Neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism—cultural, moral and epistemological.
The future of Western civilisation will depend on how well the present can mobilise the intellectual resources of the past to meet the challenges of the future. Today, we are threatened by an unprecedented array of external adversaries and dangers, ranging from Islamist terror and Russian or Chinese aggression to the fall-out from failed states. We also face internal threats—above all the collapse of confidence in Judeo-Christian values and democratic capitalism. Can either the Left or the Right rise to the challenge of the present crisis? Or are both political traditions mired in self-destructive mind-sets that prevent them from grasping the scale of the task, let alone reversing the decline?
I want to begin with the Right, because the crisis of conservatism in Europe, America and here in Australia seems too deep to be explained by the vagaries of individual personalities or parties. Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world. When Theresa May, a strong prime minister in this tradition, took office two months ago after the vote for Brexit, she felt the need to make gestures to the nanny state: an “industrial policy” and an “equality audit”. Why does she think the British state, whose record of central planning and social engineering is lamentable, should repeat the follies of the past? Could it be that Mrs May still feels the need to appease the gods of socialism, in which nobody, least of all she, still believes? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the same phenomenon is observable everywhere. Conservatism as a living tradition, a coherent conceptual framework for freedom under the law, has been hollowed out and filled with the detritus of defunct ideologies.
Much of what is popular in so-called “populism” is drawn from the discarded stock of conservative thought, dressed up in revolutionary rhetoric. A good example is patriotism, which has always been at the heart of conservative theory and practice, but is now expressed by politicians of the centre-Right only gingerly, accompanied by apologies and caveats, leaving the demagogues with their cynical appeals to xenophobia to exploit the natural pride that people feel in their country. Two centuries ago, Samuel Johnson already made the distinction between true and false patriotism when he famously remarked: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He probably had in mind William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Chatham, known as the “Patriot Minister”, who was by no means a scoundrel; but we have plenty of false patriots who are. What has made them plausible, however, is the feeble expression of true patriotic pride by mainstream conservatives.
The nation-state is nothing to be ashamed of, especially those of the Anglosphere, and there is no virtue in politicians making apologies for historical events that took place before they or the putative victims were born. There is a phoniness about the way some liberal conservatives now talk about the past: for them society is no longer, in Burke’s immortal formulation, “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. Instead, it is a perpetual conflict between the old and the young, the not yet past and the only just present, in which right is invariably on the side of the latter, the newcomers. It is a society in which the sagacity and generosity of age are not only denied their due, but positively excluded from consideration, in favour of the principle that the youngest are wisest. The Left is now less inclined than the Right to worship youth; the Bernie Sanders phenomenon is by no means unusual. What makes this pursuit of the ignis fatuus of novelty so counter-intuitive is that we live in ageing societies, the older members of which are both more prosperous and more likely to vote.
