There has been a resurgent interest in the ideas that, loosely, make up the philosophical basis of conservatism. Some of this has been an attempt (often from left liberals shocked, blinking in the light as they realise ideas exist that aren't founded in individual licence or state-directed fiat) to explain or understand what led to Brexit, Trump and assorted other things such folk lazily define as 'populist'. Alongside this is a second group (in the UK often dubbed Blue Labour and Red Tory) who, looking at the crumbling reality of small town and rural life, present a slightly rose-coloured rediscovery of old-time solidarity and community tossed together with the less globalist bits of that 'third way' communitarianism beloved of Blair and Clinton. Even libertarians have begun, gently and reluctantly, to talk about these ideas - State Capacity Libertarianism as Tyler Cowan called it.
The problem is that, while everyone is talking about conservative things, they're mostly choosing to do so without sullying their thoughts with the word 'conservative'. Instead, we're encouraged to think that conservatism is somehow more characterised by reactionaries like Roger Scruton with his bucolic myth-making about a lost England or, worse, is a composite of ignorantly insulting memes designed by leftist campaigners (the 'blood on their hands' stuff pushed out by sociology lecturers from third division universities and parroted by labour councillors and left-wing bloggers). Maybe all this is simply a consequence of the degree to which being a conservative has a very different nuance in America's elite Californian and New England communities - as a British Conservative friend in San Francisco told me, it's very hard to explain that, y'know, being a British Conservative is pretty different from a bible-waving, gun fan from Texas.
All this, I guess, brings us to Steve Bannon, one of the ultimate bogeyfolk of modern left-wing iconography. Bannon is sometimes pictured as a Svengali figure pulling Trump's strings, sometimes as a sort of alt-right demi-god and almost always as a sort of existential threat to everything we hold dear (where "we" are, of course, righteous centre-left globalists living in the Great Cities of the West). So it was genuinely fascinating to come across an article that stepped back from the caricature of Bannon and tried to understand what he really does believe - a thing called Traditionalism:
The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies.You will, of course, have noticed immediately what has been done here. The box that ought to contain conservatism has been replaced by this idea of Traditionalism. Instead of a solid, established set of ideas grounded in history and government, we're expected by Gavin Haynes (the article's writer) to use an esotheric, quasi-religious reactionary creed. It's necessary for the article as it works in explaining that the typical reponse to Bannon from many on the left - calling him a fascist or a racist - fails to recognise the reality of his beliefs.
What's most interesting about Haynes' exploration of Traditionalism and the alt-right is how he shows it to be rooted in a search for meaning - "Yeah, you have all of this stuff. Sure, you like to chase girls, you get wasted at Spoons with your buddies every Friday night. But… what does any of that actually mean?" This search for meaning seems very similar to the pitch that, for example, the Internet's Islamist extemists make to young men in Britain and France's urban places. It may even be that the hatred of Muslims so common among the alt-right's adherents is more a reflection of Islamists as competitors rather than opponents. It's also reminiscent of the flower children of 1960s San Francisco (indeed, Bannon is also a fan of gnosticism, trancendental meditation and weird Asian mythology).
While we're reminded here that the alt-right's ideology is very different to conservatism, we remain a long way from finding a position for the idea in the political firmament. It's also clear that if we allow it to become the sort of 21st century hippidom of Bannon, conservatives are a long way up a crocodile infested creek without a paddle and with a leak in the canoe. But do we embrace the slightly reactionary communiarianism of Blue Labour and Red Tory or do we endeavour to rebuild the idea that strong communities are not the antithesis of an open society. And to realise that the mistakes of government over many decades - urbanisation, centralisation, technocracy - can be reformed without losing the idea of free trade and free exchange or the principle that a market society is a natural state built on mutuality and co-operation, the very things conservatives should value.
At the same time, conservatives should consider two other ideological failures of liberalism - that poverty is a consequence of individual choices and that identity is determined by characteristics not the whole character. For the first of these we should start by stressing it's poverty not inequality that is the problem - the focus on the latter has led to shockingly poor welfare policy. By focusing on those who are literally poor, we can see our way to the system failures that contribute to this whereas attending to inequality does nothing for the poorest as policy attention focuses on infuencing marginal changes to measures of relative poverty. This latter policy therefore targets those most easy to shift and ignores the very poor.
Identity is a thornier issue - conservatives recognise its importance especially that part of it linked to nation, place, neighbourhood and community. This makes us sensitive to the identity politics of modern social liberalism. Yet the liberal idea of identity is flawed because it stresses characteristics rather than character - your D&D character isn't defined by the six charactersitics but through a broader understanding of identity yet liberal identity politics does just that by focusing on a set of characterisitcs to defines us (gender, race, sexual preference, age).
We talk of the gay community or the Muslim community as if these are homogenous entities with policy 'delivered' to meet the needs of these commuities. Not only does this misuse the idea of community but it fails to recognise that the Muslim might also be gay, might see himself as a Bradfordian or a British Asian and relate most closely to a particular neighbourhood or a network of family and friends. This man may have a shared identity with his white neighbours (living in the same street), his fellow City fans or the mix of races and ages he plays cricket with. Conservatives should not need to grapple with the complex intersectionality of this because it is irrelevant to how we want to support community. It's not that this man doesn't experience prejudice as a muslim, as gay but rather that we can see the need to 'denormalise' that prejudice without needing a policy platform that risks becoming a game of equalities top trumps.
The problem for conservatism is that it struggles to fit into intellectual debates between competing globalisms (socialism versus neoliberalism) or competing anti-growth ideologies (communitarianism and modern environmentalism). If conservatives simply adopt Scruton and similar somewhat reactionary thinkers, we run the risk of becoming little different from Bannon and the alt-right, forever searching for life's meaning by peering at obscure aspects of the world's history. The sense that what we have is built on the work of those Kipling called "...the mere uncounted folk of whose life and death is none report or lamentation" is not lost if we also recognise that the thing those men and women built is something, not just to cherish, but to improve.
What we must remember, however, is that for every great man or woman skimming across the world doing what they consider great things, there are a hundred or even a thousand other men and women doing ordinary things, in ordinary lives. These are not, as global liberalism implies, lesser people nor are their small hearts something to be critisised or worse, sneered at. And it is here that conservatism should make its pitch - as an idea that starts with the place with live, with what we see from our front door, not with some grand scheme for the perfection of man or the improvement of society. Those things will come if we allow the 'mere uncounted folk' to do what they do, if we step out of the way of innovators and if we support the things - family, community, heritage, tradition - that provide strength and stability in the places those people love with all their hearts.
....
No comments:
Post a Comment