Lindsay’s Confesssions

I recently finished David Lindsay’s new book, Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory. It is an insightful and incisive read on modern British and American politics: providing a credible account of three streams in Anglo-American discourse which cause more harm than the problems which they ostensibly set out to fix – to wit, Marxism (including American neoconservatism), the old Hard Right (the Chicago Boys and the defenders of apartheid and nationalist dictatorships in Latin America and Africa) and the left-libertarian strains which uncritically promote globalism and social libertinism at the expense of the actual working classes. His critical insight is that these three groups are more often in agreement with each other than even with people who ‘ought to be’ their allies – trade unionists, traditional Christian socialists and the anti-war party have all received immensely short shrift from all three groups. What Mr Lindsay supports, broadly, is a counter-alliance between anti-war conservatives and the traditional Fabian and protectionist roots of the British Labour party, rooted in the fertile soil of economic patriotism and Catholic social teaching in its entirety.

A tall order, certainly – but Mr Lindsay is very deft at providing hope (and none of it false) throughout his book that support could exist for such a political constellation. He is very well-rooted in British political history; my primary area of interest is generally the long 19th century, so David’s accounts of 20th century phenomena required me to do some rather far-reaching supplemental reading. The book is actually a breezy read, though nonetheless highly intellectually provocative – he rates Thatcher, Blair and Churchill as completely overrated figures both by the admirers prone to worshipping their every action as bold and visionary, and by their detractors who are (at least in Thatcher’s and Blair’s cases) wont to describe them in terms of the monstrous.

Mr Lindsay’s brilliant analysis shines brightest where he engages with history – where we can learn from Enoch Powell (both where he was correct and where he was mistaken), from Benjamin Disraeli, from the broader Jacobite tradition – and where he tackles political settlements (regarding NATO, regarding Ireland, regarding public ownership, regarding Islam) from a viewpoint not normally associated with the position he advocates. We should seek not only peaceful, but co-operative relationships with Russia and China not because they are our traditional enemies as communist states, but precisely because they have renounced communism and remain more traditionalist, more economically interventionist and more sceptical of globalism than we are (which is precisely why the neoconservatives cannot stand them). All Ireland should be part and parcel of the United Kingdom – for the sake of the Catholics who live there and of the Catholics in the other kingdoms; we should regard the triumph of the secularising, linguistic-nationalist Irish Republic as a tragedy for Catholics and particularly for Irish Catholics. Islam ought to be seen as a concern, but because of the ideological and theological remedies it presents to the ailments of modernity rather than because of trumped-up terrorist threats. We should insist upon asserting our own remedies to those ills rather than importing them (again) from the Islamic world, and we should be careful to tout the virtues of a Trinitarian (ergo social) God and a realistic account of human nature over-against both the militant Unitarianism of Islam and the Judaism-derived ‘denial of original sin’ and the ‘unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation’ which underpin the secular West. Mr Lindsay’s breadth and depth of knowledge, both political and theological, is remarkable – and the easy, accessible, unpretentious and clever way in which he presents it makes the book all the more profound a pleasure to read.

There are points where I think his analysis runs a bit thin, or where I think he could do with some further explanation. Though I absolutely and unqualifiedly agree that climate change must not be used as an excuse to adopt policies that would depress employment and living standards for the world’s poorest, I nevertheless acknowledge that climate change (like all too many other environmental problems involving air and water) is a transnational problem which requires concerted, co-operative regional action at the very least. Another point of contention regards American history: the war of independence founded two nations rather than just one; and the nation which has been more amenable to the radical-orthodox, Jacobite critique of capitalism has traditionally been the same one which has preserved (even under Hanoverian sway) the last remnants of France as the ‘eldest daughter of Holy Mother Church’ in Quebec. This was, anyway, the contention of George Grant, and has been the conceit of the entire progressive-conservative movement in British North America which has traditionally looked to Disraeli for inspiration. As an American, I very greatly appreciate what Mr Lindsay is trying to accomplish by providing a distinctly American ideological space for critiquing the excesses of capitalism, but at the same time I think caution is warranted here lest we start to romanticise a revolution which allowed itself so easily to be subsumed by slave power, Jeffersonian deism and the denials of original sin from the likes of Thomas Paine – just as I think it will be necessary for China’s leftists not to romanticise Mao and the Cultural Revolution in spite of all of the economic and human-capital successes that he brought to his own nation.

All in all, however, this is a brilliant book – Mr Lindsay makes a point of interrogating British history in its popular conceptions with questions that need to be asked, in ways which mirror the work of Wang Hui (for Chinese history) and John Milbank (for the history of the Church more broadly). And he never loses sight of what he endorses, drawing upon old-school conservative and upon old-school leftist thought alike – a peaceable order which respects not only the economic and not only the political, but also the spiritual welfare of all of the people under it. Would it were distributed more broadly amongst Democrats here, and among Labour supporters on his side!

You can find the book here (or here if you’re more of an e-bookish sort); I highly recommend it.