Conservatism After Capitalism

Like Rod Dreher, I stand outside the conservative mainstream, and can therefore see more clearly the things that matter. That “modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character”. That “big business deserves as much scepticism as big government”, to say the very least. That “culture is more important than politics and economics”. That “a conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship – especially of the natural world – is not fundamentally conservative”.

That “Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract”. That “beauty is more important than efficiency”. That “the relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom”. That “politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives”. And that, with Russell Kirk, “the institution most essential to conserve is the family”.

Ah, yes, Russell Kirk. The transcendent order, based in tradition, divine revelation, and natural law. Joy in the “variety and mystery” of human existence, including “natural distinctions”, with property and freedom closely linked. And faith in custom, convention and prescription, recognising that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, out of respect for the political value of prudence. With Taki, I prefer “peace with honour to proxy wars, Western civilisation to multicultural barbarism, Christendom to the European Union, and Russell Kirk to Leon Trotsky”.

Therefore, I believe in national self-government, the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts. In local variation, and historical consciousness. In family life founded on the marital union of one man and one woman. In the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West. In agriculture, manufacturing, and small business. In close-knit communities, law and order, and civil liberties. In academic standards, and all forms of art. In mass political participation within a constitutional framework.

In the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. In the constitutional and other ties among the Realms and Territories having the British monarch as Head of State. In the status of the English language (not instead of other local tongues rooted in the soil, but not subject to them, either), and the rights of its speakers both throughout the United Kingdom and elsewhere. And in the rights of British-descended communities throughout the world.

Economics is about means to those ends, and to define politics in terms of economics is not to be a conservative, but to be a Marxist. I am therefore opposed to the “free” market, which, as the great anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers pointed out, corrodes all conservative things to nought. And I am therefore opposed to the neoconservative war agenda.

Though occasionally inescapable to defend our people or territory, wars are colossally expensive to taxpayers. They embitter or entrench old enemies while creating new ones. They are massively disruptive of the moral and social order: everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started during the War; we laugh now about the old ladies from whose pantries the Normandy Landings supposedly started, but it was and is no laughing matter. There is always a baby boom after a war, so after the War came the Baby Boom, still imposing itself economically, socially, culturally and politically, with no sign that it is going to stop any time soon.

There were warnings about that in the 1930s. But then, there were warnings about a lot of things in the 1930s. Far from the War’s hastening the emergence of what came to be seen as the post-War settlement, in reality it delayed that already well-advanced emergence by an unnecessary six years.

Saving the Jews was no part of the motivation for the War at the time, and if it had been then the War would have been the most spectacular failure, even more than it was in any event when it ended with Poland handed over to Stalin. Stalin was plotting a pogrom at the time of his death, since anti-Semitism, which was the norm at every level in Britain, France and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, remained so in the Soviet Union throughout that Union’s history. Nevertheless, there was anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism: the Holocaust, in which by no means all victims were Jews, could not have happened if the German public had not been distracted by the War.

The point of Armed Forces is precisely to prevent wars, by deterring them. Nothing could be less conservative than the attempt to make the world anew, in accordance with some academic blueprint, by means of global war: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll at the barrel of a gun. The West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. I should die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore.

But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then I hate it as much as does any Islamist. Including the Islamists to whom, whatever they may pretend, the neocons have been allied from 1980s Afghanistan through 1990s Bosnia to today’s Turkey, Kosovo, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia (whence came the 11^th September 2001 attacks), Xinjiang and elsewhere.

Including by taking out the bulwark against them in Iraq, with that in Syria next on the hit list. Including in the form of Jundullah, the neocon-backed Islamist terrorists against the present government of Iran. Including in Libya, where the unelected Islamist government’s first act has been to legalise polygamy, starting as it means to go on. Including in “the Sixth Caliphate” of Tunisia, where Ennahda will govern either alone or in exactly the sort of Islamist-Leninist alliance that British neocons rightly castigated the Stop the War Coalition for being. And including by means of the capitalist system that cannot function without unrestricted global migration.

It is no wonder that the neoconservative wars have been and are most enthusiastically promoted by media moguls who, far from being conservative figures, are somehow all and yet none of Australian, American and British, or somehow all and yet none of Canadian, American and British. Those media have been the prime movers in turning first New Labour, and then also its imitators who have taken over the Conservative Party, into what most of Britain’s supposedly conservative newspapers have long been: more loyal to the United States and to the State of Israel than to the United Kingdom, a position as unconservative and as far removed from Labourism as it is possible to imagine, and without parallel in any comparable country, if in any country at all.

Just as the neocons have no problem with Islamists, so they have no problem with Ba’athists, cheerfully encouraging and assisting the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI) that moved during the Iran-Iraq War to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which until its own overthrow in 2003 provided most of the PMOI’s money and all of its military assistance. No, it is not made up of Arabs, and Ba’athism is supposed to be a form of Arab nationalism, founded, like so many such forms, by a Christian.

But if there are Russian Nazis, increasingly in Israel because at least they are not Arabs, then there may as well also be Persian Ba’athists. And there are. In fact, in backing both the PMOI and Jundullah, the neocons are backing both the Ba’athists and the Sunni Islamists in relation to the same country. But it is that country. So that’s all right, then. Isn’t it? Never mind that small parties and Independents have a great deal more ballot access in Iran than in many a United State of America.

Instead, I fight for the universal and comprehensive Welfare State. For the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment. For fair taxation. For full employment. For the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. For co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies and similar bodies. And for every household to enjoy a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

If “there is no such thing as society” (and yes, Margaret Thatcher really did say that), then there can be no such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. There cannot be a “free” market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography. There cannot be unrestricted global movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour. American domination is no more acceptable that European federalism. The economic decadence of the 1980s is no more acceptable that the social decadence of the 1960s.

The principle of the planned economy came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberal Keynes and via Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from an ultraconservative Catholic, Colbert. The principle of the Welfare State came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberals Lloyd George and Beveridge, and via the Conservative Governments of the Inter-War years, from an ultraconservative Protestant, Bismarck.

Both had and have much affinity with the socialisme conservateur by which Metternich sought to bind together the several classes and the many ethnic groups of the Habsburg Empire, against the German-nationalist bourgeois supremacism and triumphalism of the liberals in their secret societies, which logically went on to support the Nazis and which are now well-received by parties of government in Israel.

Those who looked to the union-busting criminality of pirate radio, which was funded by the same Oliver Smedley who went on to fund the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs, were enfranchised in time for the 1970 General Election, gave victory to what they thought were the Selsdon Tories, and went on to support first the economic and then the constitutional entrenchment of their dissolute moral and social attitudes by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

There was no Keynesian closed shop among economists in the 1970s, but those who screamed themselves to prominence on the claim that there was have now created a neoliberal closed shop with the catastrophic consequences that we now experience, and which we shall continue to experience while almost the only economics taught to undergraduates or published in peer-reviewed journals seriously maintains that the way out of recession is the State’s contrivance of even more unemployment and of even less spending power.

As we nurse our wounds, we shall remember those who pulled the triggers. But we must not forget those who loaded the guns, or those who manufactured the bullets. Nor will we.