Here we are again. Politics offers us the amusement of the diversion summarised poetically by King Lear as, ‘Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.’ Truss is out. Kwarteng is out. Hunt is in. Johnson may win: he may lose. Sunak may win: he may lose. Mordaunt may try for something. A compromise may be arranged. But let us be clear about one thing. The name Conservative is no criterion for anything any of them is likely to suggest.
What is ‘conservative’?
It is the name of a party, thus capitalised: Conservative.
What is ‘conservatism’?
There is a phenomenon, which we will call x. This x is the resistance of society to the taxations and coercions of the state.
In order to make sense of this it is worth imagining a scenario involving two characters, State and Society.
State says, ‘Do this!’
Society says, or, more likely, thinks, ‘Why?’, and ‘No!’, and, reluctantly, ‘Let’s get on with it then.’
State is irritable, wants things to be done immediately, wants to create Society in its own image. Society wants to resist this, while making as few concessions to State as are compatible with good order. Society has a longer sense of time than State.
State is a word for king, prince, lord, sovereign, government, constitutional democracy, etc. It is a word for a singular thing. Society is a word for a multitude, the people, us: it singularly summarises something which should never be seen as singular.
What happened was that x, something which was natural, inchoate, atavistic, primitive, inarticulate, and outside politics, was articulated by some clever men in the early nineteenth century, given the name ‘conservatism’, and brought inside politics.
Politics in England is confused. It is confused, for instance, by the distinction of Government and Opposition within Parliament. This is a trick. Originally, Government was State, a singular thing in the centre, and Opposition was Society, the entire world outside it. Opposition was based on x. In the 17th and 18th centuries some honest commentators (and some unscrupulous statesmen) called them Court and Country. But Opposition was always fractured, splintered, various. (Good opposition should never be unified. Government should speak with one voice; Opposition never should.)
Court was the ‘junto’ or ‘cabal’ at the centre: the power centre dominated by King (Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, George I) along with important ministers (Clarendon, Danby, Harley, Sunderland, Walpole, etc). It was usually considered corrupt. And why not? It was corrupt. Country was everyone else. It was usually considered honest, since x is honest, whereas y, the innovations and extractions of the rulers, to which x is the response, are usually matters of force and fraud.
This distinction is at the root of all populisms. Populism is basically the opposition of Country to Court.
Everything became muddled when Bolingbroke, resentful of Walpole’s dominance of Court, attempted to create a Country party. What he wanted to do was brilliant: an open conspiracy. If Walpole was the original corrupt statesman, inside the system, Bolingbroke was the original unscrupulous statesman, outside the system, trying to come in. He wanted to take Society, honest, not corrupt, and use it to cast the Court party to one side, by making Society into the State. He failed. Whigs ruled for another twenty years, until cast aside by George III for the Tories. But the system was oligarchic, whether Whig or Tory, and remained unruffled and unreformed, until the Great Reform Act of 1832: which was an attempt by Whigs to respond to the French Revolution by taking their own ideas seriously, and reform the system in favour of greater inclusion of Society into State.
It was around the same time, in 1826, that Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse joked about the existence of ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ standing against ‘His Majesty’s Government’. The joke was immediately recognised to be the truth of the system. Government and Opposition were no longer Court, within, and Country, without: both were within the same system, standing over against each across the despatch boxes. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a wonderful fiction, which was that politics would be carried out within the House of Commons, and relayed to everyone by newspapers and managed by elections and eventually organised political parties.
Conservatism is a word invented in the 1830s. It originally meant: ‘Those who were against opening up State to Society but now have changed their minds at least to the extent of accepting the opening up: though they still remain committed to holding onto as much of the old order as possible.’
So originally ‘Conservatism’ was compromised, even corrupt. Men had opposed the French Revolution and the Reform Act, but now they accepted them. They had been convinced, not by Truth, but by Time. And ‘conservatism’ became a word for the attempt to recognise the political significance of time.
(The word ‘conservatism’ makes most sense when there is still some memory of the moment when time became politically significant. The further we drift from the 18th Century the less sense it can possibly make.)
Conservatism has always been ambiguous. By the middle of the 20th Century – sufficiently distant from Burke’s Reflections and any angst about the French Revolution – commentators like Michael Oakeshott and Samuel Huntington came along to say calming and shrewd things about conservatism. In fact, they were inventing new justifications for it. It was, said Huntington, a ‘situational’ doctrine. What he meant was that it had no core or essence. Everything would depend on situation. And the reason is obvious enough. One can only conserve what is available for conservation. It was, said Oakeshott, holding on to whatever one has – in the present. It was nothing to do with the past. Now, what both Oakeshott and Huntington did was to take this word, which had originally been about the political significance of time, out of time: or, rather, to emphasise only the present. No more was conservatism about past historic; now, it was only about present continuous.
But, originally, conservatism had been a word about something we had lost, and was now in the past.
Truly, then, ‘conservatism’ should carry with it a memory of the politics of before 1789: but if we are too distant from 1789 then this has almost no meaning at all: and so ‘conservatism’ becomes a present-centred politics, of ‘holding on to whatever we have’. But ‘whatever we have’ can be anything. It is a dark historical irony which means that conservatism can be the politics of conserving anything – including bits of Gladstone’s, Lloyd George’s, Attlee’s and Blair’s legacies, not to mention Lenin’s or Gramsci’s.
Now, I said that x is resistance to be driven by our rulers. It is the natural disposition of Society. It is the natural response of Society to the State.
This natural thing x was named ‘conservatism’ by some intrepid politicians after the French Revolution. And then, very cleverly, it was brought into the State, into Court, into Government and called ‘conservatism’. There was now a Conservative Party. This is, everyone says, the oldest and greatest ruling cabal in all the world: the most ruthless entity, concerned with power, all those clichés. But no one really says what the problem is with the Conservative Party. It is that it took a name which was an appropriate name for Society or Country hostility to State or Court and turned it into a state or court party.
The Conservative Party has been a paradoxical means by which a Court can impose itself on Country. Occasionally, it finds itself obliged to pay attention to Country. For instance, Brexit. Cameron, like everyone else of the Court, was opposed to Brexit. The Country wanted it. Johnson temporised. His instincts were actually more ‘conservative’ in this sense than Cameron’s (in seeing the obligation to pay attention occasionally to Country). But any credit Johnson achieved by Brexit was lost by Covid. Covid was, in effect, the proof, to anyone capable of seeing it, that we are still in the early 18th Century, that there is a Court and a Country: with the difference that Court has spent the last three centuries since Walpole ‘diversifying’ and ‘engaging with outreach’, so to speak, in such a way that it has dragooned half the population – the higher (sic) educated (sic) half – into Court politics: using various means: chief amongst them financial inducement and ideological capture via various politically correct convictions. (Ian Robinson defined ‘political correctness’ unforgettably as ‘the official beliefs of the ruling class’.) Finally, one of Court’s greatest tricks is in, at times, using the word ‘conservative’ – the word for that original x which was our resistance to the Court.
This history is all extremely complicated. Conservatism, obviously, owes something to Bolingbroke, the original unscrupulous statesman, and to Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution. But, as everyone knows, Burke was a Whig: and Burke hated Bolingbroke. The lines are all twisted and fractured. Words offer an apparent continuity. But the continuities embodied and gestured at by the word ‘conservative’ are delusive: they are part of the trick by which former statesman attempted to respond to real situations. These situations are gone and conservatism remains: but in our situation in which everything is so very late, or postmodern, and where the most ‘conservative’ position appears to be agreement with Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism or Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations, all of these newspaper articles about whether Johnson or Sunak or Truss or anyone is ‘conservative’ enough or in fact ‘liberal’ are simply worthless.
We might as well use words like Guelph and Ghibelline to describe our contemporary politics, which would at least have the advantage of being so unfamiliar we would have to think about what they mean. The Conservative Party is, in large part, a conspiracy against thinking about what conservatism means. So there is no point using words like ‘conservatism’ to think about Conservatism.
Dr. James Alexander is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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If you feel threatened by a group of ladies carrying out a vigil on behalf of a lady raped and murdered by a policeman then maybe you’ve made the wrong career choice? But what other job in the UK offers a psychopath the opportunity to indulge their blood lust against innocent, defenceless civilians? Maybe these poor threatened coppers could go and volunteer to join Putin’s army?
“Maybe these poor threatened coppers could go and volunteer to join Putin’s army?”
If this is sarcasm it misses the point. If you are serious you have a faulty understanding of the Ukrainian situation.
So Putin’s army are not brutalising innocent civilians?
Innocent civilians are brutalised in all conflicts. The argument made by Russia is that they’re aiming to stop the brutalisation of innocent civilians in the east of the Ukraine, by demilitarising and denazifying the country. Worth remembering that this is after eight years of attempts to resolve diplomatically, during which thousands died in indiscriminate shelling; very well documented and not really in dispute.
While there is always the chance that elements in any military ‘go rogue’ and commit atrocities, it is not in the Russian state’s interest to cause unnecessary suffering in a country that sits on their border. So I believe them when they say they are trying to avoid killing civilians. They are not trying to conquer the country, despite what western talking heads say. They don’t want it – they just want it to not be a threat to them, which it categorically was and increasingly so.
I doubt any of these coppers would last an afternoon in Putin’s army. What you and many others seem not to realise is that Russians feel existentially threatened by the West and for good reason. They have been looted, undermined, humiliated, ignored, interfered with, attacked via proxies, blamed for things they had nothing to do with, vilified, lied about, deceived, and disrespected for the entire post-Soviet period. They have had enough; it’s a catastrophe that Ukraine is now feeling the brunt of this, but ultimate responsibility lies with the criminal gangsters in Washington, who have only ever seen Russia as a target for exploitation. Those days are over.
I haven’t read the article in full so these comments are based on the above synopsis.
Given the utter stupidity of the comments quoted by various members of the police gang members I seriously wonder if their mental faculties had been properly evaluated prior to employment.
A large crowd of predominantly women gather at a vigil to remember another woman who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a police gang member and some women direct verbal anger at the attending police. Perfectly understandable.
Clearly the most senior copper in attendance did not have sufficient intelligence to tell his gang to back off which would have been the most sensible course of action. Oh no, the vigil had become an anti police protest. What the firkin hell did the police expect?
A gang of police surround a crowd of peaceful women mourning the death of another woman and then voices are raised! Plod didn’t see that coming? Good grief.
A crowd of women are surrounded by a gang of police who decide their vigil has become an anti police protest and who decide to wade in and make arrests.
Of course there are bad apples but Sarah Everhard was FAILED by the police who recruited the murderous Couzens. His psychopathic nature had not been detected during recruitment so the anger of the protesting women is understandable.
The women were breaking C1984 rules.
FFS.
Some senior coppers should have lost their jobs over this.
What a bunch of mendacious, petulant pansies.
Very well said HP. Especially the last sentence
Thank you CG.
Interestingly, as a teenager (nearly 50 years ago), I remember commenting to my dad that the two worst male bullies in our year had joined the police force.
My dad (born in 1918) said “it was ever thus!”
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