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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I want a party that believes in small government, low taxes, personal freedom, freedom of speech, preventing and prosecuting crime, and protecting our borders.
Is that coherent enough for you?
That’s not coherent – that’s popularism so doesn’t count.
You must be one of those right wing extremists my belovéd Beeb tells me about.
Yup. One of my work colleagues compared me to Hitler.
Off topic, went to the Tate Modern today for first time since the pandemic of lies – I’m sure they all have masters degrees and above average IQs but the number of masktards was shocking. They have almost died off on trains.
Up here in t’ Norf it’s only the seriously mentally ill and nasty champagne socialist in the nappies.
Yup. There is an abundance of champagne socialists in London and environs and they are all Tate members.
Also Chinese students and tourists.
Good grief. I went to a Northern supermarket today and didn’t see one mask. Truly another country.
Try a visit to a Northern community with a large ethnic (can I say that?) community, especially Chinese, I’m sure they put their masks on before their knickers. They’re bloody obsessive.
The Chinese tend to wear masks because of pollution though, they were wearing masks a long time before covid came along.
It may be coherent. But it’s not conservative, it’s (1980s) neoliberalism (could also be called Thatcherism or Reaganism).
Easy there tiger! I agree there is no Conservative doctrine, but Conservatism IS a precise philosophy and set of principles: to preserve those social, traditional, cultural, and economic institutions, customs and manners which have spontaneously emerged over time through trial and error which consistently deliver the best outcomes for all.
In Britain among these are our Judeo-Christian morality and values, property rights, sovereignty of the individual, Common Law, trial by jury, rule of law, free market capitalism, a uniting constitutional monarchy.
Margaret Thatcher understood and embraced this as do a large swathe of the population.
The Conservative Party in Government has been since 1945, the Continuity Labour Party, save for the Thatcher era, simply carrying on Labour’s policies in Government they opposed in Opposition: State-run economy, unionisation with its closed shops and demarcation, welfare Statism, transfer of self-dependency to dependency on the State, redistributive taxation, tax/spend/borrow, bloated Government – all the institutions of serial failure aka Socialism.
So don’t say Conservatism doesn’t exist – it does in the population – but it is true it certainly doesn’t exist in the Conservative Party.
Apparently Conservatism is now called populism, which is why the global nexus of technocrats and tyrants fears and hates it and the people.
I agree conservatism exists in the citizens. Its that desire to preserve what is good in our society and to pass it on to our children so that they can live better lives than we have. Its not a fixed list, but it is a set of boundaries that are tried and tested and work for the overwhelming number of people. When we rebel, we rebel not against ‘The New’ just for the sake of it. I dont want the world to be set in Aspic. I want it to develop and improve, but I also want it protected from those things that make our lives poorer, and less enjoyable, less successful.
At a political level, the indoctrination of Generation X and the Millennials are where the votes are. People of my view tend to be older and we wont be here to put our cross in the box forever. But then, this reduces politics to brands of soap powder. Ours washes whiter than theirs, etc. Where are the politicians who believe in anything other than getting into power and staying there. You might say politics without power is just a pointless intellectual exercise, and I get that, but someone, somewhere, has to be passionate about more than what the focus groups think.
Very well put.
Once more it falls to nutjob conspiracy theorists to state the obvious.
A pity Thatcher didn’t understand Scotland.
I wonder how much this lack of conservatism since 1945 is down to the war(s)?
This is pretty rambling. Conservatism is obviously rule of law under a limited government that encourages free enterprise with minimal intervention in free markets, except in the cases of market failure. That’s pretty much the position reached prior to ww1 since when the state has pretty much continually expanded with power grab after power grab.
“obviously” – just look at the policies and habits of CP Ministers for the past 12 years or their predecessors in oppostion before that. I do not think your hypothesis is supported. Your posting reflects your hopes, I fear.
There is a perfectly coherent conservative “doctrine” – leave people alone.
The problem is that no political party exists to support this “doctrine”.
I know. They support jobs for the boys (or “huperoffspringkind” these days”?). And the people who fund them.
Conservatism implies that the critical objective is to take something that’s valued, by a group with power, from the past & conserve it into the future. Whereas liberalism puts primacy at the level of the individual in the here & now.
What we’ve seen is that radicals have become conservative as well as Conservatives. In fact all groups have become Conservative, except the traditional liberals, by which I mean people who value the individual.
We have conservative greens, Marxists, fascists, Liberals, plus the whole panoply of intersectional groupings.
There are very fee liiberals, free speakers, free traders etc left. We’re an endangered species. Maybe we need to get together & form our own group!
https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/81825/global-technocrat-cabal-exposed-through-network.html
This article explains why politics is redundant. It also explains why Hunt currently has Blackrock minders.
Brilliant article.
It gives a historical perspective to a common sentiment I find on here which is that the state treats us like an enemy and our politicians don’t really represent ordinary people.
It seems to me that the original question remains unresolved: how does a society that for the most part wants to be left alone to live and let live stand up to the relentless control of the state?
Stop voting Conservative. UKIP and the voters bullied them into Brexit so it’s not impossible.
IMHO we need, as far as possible, to ignore and deny our government – in order to make it as difficult as possible for them to achieve their goals. Use cash as much as possible, use digital services as little as possible, ditch loyalty cards, use doctors minimally and research alternative solutions to maintaining health. The unions used to work to rule in an almost exactly parallel situation – not that I always agreed with them but they were quite effective.
Tobias Ellwood dropped a revealing comment in a tweet he hastily deleted earlier today:
”The free mkt experiment is over – it’s been a low point in our Party’s great history.
The reset begins.”
Unbelievable. He is a Sunak supporter but I worry that this technocratic corporatist view characterises the Conservatives today.
They don’t deserve a single vote from the people they claim to represent.
Ellwood is a globalist and if he’s not a WEFfer then he’s a WEFfer wannabee as he makes clear every time he opens his bloody gob.
In reality Ellwood is a globalist useful idiot but at some point he will be deemed expendable and then – Boom.
Covid was, in effect, the proof, to anyone capable of seeing it, that we are still in the early 18th Century,
In the early years of the 18th century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the Whig and Tory parties were at each others throats with a fervour scarcely replicated in after years. The point is: there was an opposition – different ideas vying for the fore.
Contrast today. Parliament is one bland, anodyne mass right now, where everyone pretty well says the same.
To paraphrase the article, covid is the proof that we no longer have an effective Parliament.
As an additional fact to reinforce what James Alexander writes, until the early years of tjhe twentieth century any MP invited to become a Minister had to resign his seat in the House of Commons and seek reelection to ensure the approval of the voters in his constituency. While commonly given it was not always so and the principal was a good one. I have a book about the East Anglian Coleman family (of mustard fame) which records the progress of family members as MPs for Norwich and their appointment as Ministers.
The State is “them” and all other MPs should be “us”. Unfortunately almost all MPs today aspire to becoming a minor, dare I say irrelevant, part of Government more than they aspire to being an MP on behalf of the people.
Leaving aside the, no doubt accurate and interesting, summary of how the Conservative Party came about, I recall that it was a vaguely coherent concept 60 years ago and, perhaps, until the 1980s. It stood for Monarchy, smallist state, strong defence and law and order; it was patriotic. Several of these qualities were not shared by all CP MPs but they were very widely supported by the members and supporters of the CP.
I am still unclear when the political class as a whole, led by the LibDems and quickly followed by the CP, became infatuated with the EEC/EU and effectively gave up on governing our Copuntry. They seem to have not understood enough economics (a common fault among the CP) and came to believe the UK was ungovernable. The strikes and inflation of the 1960s were clearly not understood and I believe vthey wanted to be directed by someone else, enyone else, on administering the country.
Labour joined that particular party after their election loss to John Major (what a disgrace!) when they embraced the authoritarian supra- national EU.
Of course, conservatism is something diifferent from the CP. While some (now very few) Tory MPs are somewhat conservative, it was never a strong belief for them. The CP has never had a strong belief in ideas or political principles. The excessively rapid withdrawal from Empire, strongly encouraged by the USA, resulted in poor government there and a depressed government here.
What else to say. The Conservative Party is a complete waste of time. It, Labour and the LibDems are nothing more than different brands for the same thing. They are like the soap makers who compete through advertising and gimmick and not on anything else. The prices are too high because of oligopoly market power and innovation only happens whe na (much) smaller business finds something new. UK politics is the same – the existing brands cooperate to keep out new comers.
The article is largely a waste of time. It is now abundantly clear that voting is a waste of effort because the politicians are not in charge. They exist in order to present the illusion of democracy but the reality is that the country is being run from elsewhere and by people we may never know the names of.
TPTB have declared War. Every event must now be seen as a new front in the war.
I don’t know which way to go but as I have often stated –
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
No, it won’t. But it will disrupt their Agenda.
Only the person answering this question correctly, like new Alberta PM Danielle Smith, is qualified to become the next UK PM. Hihttps://boriquagato.substack.com/p/so-simple-and-so-straightforward
From “The Independent on MSN”
“Boris Johnson is coming under pressure from within his own party to ditch his attempted comeback as prime minister, amid fears that he could pit activists against MPs in a way that would tarnish the Conservative brand for a generation.”
Boris Johnson urged to drop comeback bid as he lags ever further behind rival Sunak (msn.com)
You’ve got to chuckle. By “activists” they mean party members who are entitled to vote to choose the party leader under the constitution of the party, to which MPs presumably agree when they join. Yet another case of democracy being thrown out of the window when it produces the wrong answer. Sunak and Johnson are both pretty terrible, but at this point I am inclined to want Johnson to win just to piss people off.
I would have given an uptick but for the last half sentence.
Well, I’m not a member of the party, never have been, and had I been I would have left, and if by some mad chance I had not left I would not vote for either man, or for any of the other likely candidates. But as I have no say in, and whatever happens is a bad outcome, I feel no shame in taking some satisfaction from pissing off the kind of people it will piss off, present company excepted.
I cut up my card and mailed the bits to Tory HQ, with a little explanation included.
The definition is really rather straigh-forward (although I’m uncertain if I’ll manage to word it appropriately, but I’ll try): Conservatism is being opposed to radicalism.
The radical standpoint is that man is principally perfect but hampered by unfavorable circumstances which were by-and-large just caused by historic accidents. In order to improve the situation, society must be radically transformed as dicated by some perfect theory of society how it should reallty be.
The opposing conservative standpoint is that man very imperfect and thus, fallible, and that change is principally bad because it causes disruption and its ultimate outcome will likeky more often than not be worse then what we already have due to man’s fallibility. Traditions are good, because they’re really collections of recipes known to work, essentially, inherited wisdom. They should thus only be changed if unavoidable and only to the degree they absolutely must be changed.
Afterthought: One could regard the radical standpoint as illogical: The present unfavourable circumstances are the outcome of men in earlier times honestly trying to improve things. Hence, if that didn’t work, why should a new radical transformation work out better instead of just resulting in a somewhat different set of unfavourable circumstances?
Very well put. It’s similar to a definition I’ve seen Thomas Sowell use.
I think I got that mostly from somebody who posted it here.
Not convinced, sorry.
The Conservative (originally Tory) Party in the 19th century was the party representing the landed gentry. The Liberals represented the merchants. So one part for each of the main power centres in the country.
Politics then was seen as the means of balancing competing interests, not being about ideas. (Hence the phrase, still sometimes heard today, of standing for parliament “in the Conservative interest”.)
Today conservativism really stands in opposition to revolution, not in opposition to liberalism. The Left want to transform society, to remake it. Conservatives want to resist that, believing that change should only be accepted of there is an overwhelming case for it
Margaret Thatcher was not a Conservative. As Roy Jenkins observed, she was really a Gladstonian Liberal. Today’s Conservative Party is broadly an alliance of Gladstonian Liberals and toffs. Which perhaps explains why it is so fractured – the interests of the two sides no longer coincide.
Interesting points raised. Could you point out evidence that the Conservative Party is made up of Gladstonian Liberals (classical liberalism not modern liberalism) and toffs.
The Conservative Party will always let you down if you believe in individual freedom, living within your means, balanced budgets, the rule of law, the market economy as opposed to corporatism, the nation state, the traditional family unit, freedom of speech, localism and control of our borders/immigration.