … we stand in the midst of a Maoist iconoclasm, with young mobs demanding the tearing down statues and the erasure of Britain’s past.
‘Just a few short years after we voted for major change, how did it get so bad? How did the liberal-Left entrench its cultural dominance, and latterly become so very threatening?
‘The salient fact is that for decades the Left have been pushing at an open door. They have received absolutely no opposition from the institution charged by its voters in supplying one, the so-called ‘Conservative Party’, which for many years hasn’t shown the slightest interest in cultural issues that surely should be absolutely smack bang central to any conservative party worthy of the name.
[This causes me some hilarity. The oddest thing is that, from the Left, arguing for socialism and Marx, I have paid close and considered attention to moral and cultural issues with respect to transcendent standards of justice, substantive notions of the good, the cultivation of the virtues, character-formation, God, law, order, authority, the sacred, community, small-scale practical reasoning …. I haven’t found an audience on the Left. It seems I wouldn’t find one on the Right, either. Libertarians one and all. I’ll state my view provocatively – if conservatives wish to secure their core principles, they need to be socialists, and if socialists want to be effective, they need to be conservative. But I should have known this. In a book I wrote on Lewis Mumford I explained his neglect as being on account of being too radical for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals.
The article explains the problem as lying in the fact that ‘Toryism is, in the main, a parasitic political tradition rather than a conservative one. Low agency and opportunistic, the party seeks only to acquire and then prolong its time in office, a goal that requires the careful husbandry of political capital. It thus much prefers to be derivative, to implement the settled ideas of the zeitgeist rather than its own principles or ideas.’
Precisely. I openly espouse conservative principles. I had a little involvement in the campaign to have Rory Stewart elected as leader of the Conservative Party. I wrote to him and other MPs in his support, backing his ideas, but showing precisely what was required to make those ideas a reality. To no avail. I don’t know how serious the Conservative Party is about conservative principles. It seems to have sold them out to money and power.
‘This is especially true when it comes to fighting the culture wars: because culture changes so slowly, there are few benefits in fighting for or against cultural change over the relatively short horizons of the electoral cycle, though the long-term consequences of not doing so are enormous. The intelligent Left noticed and realised that this was a mechanism by which society could be slowly but remorselessly transformed: it did not need to be in office to be in power, it just needed first to frame and then embed the necessary cultural narratives that the Tories would quickly judge too politically expensive to resist. The latest manifestation of this highly successful strategy is, of course, the rise of Black Lives Matter: a malignant combination of identity politics, anti-white racism and mob violence that the Tories have, predictably, been too timorous to oppose.
In my work I have thought that I have been buttressing an emancipatory socialist politics with ethical foundations and virtuous practices. That is a delusion, there is no interest. Politics is a war between the sophists of various persuasions, and to that extent my work has simply been part of the culture wars. I write on Marx, people see the name, and place me on one side in the war – few actually read the nuanced arguments I make on Marx. So maybe I am better away from ideology and should place more focus on communities of practice and character, shifting agency away from culture and intellect and towards the ‘ordinary’ folk who put a shift in within the little platoons.
‘The major problem for the Tories is that ordinary people have noticed. Just as mass immigration made people sit up and take notice of the influence of the EU over our daily lives, the toppling of statues has finally brought to their attention the Kulturkampf that has been raging around us for decades. Boris Johnson, aka ‘the Bottler Blond’ is now surely in serious trouble: the patriotic working class will be especially disgusted by the disorder and destruction of their heritage, and smell Tory betrayal, reinforcing their still bitter memories of the Thatcher years. Lose that Red Wall now, and it is surely lost for ever.
The writers goes on to speculate about the building of a new vehicle to channel the mainstream, patriotic instincts of the majority.
‘Now, if only there was a brave, charismatic individual at hand, someone who could communicate effectively with ordinary people, with a track record of building mass movements and winning unlikely victories against all the odds, while defenestrating Tory leaders in the process.’
The question is asked: Who could that be?
The fact that Nigel Farage is offered as our saviour indicates how deep a mess we are in. Farage, like Trump, is a symptom of the problem, not a coherent response to it. Both are libertarians, looking to deregulate and privatise in economics.