RUTHFULLY YOURS

With most conservative parties split between populist and establishment wings, and with the West challenged in ways not seen in almost a century, John O’Sullivan’s Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here‘s collection of essays is both timely and instructive. Indeed, there are few better placed to reflect on the travails of the Anglosphere than O’Sullivan, who has been a key conservative intellectual for over four decades. He was Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer at the time of her Bruges oration that marked the beginning of a credible Brexit movement. In America, he edited National Review for a decade. In Canada, he helped to found the National Post newspaper. And in Australia he edited Quadrant for two years. He now runs the Danube Institute in Budapest (where I am a visiting fellow), a think-tank bringing conservative perspectives to economic, social and strategic issues; striving, in particular, to reconcile economic liberalism with social conservatism in ways that “unite the right”.

This compilation of essays testifies to a depth of insight and consistency of purpose, as well as being a good commentary on many of the big issues since Thatcher’s time. O’Sullivan brings a well-stocked mind and a genial temperament to everything he discusses. As Rod Dreher writes in his foreword, he “has a conservative’s capacity to perceive the severity of the problems about which he writes, with an Englishman’s ability to maintain good humour and sound judgment when everyone else around him wallows in despondency”. As well, he’s great on memorable quotes. A couple of examples: from Disraeli, he gives us the injunction to “read biography, for that is life without theory”; and from Thatcher, this riposte: “Reactionary? Well, there’s a lot to react against.”

His journalist’s sense of the good line and the revealing anecdote helps to make gems of most of these essays. They cover numerous topics—from Cardinal Mindszenty to the MeToo Movement—and are all highly readable; but for me, O’Sullivan is at his best writing on conservatism and the British Conservative party; plus the West and its contemporary ills. If there’s a possible gap in this collection, it’s that he has little to say about the Trump phenomenon, other than to note that it’s a reflection of a Republican Party that has lost touch with its base. In any event, O’Sullivan’s considered eclecticism is the polar opposite of the former president’s angry populism.

In a powerful essay prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests across the Anglosphere (as if poor policing in the US had any real parallels elsewhere) O’Sullivan discerns five broad similarities between the current turmoil and Mao’s Cultural Revolution: first, the deep schism within elites between more conservative and more “progressive” elements; second, the rise of tribal thinking (in our case the identity politics of “oppressors” versus “oppressed”, akin to the “true” communists versus “capitalist roaders” of Mao’s time); third, the existence of modern Red Guards in the Antifa and Extinction Rebellion mobs; fourth, the readiness of establishment entities such as big business and big sport to engage in self-criticism by “taking the knee” and embracing ESG; and fifth, the extent of semi-officially-sanctioned violence, as when the BBC reported that “twenty-seven police officers were injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests”.

He notes the distinction between the Greek idea of liberty as the right to participate in government and the more modern idea of liberty as the right to one’s own pursuits. This has led to conservative or classical liberals defending the “imperfect, partial and compromised versions of democracy, science and capitalism” that emerged from history; while radical liberals or socialists demand “mint fresh institutions of freedom that would liberate man from historical oppression”.

With much prescience, writing in 1999, he sees the collapse of Soviet communism as a “world historical victory, yet one … that was curiously muted by the West’s own moral self-doubt and in danger of being drowned out by the unabated cries of environmentalists, multiculturalists and 57 varieties of anti-Western criticism”. He speculates on the extent to which the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the West’s embodiment of universal values or was simply the victory of superior technology and market economics, concluding that it was most likely a bit of both and foreseeing the “moral certainty” of future threats to Western interests (that subsequently materialised in Islamism and Russian and Chinese revanchism).

Writing in 2012, O’Sullivan points to the erosion of democracy by global bodies, courts and NGOs. What Francis Fukuyama did not grasp with his “end of history” thesis, he says, was that a “plausible challenge to Western liberal democracy might come from within the West itself”. O’Sullivan cites the increasing constraints on elected and accountable governments from unelected and unaccountable global bodies (such as the UN and its agencies) or supra-national ones (such as the EU). Plus the increasing tendency of judges to disallow government decisions on essentially political grounds. Plus the increasing deference of governments to supposed “expert” bodies. This transfer of power, he says, “has happened in part because progressive elites at the top of mainstream political parties have happily gone along with it”.

Immigration control, he says, “is one example of policies excluded by silence”. When mainstream parties consistently ignore voter concerns about, say, very high immigration or costly policies to deal with climate change, the result is populism: “an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism”, O’Sullivan calls it. Liberalism without democracy, he says, “is an apt description of the system of government towards which the West has been moving” for several decades “and populism is the resistance to it”. As if to prove his point, the centrist establishment not only routinely denounces “populism” but denies the legitimacy of voters’ choices when they “get it wrong”, as in Brexit or the election of Donald Trump.

In another prescient essay, this time from 2001, he says that “the arrival of ever more migrants … reduces the weight and influence … in politics and culture” of the existing host people, “makes multiculturalism seem less a matter of choice than of inevitable adaptation … and fosters a society that, because it is divided ethnically and culturally, requires a political elite to manage it”. O’Sullivan plainly thinks that the replacement of a bottom-up liberalism (where decisions are made by elected governments representing the people) with a top-down liberalism (with elite-made decisions that the people are expected passively to accept) forms the “democratic deficit” at the heart of so many of our contemporary governmental woes.

While O’Sullivan doesn’t under-rate the importance of freedom (at least in the well-regulated Burkean sense), he puts love of country at the heart of the conservative creed. O’Sullivan quotes Thatcher in an unguarded moment prior to the 1979 election: “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t bear it.” Above all, conservatism is the product of respect for family, faith and country. Conservatives temper freedom with fairness and with order because that’s necessary to preserve the social fabric that they instinctively revere (unless, of course, it’s been rent by radical innovation, in which case it has to be restored).

The British establishment’s defeatism and declinism have long been a source of bafflement, from its appeasement of Nazi Germany to its ongoing sulk over Brexit, given that no country on earth has had more impact on modernity: gifting us the world’s common language, the mother of parliaments, the Industrial Revolution, and the emancipation of minorities. Naturally, O’Sullivan’s heroes, Thatcher and Churchill, were the two British prime ministers most resistant to any hint of British decline.

Thatcher, he says, was driven by a “fierce patriotism” yet “governed by a highly practical prudence”. Even so, he says, her two signature triumphs, over the Argentine invaders of Britain’s Falkland Islands dependency and over the militant coal miners who thought they could coerce the government, “ran completely counter to the usual post-war British politics of fudge, compromise and splitting the difference”. He points out that Thatcher’s success made the wider world a better place; and that unlike that other mighty exponent of British exceptionalism, Churchill, she left Britain stronger than she’d found it (although in Churchill’s defence it should be pointed out that he spent his country’s strength in defeating the most monstrous tyranny the world has yet seen).

O’Sullivan contrasts Thatcher’s modernisation project “of sound money, ending exchange rate controls, cutting taxes, building up defence, and privatisation” with the modernisation project of the current UK Tory government: “same-sex marriage, ring-fencing foreign aid, sharply cutting defence, [and] allowing the UK financial sector (still) to be regulated by Brussels”.

In one of his most recent essays (from 2022), O’Sullivan summarises our modern ills:

the growth of judicial power that overrides popular majorities and executive authority … de-industrialisation, the plight of the underclass, wage stagnation, trade protectionism, illegal and runaway immigration … multiculturalism as an alternative to a common culture, racist expressions of contempt for “whiteness” … the spread of effectively independent administrative bureaucracies … restrictions on free speech and academic freedom in universities, the expansion of the concept of “hate speech” and, most sinister of all, the selective enforcement of the criminal law.

In this at least, populism is an attempt to “bring our governing elites to their senses”.

His 2017 John Howard Lecture has some useful advice for the conservative side of politics in Australia: what he christens “Loughnane’s law”, after the Liberal Party federal director who first enunciated it, namely that “Liberals tend to win when the leader of the Liberal Party is also the leader of the conservative movement”. My version of this is: “Labor-lite Liberals lose”. The consistent lesson, at least of federal elections (think 1975, 1996 and 2013), is that the Liberal-National Coalition wins when it’s a clear alternative rather than a weak echo of the other side.

As it happens, with his successful opposition to the government’s proposed constitutionally entrenched race-based indigenous Voice, his commitment to nuclear power as the only feasible way to get to net zero emissions, and his robust defence of national symbols such as Australia Day, Peter Dutton is turning out to be a Liberal leader very much in the Menzies–Howard mould.

Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here
by John O’Sullivan
Academica Press, 2023, 423 pages, US$45

The Hon. Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015