Of Anglo-Saxons and Anglophilia

Daniel Larison writes: 

I don’t attach much importance to this ginned-up controversy of the day, but there are a few things I would like to add to this “Anglo-Saxon heritage” debate. No one would seriously dispute that America has a British cultural and political inheritance. Russell Kirk wrote at length on the British culture that Americans inherited and reproduced in our literature, laws, and form of government. The American constitutional tradition draws heavily on the precedents established in Britain during the 17th century, and the origins of some our own political persuasions can be traced to political quarrels between the vying Country and Court factions of 18th century Britain. None of those inheritances and affinities required a close U.S.-U.K. relationship of the sort that has existed for the last seventy years.

The U.S.-U.K. relationship was remarkably poor and adversarial for at least the first sixty years following our independence in spite of the significant cultural ties that existed between our countries. Anglophobia remained strong for many more decades after that. Acknowledgment and respect for America’s British cultural inheritance in no way require anyone to indulge in the more recently-minted enthusiasm of Anglophilia in U.S. foreign policy. The silly controversy this week concerns whether one candidate should be viewed as more of an emotional Anglophile than another, since there are no meaningful or practical policy differences between the candidates that touch on the U.S.-U.K. relationship.

My response to the contest over who makes a better emotional Anglophile is: “who cares?” Why should it matter who has the stronger personal or emotional attachment to another country? That doesn’t mean that the person will be more capable of maintaining a better relationship with that country’s government. It’s possible that the emotional attachment will get in the way of relating to the other government and understanding the country as it exists in the present. Insofar as American Anglophilia depends on an understanding of Britain that is decades out of date, it will lead to more misunderstandings rather than fewer. At its worst, Anglophilia just becomes an excuse for imposing American priorities on Britain.

That is what occurred to me as I was reading Aaron David Miller’s article on Obama and Israel. Miller writes:

Unlike Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel. As a result, he has a harder time making allowances for Israeli behavior he doesn’t like. Obama relates to the Jewish state not on a values continuum but through a national security and interest filter [bold mine-DL].

If Miller’s interpretation is correct, I fail to see why this is a bad thing. The U.S.-British relationship would benefit from a similar approach. Indeed, during the last British general election and for several years before that the leaders of the coalition’s two parties had made a point of distancing themselves from an understanding of the “special relationship” in which Britain acted as the reliable deputy without ever receiving anything in return for its support. They were calling for a relationship that was still constructive and friendly, but not one-sided or blinded by sentiment. Similarly, Americans can cultivate good relations with Britain without feeling obliged to indulge in all of the rituals of Anglophilia.

Once, there was a Toryism, quite distinct from the Conservative Party as a vehicle, which was closely associated with Keynesianism and with support for the Commonwealth, and which was not without its Eurosceptical side. It was therefore extremely hostile to Thatcherism on at least three grounds. It is true, though, that occasional representatives of this school, such as Auberon Waugh, Stuart Reid and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, have seen a certain form of European federalism as the last hope.

It had grave reservations about the American Republic, the embodiment of classical liberalism; those who would wish that Republic to be something else need to accept that that would entail a most radical critique of its fundamental documents and of their authors. It honoured the memory of the British fallen in Palestine, to whom there is scandalously still no memorial anywhere. And it often had a Recusant or a High Church affinity with the ancient indigenous communities of Catholic, Orthodox and Oriental Christians in the Middle East, while the Assyrians, and those Arab Christians who have become Anglicans or Lutherans since the nineteenth century, have long been the objects of a certain tendresse on the part of the more staunchly Protestant traditionalists in the Church of England.

This type of Tory had close ties to those Americans who sought to locate the great American experiment within a deeper and broader British, especially Burkean, tradition which was not without influence on their use of the Republican Party as a vehicle for Keynesian economics and for progressive social measures. Those Americans resented the excessive influence of any ethnic lobby over American foreign policy, so that their Anglophilia and Burkeanism were by no means always the same thing as a pro-British approach to the international affairs of the day.

They fiercely resisted any such influence by any foreign state as such. They honoured the equally un-memorialised memory of the USS Liberty. And they were in every sense in touch with the thinking of those universities in the Middle East which had nurtured Arab nationalism as foundations of their own "mainline" American Protestant denominations, which were themselves still defined by such basic orthodoxy as kept them within global Anglicanism, "Calvinism", Methodism and Lutheranism.

Both the British (including the wider Commonwealth) and the American sides of the family had such connections to the region that they would have had no sympathy whatever with, for example, any Islamist insurrection that had already purged one Syrian city of its Christian population and which sought to do the same across the whole country.

But I do have to disagree with Larison's enthusiasm for the present Conservative Party, which has already seen its Defence Secretary forced to resign because he had been using his office as the base for a parallel foreign policy on behalf of the American neoconservatives and the secular Israeli Far Right. Its Education Secretary, who is if anything even more of that tendency, is tipped as its next Leader. It is up to its eyeballs in the excrement of that Education Secretary's patron, Rupert Murdoch.

It might change a bit if a President Romney really did turn out to be a culturally Anglophile and constitutionally Burkean practitioner of America First; after all, Brent Snowcroft is also a  Mormon. But Romney almost certainly is not going to do that. Neither, then, is the Conservative Party. Its flagship policies of abolishing the House of Lords and of extending legal marriage to same-sex couples hardly mark it out as an obvious vehicle for Burkeanism, anyway.

However, in the famous words of  Robert E. Dowse: "From the beginning the ILP attempted to influence the trade unions to back a working class political party: they sought, as Henry Pelling states: 'collaboration with trade unionists with the ultimate object of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of Parliamentary power.' The socialism of the ILP was ideal for achieving this end; lacking as it did any real theoretical basis it could accommodate practically anything a trade unionist was likely to demand. Fervent and emotional, the socialism of the ILP could accommodate, with only a little strain, temperance reform, Scottish nationalism, Methodism, Marxism, Fabian gradualism, and even a variety of Burkean conservatism. Although the mixture was a curious one, it did have the one overwhelming virtue of excluding nobody on dogmatic grounds, a circumstance, on the left and at the time, which cannot be lightly dismissed."

Substitute "English patriotism" for "Scottish nationalism". Substitute "Catholicism" and "Radical Orthodoxy" for "Methodism". Clarify that "Marxism" is of the kind that is not really at all, since it sees itself as going all the way back to John Ball and Wat Tyler, at least as much rural as urban, and committed to the parliamentary, the municipal, the industrial and the general communitarian processes rather than to revolution, with the proletariat at most leading the other classes, if not simply working side by side with them. Take out that "even". Take out the suggestion of "curiosity".

Do all that, and the Labour Party of Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman looks like the ILP for the present age. Complete with its parliamentary wrecking tactics towards the Lords Reform Bill, without which the Conservative "rebellion" would be procedurally impossible. Complete with what has always been its promise of a free vote on same-sex "marriage", which both Coalition parties may yet whip. Complete with what is now its very anti-Murdoch stance indeed.

Labour alone now represents the Union as a first principle, any concept of English identity, a universal postal service bound up with the monarchy, the Queen's Highways rather than toll roads owned by faraway and unstable petrostates, Her Majesty's Constabulary rather than the British KGB that is the impending "National Crime Agency", the National Health Service rather than piecemeal privatised provision by the American healthcare companies that pay Andrew Lansley, restoring both energy independence and the economic basis of paternal authority by reopening the mines, keeping Sunday special, the historic regimental system, aircraft carriers with aircraft on them, no Falkland Islands oil to Argentina, a referendum on continued membership of the EU, the State action necessary in order to maintain the work of charities and of churches, and the State action necessary in order to maintain a large and thriving middle class.

An ideal partner, properly so called, for any resurgence of that tradition which sought to locate the American Republic within a deeper and wider Burkean tradition, which sought on that basis to ameliorate the effects of capitalism, which resisted the excessive influence of any ethnic lobby or foreign state over American policy, which was therefore able to distinguish its own heritage from any such influence, which honoured the victims of foreign aggression even if it annoyed any such lobby or state by doing so, and which remained in close contact with the beneficiaries of the more beneficial forms of historical American involvement in the Middle East.