Posted on 05/10/2005 5:34:13 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The people of Britain have spoken, and the Labor party is back in power with a comfortable, if much diminished, majority of seats in parliament. The leader of the Conservative party has said he will step down, forcing the Tories to their fourth leadership election in eight years.* The victorious Labor party got 36 percent of the vote, the Conservatives 33 percent, the Liberal Democrats (a Naderite Green-Left party) 22.5 percent, and "other" (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish parties) 9.5 percent.
The real victory here is Margaret Thatcher's. By annihilating the old statist ideological Left in the 1980s, she forced the Labor party to bourgeoisify itself. The class warriors and Soviet stoolies, the nationalizers and America-haters, the Bomb-banners and tree-huggers, the Scargills and Benns, the Foots and Kinnocks, were hustled off the Labor-party stage, replaced by mild-spoken middle-class types in business suits, murmuring unthreateningly about "opportunity" and "investment." They are colorless by comparison with the old crowd — I can never remember which of Blair's people is which — but much less dangerous to Britain's prosperity and security.
The price of victory, however, was extinction. In accomplishing this transformation of her enemies, Mrs. Thatcher left the Conservative party with nothing to define itself against. Since the fall of the USSR, there is not even an external enemy to concentrate minds. (Hardly anyone in Britain thinks that the war on terror is any of their business.)
If your national economy consists of a large private sector and a large public sector, and if neither big political party is nakedly hostile to either, or looks like doing serious harm to either, then politics comes down to a dull, wonkish tussle between those who think that the private sector is over-regulated and those who think the public sector is under-funded. Right now in Britain the economy is humming along nicely; the welfare state is in reasonable working order; and the public-private mix in life services like health, education, and pensions seems to offer about as much choice as people want.** Center-left or center-right? A state that occupies 40 percent of the national economy, or one that occupies 38 percent? Why change?
There isn't much room in there for a strong, principled conservatism. Nor do the British seem to want such a thing. Look at those voting figures. Since the Lib-Dems are to the left of Labor, and most of the little nationalist parties are even further left than that, the vote breaks down as one third for conservatism — the much diluted conservatism of the post-Thatcher Tories — and two thirds for everything further left. Apparently our cousins across the pond are pretty happy in their Old-Europe-trending welfarist consensus. Real conservatism is dead in Britain.
Is it any better off here in the USA? Hardly. Executive, legislature, judiciary — where can we look for strong promotion of, and adherence to, conservative principles? We think of our president as a conservative, but in what respects can he be said to have advanced conservatism? John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in The Right Nation , tick off the six fundamentals of classical, Burkean, Anglo-Saxon conservatism:
a deep suspicion of the power of the state.
a preference for liberty over equality.
patriotism.
a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.
skepticism about the idea of progress.
elitism.
"The exceptionalism of modern American conservatism" (the authors go on to say) "lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three." All right, let's ignore the last three of those principles and mark George W. Bush on the first three.
— Power of the state. Is the federal government more powerful, or less, than it was in January 2001? That, of course, is an ah-but question. Our country was attacked by a terrorist conspiracy well supported by, and well funded from, the wealthy and populous Muslim Middle East. All sorts of things flowed from that, including necessary expansions of government power and expenditure. (Though whether a $300 billion experiment in Wilsonian nation-building was really necessary is a question I shall leave to another time.) Even setting all that aside, though, are the federal authorities less of a presence in our lives, in areas unrelated to national security, than they were four years ago? Sure, you got an itty-bitty tax cut, paid for by dumping a slew of federal debt on your children and grandchildren. But spending? Even non-security spending? The answers are here.
— Liberty vs. equality. There has been no rollback of the tort-spawning, job-killing egalitarianism of the 1990s. Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act are still on the books. Norm Mineta is still at Transportation, so presumably your granny is still as much of a threat to air travel as any Saudi flight-school graduate. Not only are both sexes, all physiques, and all air travelers equal by government fiat, so are all kids. The No Child Left Behind Act assures us of that, and pokes the federal government's nose into every classroom.
— Patriotism. Flip on Fox News any night of the week and watch those clips of foreigners streaming across the southern desert into America by the hundreds and thousands. Doesn't patriotism imply some concern for your nation's borders? Some ideas about what people you would like to have come settle in your country — how many, and from where? Some cherishing and privileging of the notion of citizenship? Apparently not. Our president, at any rate, is perfectly insouciant — seems, in fact, to be on board with the idea put forward recently by Mexican foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, that his country and ours will soon be "integrated." Let 'em come!
Ah, my conservative friends tell me, but this is not Britain. They are sunk in spiritual apathy, but we have a Religious Right! That will keep us on the straight and narrow! Will it, though?
There are two main strands of politically significant religiosity in this country: evangelical Protestants, and devout Roman Catholics. Evangelical Protestantism is theologically conservative by definition; but as NR's own Jeffrey Hart has noted, it is under no necessity to be conservative on any of the Burkean points, and historically has not been. (Try grading William Jennings Bryan on the Burke scale.) Evangelicanism is, in fact, too intellectually flimsy to sustain any coherent political position outside a narrow subset of "social issues." As Prof. Hart concludes:
The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.
Roman Catholicism is more intellectually substantial, but no more necessarily conservative, in the Burkean sense, than Free Silver evangelism. Does the Roman Catholic church really have deep, ancient roots nourished by the concepts of liberty and individual autonomy? When and where, exactly, did those roots first become visible? During the Inquisition or the Armada? Under the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs? In Franco's let's-ignore-the-20th-century Spain or Eamonn de Valera's nasty, corrupt little people-exporting "confessional republic"? Yes, yes, the late John Paul II, bless his memory, made up for a great many of those things; but that only brings to mind how very much there was to make up for.
And if American religiosity is not dependably conservative, American conservatives have not, historically, been very religious. The great 20th-century conservative presidents were Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. Neither was an atheist, but neither was much of a church-goer either. Their expressions of religious belief did not venture far beyond the requirements of "ceremonial deism." The more you look at the link between American conservatism and American religiosity, in fact, the more tenuous the link appears. Scanning the names on the original masthead of National Review, I see several of whom it must be said that, if they had failed to show up for an editorial meeting and I had been sent out to look for them, the pews of the local churches would not have been my first point of call.***
American exceptionalist-conservatism still holds out in odd corners of the national life. The National Rifle Association, for instance, is still a formidable force for personal liberty: The passing of the recent "right to shoot" law in Florida is very heartening. All in all, though, I don't think that the prognosis for conservatism in America is any better than in England. My colleague Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out the other day that there has been no conservative elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court without an assist from identity politics since 1972! Scalia, remember, was the first Italian-American justice, and was nominated partly for that reason. I doubt there will be ever be another conservative on the Court. In place of Coolidge ("It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones") and Reagan ("Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"), we have George W. Bush ("When somebody hurts, government has got to move").
I believe, in fact, the trend lines show that we in the conservative movement are living in false hope. Our recent apparent advances — the breaking of the media monopoly, the defeat of Jean-Jacques Kerry and his sidekick John "ATLA" Edwards — are not indicative of any permanent revival, but only transient death-fevers, like the bright flushed complexion that comes at the last stages of tuberculosis.
Britain today, the U.S. tomorrow. There will be no more Churchills or Thatchers, no more Coolidges or Reagans, no more Rehnquists or Scalias. We are living in the twilight of conservatism.
America was different, but thirty years ago Nixon was trying to follow the Disraelian pattern over here as well. So it's not unheard of if today's conservatism accepts big government more readily than Goldwater or Reagan did. Politicians look for the middle ground. The surprising thing is that the middle ground now is so much more free market than it was in Eisenhower's or Nixon's day.
BTW, you can take the boy out of England, but can't take England out of the boy:
Roman Catholicism is more intellectually substantial, but no more necessarily conservative, in the Burkean sense, than Free Silver evangelism. Does the Roman Catholic church really have deep, ancient roots nourished by the concepts of liberty and individual autonomy? When and where, exactly, did those roots first become visible? During the Inquisition or the Armada? Under the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs? In Franco's let's-ignore-the-20th-century Spain or Eamonn de Valera's nasty, corrupt little people-exporting "confessional republic"? Yes, yes, the late John Paul II, bless his memory, made up for a great many of those things; but that only brings to mind how very much there was to make up for.
Do Buckley's and O'Sullivan's successors pay the hoary old Brit by the number of anti-papist lines he writes?
Here's what it says about socialism
But, in order to understand fully what Socialism is and what it implies, it is necessary first to glance at the history of the movement, then to examine its philosophical and religious tendencies, and finally to consider how far these may be, and actually have proved to be, incompatible with Christian thought and life.And here is what it says about "individualism"
Political Individualism.
Considered historically and in relation to the amount of attention that it receives, the most important form of individualism is that which is called political. It varies in degree from pure anarchism to the theory that the State's only proper functions are to maintain order and enforce contracts. In ancient Greece and Rome, political theory and practice were anti-individualistic; for they considered and made the State the supreme good, an end in itself, to which the individual was a mere means.
Directly opposed to this conception was the Christian teaching that the individual soul had an independent and indestructible value, and that the State was only a means, albeit a necessary means, to individual welfare. Throughout the Middle Ages, therefore, the ancient theory was everywhere rejected. Nevertheless the prevailing theory and practice were far removed from anything that could be called individualism. Owing largely to the religious individualism resulting from the Reformation, political individualism at length appeared: at first, partial in the writings of Hobbes and Locke; later, complete in the speculations of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, notably Rousseau. The general conclusion from all these writings was that government was something artificial, and at best a necessary evil. According to the Social Contract theory of Rousseau, the State was merely the outcome of a compact freely made by its individual citizens. Consequently they were under no moral obligation to form a State, and the State itself was not a moral necessity. These views are no longer held, except by professional anarchists. In fact, a sharp reaction has occurred. The majority of non-Catholic ethical and political writers of today approach more or less closely to the position of ancient Greece and Rome, or to that of Hegel; society, or the State, is an organism from which the individual derives all his rights and all his importance. The Catholic doctrine remains as always midway between these extremes. It holds that the State is normal, natural, and necessary, even as the family is necessary, but that it is not necessary for its own sake; that it is only a means to individual life and progress.
Moderate political individualists would, as noted above, reduce the functions of the State to the minimum that is consistent with social order and peace. As they view the matter, there is always a presumption against any intervention by the State in the affairs of individuals, a presumption that can be set aside only by the most evident proof to the contrary. Hence they look upon such activities as education, sumptuary regulations, legislation in the interest of health, morals, and professional competency, to say nothing of philanthropic measures, or of industrial restrictions and industrial enterprises, as outside the State's proper province. This theory has a much smaller following now than it had a century or even half a century ago; for experience has abundantly shown that the assumptions upon which it rests are purely artificial and thoroughly false. There exists no general presumption either for or against state activities. If there is any presumption with regard to particular matters, it is as apt to be favourable as unfavourable. The one principle of guidance and test of propriety in this field is the welfare of society and of its component individuals, as determined by experience. Whenever these ends can be better attained by state intervention than by individual effort, state intervention is justified.
It is against intervention in the affairs of industry that present-day individualism make its strongest protest. According to the laissez-faire, or let alone, school of economists and politicians, the State should permit and encourage the fullest freedom of contract and of competition throughout the field of industry. This theory, which was derived partly from the political philosophy of the eighteenth century, already mentioned, partly from the Kantian doctrine that the individual has a right to the fullest measure of freedom that is compatible with the equal freedom of other individuals, and partly from the teachings of Adam Smith, received its most systematic expression in the tenets of the Manchester School. Its advocates opposed not only such public enterprises as state railways and telegraphs, but such restrictive measures as factory regulations, and laws governing the hours of labour for women and children. They also discouraged all associations of capitalists or of labourers. Very few individualists now adopt this extreme position. Experience has too frequently shown that the individual can be as deeply injured through an extortionate contract, as at the hands of the thief, the highwayman, or the contract breaker. The individual needs the protection of the State quite as much and quite as often in the former case as in any of the latter contingencies. As to state regulation or state ownership of certain industries and utilities, this too is entirely a question of expediency for the public welfare. There is no a priori principle -- political, ethical, economic, or religious -- by which it can be decided. Many individualists, and others likewise, who oppose state intervention in this field are victims of a fallacy. In their anxiety to safeguard individual liberty, they forget that reasonable labour legislation, for example, does not deprive the labourer of any liberty that is worth having, while it does ensure him real opportunity, which is the vital content of all true liberty; they forget that, while state control and direction of certain industries undoubtedly diminishes both the liberty and the opportunity of some individuals, it may increase the opportunities and the welfare of the vast majority. Both individualists and non-individualists aim, as a rule, at the greatest measure of real liberty for the individual; all their disagreement relates to the means by which this aim is to be realized.
As in the matter of the necessity and justification of the State, so with regard to its functions, the Catholic position is neither individualistic nor anti-individualistic. It accepts neither the "policeman" theory, which would reduce the activities of the State to the protection of life and property and the enforcement of contracts, nor the proposals of Socialism, which would make the State the owner and director of all the instruments of production. In both respects its attitude is determined not by any metaphysical theory of the appropriate functions of the State, but by its conception of the requisites of individual and social welfare.
This is a pretty good esay. I disagree with his portrayal of the Evangelical movement though. It's much stronger than he realizes. It isn't about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. There are millions of Bible believing and biblically knowledgable Christians out here that have a very solid foundation to our conservatism. We have a secret weapon. Prayer.
"We are living in the twilight of conservatism."
I'm not going away. Anyone here going away?
Our government is a huge ever growing runaway train with nobody at the helm, headed for a crash anyone with any common sense knows has to come.
Next month Im becoming a liberal...but only for a little while
The whole us vs them mentality is destructive to our nation. It is important to move our (conservative) agenda forward and to stop the liberal agenda but this will always be accomplished on an incremental basis.
We win some and we lose some, the best we can hope for is a general rightward leaning arc. The important thing isn't which party or philosophy has the upper hand, but rather the quality of ideas and problem solving vitality that the combined efforts of both bring to some very difficult issues.
Because ultimately the sky isn't falling and the American people are freer, richer, smarter and far better off than Any people have Ever been in the Entire history of this planet.
save
Blair is going to need a lot of help from the Tories to get much of his agenda through. His most powerful opposition is the left wing of his own party at the moment.
Regards, Ivan
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