RUTHFULLY YOURS

From Austrlia but so applicable to US elections….rsk
What is a conservative to do when his favoured party’s leadership falls into the hands of a politician of no known conservative conviction? Loyalty is important, make no mistake about that. But so are values, and they are always worth fighting for.
Christopher Rath, a Young Liberal branch president, makes the following, quite remarkable confession in his Menzies House essay, “In Defense of the Establishment”:

My critics in the Young Liberals may call me an “establicon” or establishment conservative as a pejorative, but I wear it as a badge of honour. Being an “establicon” means being “dry”, it means supporting the Premier and Prime Minister, campaigning, raising money, supporting branches to grow, pre-selecting talented men and women, and fostering our best future leaders. It means loving the Liberal Party and our greatest living Australian, John Howard.

What Mr. Rath makes abundantly clear, if unintentionally so, is that he entirely misunderstands the accusation of “establiconservatism”. An establicon isn’t one who campaigns for one’s party despite personal disagreements with the ruling philosophy of its leader. Basically, and not to mince words, being an establicon means excusing oneself from the struggle for authentic conservative government on the grounds that blind support for the party is the greater good.

For instance, a true conservative could support the Turnbull-led Liberal Party while still advocating a return to conservative leadership, if not by ousting Turnbull then by pressuring him to abide by the principles of the party’s centre-right rank-and-file. On the other hand, we would expect an establicon to say that, since Turnbull and his cabinet have so far governed in accordance with broadly free-market principles, matters of cultural and social importance can be set aside and overlooked.

Let’s be clear: the true conservative is a conservative first, and a party loyalist second. He or she never sacrifices the core convictions of Anglo-Australian conservatism—civil institutions such as marriage, the Constitution, the monarchy; the sanctity of life; the preservation of Australia’s cultural identity, and so on—as a matter of convenience. He never shies from criticising those who would use the Liberal Party, ostensibly the principle vehicle for conservatism in Australia, to advance fundamentally un-conservative ends. He needn’t openly revolt against the Party’s leadership, but he ought not be cowed by the leadership either.

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are, in obvious ways, opposites: in the over-used terminology we learned from France’s revolutionary National Assembly in the 1790s, one is at the extreme “left” of orthodox politics in the Anglophone world, and the other at a version of the extreme “right”. But they also have similarities. They have both sprung surprises, one by becoming the leader of a major party and the other by threatening to. In each case they are hostile to something seen as an establishment and stand in sharp contrast to the centrist, professional politicians whom they oppose. But I think the similarities go considerably deeper than that and are best understood in terms of the sort of typology developed by Maurice Duverger, in his Les Partis Politiques, first published in 1951, although the version expounded here will be my own, rather than that of Duverger, who died last year. (Is lasting 63 years after the publication of your best known work some kind of record?)

All parties contain or relate to a number of distinguishable categories of person: these include leaders, aspiring leaders, follower-members, devotee-members, loyal voters and marginal voters. A Tory MP, for example, might be either an aspiring leader or just a follower member or both or fall into several other categories. But the relationship between these elements differs markedly between different parties and determines the nature of the party. What the Labour Party and the Republican Party have in common is that devotees are far more important than they are in other parties, though I am going to call them fundamentalists as I think that word suggests some of their more important characteristics. Therefore the central dilemma of democratic politics — compromise and win, or maintain your principles and lose — is far more central than it is in other parties. They are, of course, more or less opposite principles: egalitarian, collectivist and neo-pacifist as against individualist, nationalistic and puritanical.