In a world agog with labels and categories we too often leave
important ideas behind. With paleocons, traditionalists, neocons,
Leocons, libertarians, classical liberals, anarcho-capitalists,
distributists, and agrarians, the right can be as bad as the left in its
fetish for classification.
One group that defies easy definition are the women and men we might call Christian Humanists. In 1939, the New York Times
gave their philosophy a lineage. “This is the theme recurring in much
of the writings of some of the foremost thinkers of our day, such as the
late Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and [Nikolai] Berdyaev,
Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot.” The newspaper of record might have
added others: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their circles in Britain,
as well as philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson in France.
“Humanism is a tradition of culture and ethics,” proclaimed the
English historian Christopher Dawson, “founded on the study of humane
letters.” The moment St. Paul quoted the Stoics in his mission to
Athens—“In Him we move and live and have our being”— he bridged the
humanist and Christian worlds. (The line came from a centuries-old Stoic
hymn, “In Zeus we move and live and have our being.”) From that point
forward, Dawson argued, any separation of one from the other led to what
we must consider “dark ages.” Just as “man needs God and nature
requires grace for its own perfecting, so humane culture is the natural
foundation and preparation for spiritual culture.” Christianity and
humanism mix so readily, wrote Dawson, that they “are complementary to
one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the
order of being.”
Regardless of the labels Christian Humanists attached to
themselves—some, like Babbitt and More, were “New Humanists”; others,
like Maritain, “Integral Humanists”—all of them sought to remind the
world, as it turned toward gulags, ideology, and terror, that the human
person, no matter how fallen, carries with him a unique face of the
infinite.
“In this twentieth century of the Christian era the real contest is
between the power of transcendent faith and the power of the totalist
revolt against order,” Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind,
wrote in 1963. “In our hour of crisis the key to real power, to the
command of reality which the higher imagination gives, remains the fear
of God.”
Kirk spoke for all the Christian humanists of the century—disparate
thinkers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, E.I. Watkin, Owen
Barfield, Frank Sheed, Etienne Gilson, and John Paul II, to name a few,
who upheld the traditional concept of each human person as an
unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom, deeply flawed but also a
bearer of the Imago Dei.
In their many works of faith and scholarship, these thinkers analyzed
the innumerable horrors of the 20th century and argued that the
solution was really quite simple: to embrace the moral and beautiful
image found in each soul and to reclaim God’s gift to us, our humanity.
“Man is man because he can recognise spiritual realities,” T.S. Eliot
wrote, “not because he can invent them.”
As the label “Christian Humanist” suggests, these writers, poets, and
philosophers defended liberal education as the only true education. The
liberal arts—connecting ancient, medieval, and modern man—liberated one
from the immediate problems of this earth and linked each person to a
greater continuity that transcended time and space. The liberal arts
leavened the reason of each person, conferring citizenship in a Republic
of Letters—what Cicero and the Stoics labeled the Cosmopolis and what
St. Augustine would call, in a specially Christian understanding, the
“City of God.” Any other form of education merely forced a stifling
conformity on a person, making him less what the Creator uniquely made
him to be.
That was their common ground. Yet at best, these women and men formed
only the loosest of alliances. Intellectual as well as personal
differences separated them. C.S. Lewis especially had difficulty with a
number of his fellow Christian Humanists. “Stick to Gilson as a guide
and beware of the people (Maritain in your church, and T.S. Eliot in
mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a
fad,” he wrote to a Roman Catholic nun who would later become president
of St. Mary’s College in northern Indiana. Christopher Dawson, for his
part, assumed—probably correctly—that Lewis had taken much of the
argument of his Abolition of Man from Dawson’s own 1929 work Progress and Religion.
Before a reconciliation in the 1950s, when both served on the
committee to revise the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Lewis loathed
Eliot for his modernist poetry. “Surely it is natural that I should
regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil,” Lewis wrote to Paul Elmer
More. “His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work
by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by
reading the Waste Land but that most men are by it infected with chaos.”
Perhaps most damning, according to Lewis’s lights,
Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained I have my wonders how a job in the Bank of England—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds … the Parisian riff-raff of deviation, allied Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.
Even within Lewis’s group at Oxford, the Inklings, there was much
disagreement. When American scholar Charles Moorman wrote of them as a
collective entity, Lewis’s brother Warnie recorded in his diary, “I
smiled at the thought of Tollers”—J.R.R. Tolkien—“being under the
influence of Moorman’s group mind.” (On the other hand, sometime member Owen Barfield thought a group
mind might be ideal. One should pursue the “sober effort to build up and
maintain a common stock of thought rather than to startle with a series
of sparkling individual contributions,” he wrote in 1940. To promote
truth and defend the ideals of the West, Barfield continued, a group of
men should create “a commonwealth of the spirit, in which there is no
copyright.”)
Like Lewis, Dawson had mixed feelings about Maritain but liked
Etienne Gilson. Certainly the Augustinian Dawson felt little sympathy
for Maritain’s extreme Thomism. The 20th-century neo-Thomists,
especially Maritain, tended to believe that religious emotion was
dangerous, while rationality was an essential precursor to faith, as all
reason would lead back, inevitably, to God. This was a belief that
Dawson found simply wrong. He explained his opposition in a 1957 letter:
It is, of course, necessary to define this philosophy of culture against the absolutism of the Neo-Thomists and the relativism of the moderns (I do not know what else to call them, for they now disavow the name of positivist and materialist too). On the whole I would say that my thought is in the tradition of the medieval English scholasticism—a theological absolutism combined with a philosophical relativism, and it is also the tradition of the French Catholic traditionalists like Bonald and de Maistre.
While Dawson revered St. Thomas and considered him the pinnacle of
medieval thought, he argued that other strains of Catholic thinking
equaled and completed Thomism.
Just as he considered the Neo-Thomists too theoretical, if not
outright ideological, they thought little of Dawson, regarding him as a
mere historian—a recorder rather than a creator. Meanwhile, Maritain
regretted Eliot’s failure to come into the Roman Catholic Church,
quipping, “Eliot exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an
Englishman.”
Politics also divided Christian Humanists. Maritain and his brand of
neo-Thomists were more pro-liberal and pro-democracy than were the
Augustinians, especially Dawson and Kirk, neither of whom held any
fondness for plebiscitary rule. Kirk feared that mass democracy served
as a pseudo-religion. “This error of perfectibility is one of the
illusions to which democracies are especially prone,” he wrote in 1960.
“A distaste for the supernatural; an excessive appetite for comforts; a
notion that all the problems of life may be solved by some simple
formula or law—these are deceptions into which many men slide in
democratic times.”
Still, the fragmented Christian Humanists of the 20th century—whether
Augustinian or neo-Thomist—drew upon each other’s works frequently, and
some, especially the members of the Inklings, were close friends.
Dawson and the poet Roy Campbell met with the Inklings as a whole or
with various members from time to time. Eliot thanked and cited Dawson
in many of his philosophical and literary works, and his “Four Quartets”
seems to represent Dawson’s arguments regarding culture in poetic form.
Etienne Gilson also acknowledged his profound admiration for Dawson, especially his Making of Europe and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.
That volume, wrote Gilson, “provided me with what I had needed during
forty years without being able to find it anywhere: an intelligent and
reliable background for a history of mediaeval philosophy. Had I been
fortunate in having such a book before writing my [Spirit of the Middle Ages], my own work would have been other and better than it is.”
Tolkien’s mythological Middle-earth work often parallels Dawson’s
work from the same period, and Tolkien drew on Dawson frequently in his
own academic papers. And Dawson edited one of Maritain’s books. Kirk
perhaps best summarized and synthesized this diverse group’s thought.
“In that Christian Humanism,” he wrote in 1957, “it is altogether
possible, lie the norms which could restore nobility to letters and
order to a sea of troubles.”
A group of men of this intellectual caliber and traditionalist
mindset could never have arisen in any recent century prior to the 20th.
It was only then that the madness of the French Revolutionaries, the
dominance of scientism and positivism, dehumanized technology, and the
anti-religious ideologies of the socialists and utilitarians—all the
worst qualities of the centuries preceding—combined to bear malicious
fruit. The Christian Humanists, each brilliant in his own way, arose in
the 20th century as if an answer from Grace, and fought the good fight,
attempting to re-infuse the culture with Christianity.
Today the whirligig of modernity and post-modernity swirls us closer
and closer to the abyss. At home, our culture drowns in its pornographic
advertising, clothing, and entertainment. With some exceptions, our
politicians pander to the lowest common denominator as they dismantle
the republic in favor of a flabby empire without purpose or meaning.
Indeed, for many of our leaders, “democracy” has become a term of
religious significance and intensity, and “freedom”—not the natural law,
as St. Paul told the Christians of Rome—“is written in the hearts of
every man and woman on this earth.”
With
even fewer exceptions, our academics remain trapped in their own
subjective realities, publishing only for each other. The average
American student knows that he “is worth something” and “is as good as
everyone else,” but he could never name the last serious book he read,
let alone one of the seven cardinal and Christian virtues. He may well
not even know what a virtue is or that such a thing exists.
All of this should make us return to first principles and to the most
important questions one can ask: What is man? What is God? And what is
our relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does
not pretend to have the answers, but he knows these questions must be
raised. The Christian Humanist, wrote Kirk in 1956, understands that the
“past and present are one—or, rather, that the ‘present,’ the
evanescent moment, is infinitely trifling in comparison with the well of
the past, upon which it lies as a thin film.” Indeed, the Christian
Humanist understands that he is always a second away from eternity.
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.
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 11th 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.
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”.
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, again with Kirk, “the institution most essential to conserve is the family”.
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.
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, again with Kirk, “the institution most essential to conserve is the family”.
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.
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 11th 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.
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