Conservatism ain’t what it used to be

The original Red Flag

I left a comment on another conservative blog to the effect that, although I am not a fan of ‘nativism’ in such a context as my own, as a conservative, I had no problems either with trade protectionism (or, for that matter, legal sanctions and limits on entire sectors of œconomic activity, if they are socially harmful) nor with a non-interventionist foreign policy. Those were, after all, the stances taken by Lord Salisbury. The response was, shall we say, somewhat disappointing. Clearly the author of the blog had more interest in being ironically self-defensive about his own ‘modern false’ conservatism than in discussing the merits. One of the overriding themes of this blog, and an irony that never fails to get old for me, is that each and every single one of the positions that would have made me a good, High Tory conservative 160 years ago now renders me something similar to a socialist.

For example, my belief that families are generally a positive thing for society, and that even the most modest families should be protected and encouraged. On the modern right, the family has long been considered a secondary and expendable concern, next to the sacrosanct demands of the Corporation. The most pro-family œconomic policies (living wages, paid maternity leave, universal health insurance, food aid to needy children) are now, on either side of the English-speaking Atlantic, almost exclusively staples of the discourse of the left.

Or, for example, inequality. I’m currently reading Plato’s Laws, and here as in the Republic he is insistent that inequality is both a harbinger of instability and chaos, and the result of bad citizenship. Inequality is a mark that distinguishes a ruling class that has turned from the higher things to the wants of the belly. For Plato, in Book V of the Laws, a well-governed society legally won’t let the wealthiest citizens acquire more than four times the minimum amount of wealth needed for a dignified existence. Why is that? The reason he gives is wholly a conservative one: ‘A state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction;-here should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty, nor, again, excess of wealth, for both are productive of both these evils.’ Inequality should be a concern for conservatives who seek to ward off both faction and distraction. Yet nowadays both left and right wallow, even revel, in distraction and, with some noble and prophetic exceptions like Neil Postman and Chris Hedges, do not see such distraction as morally problematic.

The conservative voices, the voices of the gentry and rural élites, speaking up for the nascent working class in the nineteenth century produced a great wealth of conservative enthusiasm for alternative forms of labour organisation. German conservatives like Justus Möser were advocates of the freer life for the craftsman that held under the mediæval guild system. In Britain, a direct line can be drawn among the High Tories from Richard Oastler to Arthur Penty and Gilbert Chesterton in their advocacy for traditional forms of workers’ self-reliance. The Russian artel’ and obshchina were favoured by the conservative Slavophils as peculiarly Slavic and traditional ways to organise labour and œconomic activity that would bypass capitalism. And, as I have pointed out before, in these areas you see an overlap between peculiarly conservative and peculiarly socialist ideas.

The suspicion that trade is and must be a political and not merely an œconomic matter, historically, hasn’t just been for socialists, anti-globalisation protesters and environmental advocates. This suspicion of ‘free trade’ has long been an animating force of the Old Right in Britain, from Richard Oastler’s spirited defence of the Corn Laws on through the tenures of Disraeli and Bentinck. Depending on whether or not you see Lincoln as a political conservative, on this side of the Atlantic you might be able to make a similar case.

Public management of utilities and infrastructure is nowadays dismissed as a far-left Corbynista pipe dream. The irony is that in Britain itself the idea that mail, rail, road and telegraph ought rightly to belong to the Crown was originally a conservative idea. There’s a reason that in Britain it’s called the ‘Royal Mail’: it was a project first undertaken by Henry VIII, but brought to fruition by His Majesty King James I of England, VI of Scotland with the mail service connecting London to Edinburgh. (Not coincidentally, British Unionism itself was a conservative idea and a Stuart and Jacobite cause to begin with.) It was Sir Robert Peel, of all men, who first brought the railways under state control. I could go on, of course, but you get the idea.

These are all areas in which I am distinctly drawing on and taking inspiration from conservative categories and modes of political thinking, but which have been leading me in what is now considered a leftward direction for the past decade. It’s not merely the opposition to Whiggish forms of thinking, not merely a reaction against an entrenched definition of ‘progress’ that has been tugging in this direction. There is indeed a substantive overlap between the two bodies of thought, that goes back to King Charles I (or, if you like, Tsar Aleksei of Russia, who did so much to ingrain the aforementioned obshchina into Russian life) and his defences of the rural working class against predation by the gentry. Even earlier parallels might be drawn: the early rulers of Kievan Rus’, perhaps, or the reigns of Emperor Constantine and perhaps even Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodōra.

What passes for modern movement conservatism, by contrast, is sorely lacking in moral content and, yes, deeply false. Trumpery is only the latest and most visible symptom of that, and should not be confused with the true rot. That set in far earlier with the prior conservative embraces of ‘free trade’ Whiggery, the non-ethics of pre-emptive war and torture, and an overriding disdain for the people at the bottom of the socioœconomic ladder who embody all the ‘little platoons’ they claim to cherish. If such ‘conservatives’ want to mistake me for a socialist, so be it. I welcome their contempt.