On being conservative

Katherine Birbalsingh recently tweeted something insightful:

"Having small c conservative values" is not political. Many lefties have them.

True. I think of myself as one of these.

The conservative disposition, wrote (pdf) Michael Oakeshott, "is averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation." And there have been many changes in my lifetime which are indeed deprivations: the dumbing down of the public sphere and disappearance of the public intellectual; the loss of music teaching in state schools; the closure of thousands of pubs; the insertion into football of billionaire owners backed by repressive states; the loss of cleanish bathing water in our seas and rivers; the declining quality of popular music. And don't get me started on cricket.

But here's the thing. Many of these losses have been inflicted upon us by neoliberal capitalism: the privatization of water; the view that schooling (or at least state schooling) must merely prepare youngsters for labour; the opening up of English institutions to predators of all nations; and a university management which valorizes unreplicable "research outputs" over genuine intellectual work.

Not least of these impositions have been the forces that have diminished the traditional "middle-class". Financialization has led to thousands of people in professional jobs being unable to buy a house - a development which would have appalled Thatcher with her advocacy of property-owning democracy. And the professions themselves have been degraded by managerialism - hence gruelling hours and the loss of autonomy.

Neoliberal capitalism has done much more damage to the traditional English way of life than "cultural Marxism" or "wokesters" ever have.

In fact, the very use of those terms by the right is a sign of a temperament antithetical to small-c conservatism. Whereas small-c conservatism - as expressed by Burke or Oakeshott - advocates cool-headed scepticism and attention to empirical fact, talk of "wokesters" or "cultural Marxists" is that of fanatics who live in their own head or (what is just as bad) get their ideas of the world not from the evidence of their own eyes but from the scribblings of billionaires' gimps.

Not that their fanaticism stops there. Liz Truss was propelled into government by a small cult. And her belief that a tax-cutting Budget could boost growth even when the economy was close to full capacity was a denial not only of conventional macroeconomic thinking but also of Burke's conservative dictum:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Her ill-fated premiership was at one with Brexit in this regard. The conservative, wrote Oakeshott, is "cool and critical in respect of change an innovation", preferring the tried to the untried. Brexiters, however, were the opposite of this - fanatics for change who, in most unBurkean fashion, over-estimated the capacity of government to achieve a satisfactory post-Brexit settlement.

"We tolerate monomaniacs, it is our habit to do so; but why should we be ruled by them?" asked Oakeshott, adding that goverment should "protect its subjects against the nuisance of those who spend their energy and their wealth in the service of some pet indignation."

In all these respects, therefore, the small-c conservative should be antipathetic to today's Tory party and to the neoliberal capitalism it (partially) represents.

Which leads to a puzzle. Ms Birbalsingh went on to commend National Conservatism as a grouping of small-c conservatives. Its defining features, however, seem to me to be not hostility to Brexit, Truss and neoliberalism but to migrants, "gender ideology" and "wokesters". Yes, there are complaints that policy-makers have put "the abstract goal of global free trade ahead of the economic welfare of all citizens." But the new right is defined more by culture war issues than by an antipathy to actually-existing capitalism.

Part of the reason for this is that conservatives love what they have come to know, which leads to Scruton's point*:

The disquiet over immigration [is] the result, it seems to me, not of racism, but of the disruption of an old experience of of home, and a loss of the enchantment which made home a place of safety and consolation. (England: An Elegy, p7-8)

This, however, runs into two problems. One is that migration isn't the only thing that's disrupting our old experience of home. So too (for example) is the environmental change caused by water companies and climate change. We would therefore expect anti-migration sentiments to be correlated with support for green policies. Whilst this is true in some cases, such as some nimbys or Zac Goldsmith, the opposite is more often the case: Ukip, for example, is campaigning against decarbonization policies and wants to reopen coal mines.

The second problem is that those areas that have actually experienced more immigration - and therefore one supposes more disruption of home - are more accepting of it; it was areas with low migration who were more likely to vote for Brexit, for example.

This might be because fear is worse than reality. Or it might be because of something else.

That something is that the idea of home is, for some, not merely an empirical matter of one's local area and the people and places we see every day but is instead a reified and ideologized notion. "Britain" is a bundle of symbols and myths, such as of a benign Empire or wholly heroic Churchill. And this "Britain" is identified with rich, white (and southern) people so that Russian agents are more "British" than Muslims or trades unionists. Which is a legacy of an old attitude described by C.B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: "the poor were not full members of a moral community...They were in but not of civil society."

Such patriotism is thus a love of a cleansed and mythologized nation.

Which is paradoxical. For me, one of the attractions of small-c conservatism is its empiricism and distrust of abstractions and dreams. And yet small-c conservatives on the right too often invoke just such an abstraction - that of what Benedict Anderson called an imaginary community. This is not to say they are flat wrong: we all need myths and legends. It's just to say that we can and should separate small-c conservatism from anti-migrant sentiments. To fail to do so is to miss the many strengths of conservatism.

* Scruton went on to add that "the right of asylum is an untouchable provision of the English law", putting him to the left of today's Tories.

Comments

[Tim]

See the excellent paper by Gerry Cohen (a Marxist, of course) on why he is a conservative: https://academic.oup.com/book/4117/chapter-abstract/145857931?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[Tim]

I think there's also a vid of him giving the paper as a lecture on YouTube, which might be worth tracking down.

[Jan Wiklund]

The best book I have read about this is Craig Calhoun: Roots of radicalism. Studying radical movements he found that they were manned by conservatives - people whose life was dependent of tradition and found themselves in the clutch of annihilation when the old ways disappeared. So there we had the phenomenon of conservatives advocating complete revolution, so that nothing would change.

He also has a chapter about what this tradition is that they defended - the old ways of doing things where one could be in full control of things, instead of losing autonomy and being shuttled to and fro by e.g. despotic foremen.

This kind of conservatism gave rise to the Labour Movement, and to every peasant revolution of the 20th century. He didn't study environmental movements, but do look at the family farmer international of today, Vía Campesina, which is the strongest proponent today of biological food and a strategic partner of Friends of the Earth. They are true conservatives wanting to continue their traditional lifestyle. And at the same time political radicals.

[Laban]

"the opening up of English institutions to predators of all nations"

I'd say the opening up of Britain to predators of all nations is a pretty big loss.

"those areas that have actually experienced more immigration - and therefore one supposes more disruption of home - are more accepting of it; it was areas with low migration who were more likely to vote for Brexit, for example."

Does not compute. Doesn't it just mean that there are fewer natives left in those areas to vote for Brexit?

Not that it did us much good, Boris celebrated his win by handing out a million visas in the year to June 22. Instead of Poles we're getting Francophone Africans.

If we'd had our current bipartisan mass immigration policy in the early 18th century, we'd never have had an Industrial Revolution.

"The main textile-buying organisation has said Britain will be short of half a million hand-loom weavers by 1730, unless migration controls are relaxed"

"Young people are increasingly turning away from equine-related employment, the coal mine owners said this week. Without men to lead animals round the horse-gins, mines will be flooded. The owners are calling for up to 100,000 Turks to be allowed in to fill the posts"

[Scurra]

"Katherine Birbalsingh recently tweeted something insightful:"
I guess there's a first time for everything.

[rsm]

Were the previous blog's comments closed prematurely? Can I respond to Blissex here? "those who win bets about "fictitious goods" can use their winnings to buy lots and lots of real goods." Why can't we give everyone a strong basic income so that they have access to a minimum decent standard of living, at least? Couldn't the rich still find expensive positional goods to buy? As people get richer, don't they satiate on real goods anyways and spend more and more of their earnings on financial goods, anyways?

Our blogger says in this blog: "Financialization has led to thousands of people in professional jobs being unable to buy a house"

Wasn't the outcome of mortgage-backed securities innovation that lots of people got houses, cheap? What if the Fed hadn't jacked up interest rates, provoking some mortgage defaults that got overblown into a panic about a looming default wave that never materialized but fear of which prompted fire sales? If the Fed had bailed out Lehman Brothers like it bailed out Silicon Valley Bank, would all those people still be in their houses provided by financial innovation?

[Blissex]

«The conservative disposition, wrote (pdf) Michael Oakeshott, "is averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation."»

Out blogger here seems to suggest that political conservativism is driven by the ideology of conservations but that to my seems a ridiculous idea, because:

* As obvious in this quote as "change" usually means less for some, usually insiders, but more more for others, usually outsiders.

* Political conservativism is all about protecting the interests of insiders, and resisting change is a tool to that.

Also "conservatives" usually become quite radical when a lot of change is required to protect the interests of insiders, as well summarized in the saying "tout changer pour rien changer" (change everything to change nothing).

«preferring the tried to the untried. Brexiters, however, were the opposite of this - fanatics for change»

That is one of the most ridiculous claims here, because the fantasy of many Brexiters was to *revert* change, and Make Britain Great Again by returning to "Splendid Isolation", as in several centuries before 1973.

One of the reasons why imagining that political conservativism is based on conservative ideology is ridiculous is evident here: if change is to be opposed, which change should be opposed? The entry into the EU or the exit from the EU? "the loss of music teaching in state schools" of the return to lower taxation this facilitates?

Conservative ideology is ridiculous because it is simply impossible to oppose all changes, and if one opposes changes selectively, that's not conservativism, it is simply protecting certain interests and not others.

[Blissex]

«those areas that have actually experienced more immigration - and therefore one supposes more disruption of home - are more accepting of it; it was areas with low migration who were more likely to vote for Brexit, for example.»

That's seems to me a silly and superficial point because:

* Brexit was not synonymous with anti-immigration sentiment, but many brexiters truly and sincerely fantasized about "sovereignty" as if it were a matter of loud declamation and not material power.

* Areas with low immigration often are poor areas because immigrants target areas with many jobs, and vice-versa, and many lower income people voted for Brexit to protest against being screwed by decades of neoliberalism.

* Areas with low immigration are often areas of areas of high emigration to the areas with more jobs also targeted by foreign immigrants, and they voted Brexit because foreign immigrants outcompeted them in the job markets of high immigration areas and the housing market by being eager to accept low wages and more doubling up.

* Some areas of low immigration are such by being so affluent that they are unaffordable to foreign immigrants, and some affluent people voted for Brexit because while being very much in favour of foreign immigration they were outraged that EU immigrants were given the same civil rights as english citizens and even some political rights, including in practice the right of residence.

[Staberinde]

It seems to me that the Tories are given greater licence for radicalism because (1) they never refer to it as radical, and (2) the party name frames the radical as conservative.

By contrast, whenever something radical is proposed on the Left, its radicalism is touted as a key feature - thereby alienating a great many people who are small-c-conservative in the Oakshottian sense who might otherwise support it.

The simple lesson ought to be: always present the radical as the conservative, as common-sensical, and in tune with the romanticised national myth. Then you can have all the things.