They Dare, They Dare

Much to my surprise, several of those named in my post on Thursday entitled Go On, I Dare You have been in touch. I won't name people, since for some reason they've all asked me not to. I don't know why.

I'm not surprised that sitting MPs are seeking re-election, nor that certain other individuals are planning to give it a go (not always their first go) next time. And no, in answer to a third party, I didn't really expect a former longstanding MP, who has now retired, to attempt a comeback.

But I have been especially interested to hear from those who say that they intend to take up my challenge and put their views to the electorate as such. I will be watching out for them. So far, they have all been Eustonites; for that and many other reasons, I have a few more thoughts on the Euston Manifesto.

First, in condemning racism, why is no mention made of the demonisation of the white working class, a trend at least as pernicious in Britain today, and far more prevalent and respectable, and on which at least one Eustonite (Julie Burchill) has written importantly?

Secondly, having made the apology that only Communists (within or beyond any Communist Party as such) need make in relation to the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, why is no apology made for Trotskyist support for the American-led wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, a key moment (possibly the key moment) in the emergence of neoconservatism? I have probably answered my own question there, of course.

And thirdly, to which "conservative" voices (I have far more doubts about "liberal" voices), exactly, are Eustonites willing to listen, and why? I hope that they mean the "conservative" critics of capitalist, libertine, decadent, philistine warmongering: the High Tory traditions in the United Kingdom and the Old Commonwealth (and perhaps especially the Red Tory tradition in Canada), paleoconservatism and Agrarianism in the United States, Gaullism and French monarchism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and so forth.

These at least ask the questions to which the answer is the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. Will Eustonites subscribe to this definition of Socialism (since their Manifesto offers none of its own), or do they prefer some Marxist (including neoconservative) version? It does seem to matter.

And these authentically conservative traditions are as one with the pioneers of the Labour Movement, and that for the same reason, in rejecting the theory of the perfectibility of human nature by its own efforts alone and in this life alone. This rejection, so staggeringly vindicated in the twentieth (as every previous) century, is perhaps the most important conservative insight of all. Have the Eustonites attended to it?

In other words, have they, with everything thus entailed, accepted the doctrine of Original Sin, always denied outright in Judaism, and always at least downplayed to the same practical effect in the Liberal Protestantism that, through the reception of neo-orthodoxy in popular Protestantism, and through the secularisation of much Catholic thought and practice after (but not because of) Vatican II, has so heavily influenced neoconservatism?

The Labour pioneers certainly accepted that doctrine, and indeed the whole Augustinian patrimony of the West to which it is integral. That is why they, like anyone else who so accepts, could not possibly have had any part in the ludicrous, blasphemous and idolatrous human attempts to make the world anew advocated by the likes of the American Enterprise Institute or the Project for the New American Century. In a word, neoconservatism. So, what say the Eustonites? And what say The Henry Jackson Society, ostensibly conservative subscribers to so utterly unconservative a theory?