Conservatism and Neo-conservatism

For at least the last forty years if you were to have asked a self-described conservative living in North America what conservatism was all about the answer you would have received would have been that it is about small government, low taxes, freedom, free markets, free trade, tough laws and sentences for violent crimes and a strong military. If the conservative you were talking to happened to remember he might have added the defence of the nuclear family and a traditional Christian morality and way of life.

In my country, Canada, conservatism was originally about much more than this. Canada is a country that was founded within the British Empire in the Victorian era and which developed her national sovereignty within the British family of nations without severing ties to the Crown and Britain, the way our republican neighbour to the south had, and as such inherited from the older country, the older kind of conservatism known as Toryism. Toryism was about monarchy, the institutional church, and government for the common good of a national society envisioned as an organic whole that includes past and future generations, not merely those present among us today. I have been a conservative of this older type, a Tory, my entire life.

There has been much talk in recent years of “neo-conservatism”. What is meant by this term is somewhat different in Canada and the United States, although in both countries it refers to either the espousing as conservative of ideas that were once considered liberal, the profession of conservatism by former liberals, or both.

In the United States, the term refers to a very specific group of people and a set of ideas with which they were associated. The original neoconservatives had been members of the group known as the “New York Intellectuals”, which consisted mainly of second generation, Jewish Americans who had studied either at City College of New York, Columbia University, or both in the period between the World Wars and who in that same period espoused politics that ranged from New Deal liberalism to far-left Trotskyism. After the Second World War many of these became Cold War liberals, i.e., liberals who strongly supported the West in the fight against Soviet Communism, and of these many realigned with the right in the 1960s and 1970s, to become the “neo-conservatives”. The best known among these were Norman Podhoretz, who edited the journal Commentary for decades, his wife Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, also a journalist, and his wife, historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.” As “neoconservatives” these continued to look upon the New Deal welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, the early stages of second wave feminism, and other such causes they had espoused as liberals favourably, but it is their outlook on geopolitics that is their most notable distinctive.

The American neoconservatives believe that American style liberal democracy is the birthright of everyone on the planet and that the United States has a duty to guarantee that birthright, by offering military assistance and protection to countries that have liberal democracy, fighting against and toppling the enemies of liberal democracy, and bringing liberal democracy to countries that do not yet enjoy it. For this reason, the neoconservatives believe, the United States must continue to maintain a military presence throughout the world, as the world’s policeman. This vision of a Pax Americana is rooted in liberalism, having antecedents in the war aims of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its most utopian articulation, that of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man envisions all of human history as having led up to universal capitalism and democracy and is simply the latest manifestation of the Whig theory of history.

The American kind of neo-conservatism has come under much heavy criticism during the last thirteen years for its influential role, during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, in leading the United States into the disastrous War in Iraq. While most of this criticism is well-deserved, those making the criticism seldom understand the nature of the problem with the neoconservative view of geopolitics. Critics on the left, inevitably maintain that all the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy, protecting the rights of women, and such claptrap, is just a thin veil masking the lust to grab power and resources for the United States, or the large corporations that to people of this mindset are the real powers behind the American government, from which it is assumed on the left that the neoconservative enthusiasm for war arises. In reality, however, it is precisely because the neoconservatives are true believers, in Eric Hoffer’s meaning of that expression, in democracy, human rights, liberalism, and basically all the same ideals that their critics on the left hold dear, that they feel that it is imperative that these American liberal values be exported universally.

In Canada, the word neo-conservatism is often used interchangeably with conservatism, in reference to the conservatism described in the first paragraph. The intent of this usage is to contrast what has been called conservatism for the last forty years or so, with the older Toryism. Red Tories in particular like to use the word in this way. Red Tories are people who, like myself, are High Tories of the older royalist, institutional church, and common good-of-the-organic-whole variety, but who, unlike myself, have avowed sympathies with socialism, feminism, pacifism, and other left-of-centre causes for which I have nothing but disdain and contempt. The Red Tories are quite right in saying that much of what is called conservatism today is what was called liberalism a hundred years ago, but I cannot help but observe the irony of the fact that this offered as criticism by those whose Toryism is modified by an adjective that alludes to their espousal of ideals that have also sprung from the modern well of liberalism and much more recently than the capitalism of the neoconservatives. Liberalism is not like a fine wine that has improved with age – it is more like milk that has long passed its expiry date, and been left out in the sun.

At times these attempts to distinguish Canadian neo-conservatism from the older tradition can be exaggerated in a way that can be quite misleading and which distorts the nature of the older Toryism. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Red Tories say that the older Toryism was the opposite of what is called conservatism today. Think about what that suggests regarding the first items mentioned in the description of conservatism in the first paragraph – small government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade. (1) There is a grain of truth in this when it comes to free trade – the older Toryism espoused protectionism – but if we were to accept the assertion that the older conservatism was the opposite of today’s conservatism, we would have to conclude that it was opposed to freedom and stood for big government, high taxes, and a centrally planned and bureaucratically administered economy. This, however, is laughable nonsense. Indeed, as I have frequently pointed out, the older “throne and altar” Toryism, ought to be regarded as being more favourable to small government and low taxes than contemporary North American conservatism. Toryism was born out of the defence of royal sovereign authority against those who wished to wrest it away from the Crown and to vest all power in elected legislative assemblies. The opponents of the original Tories declared themselves to be on the side of “liberty” against tyranny, but the history of the last four centuries tells us another story. What that history tells us is that the more the Crown’s authority was limited and the power of the elected assembly augmented, the larger and more intrusive government became, while taxes grew both exponentially and astronomically. (2)

With regards to freedom, the difference between the older Toryism and the classical liberalism that much of modern conservatism resembles was not that the latter supported freedom while the former opposed and feared it. It was rather a disagreement about the nature of freedom. The classical liberals equated liberty with the sovereignty of the individual, argued that the function of government was to protect liberty so defined, and declared that only democratic governments, in which each individual participates at least through his elected representative, can so protect the liberty that is individual sovereignty. By contrast, the Tory view of freedom, grounded in the thought of classical antiquity, was explained by the martyred King Charles I, in his final speech before his execution, when he declared that the liberty and freedom of the people consist in their having from their government “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own” rather than “having share in government”.

Anyone who happens to think that the liberal doctrine is more conducive to personal freedom than that of the Tory it is invited to look around him today. The idea of freedom as individual sovereignty is now being taken to the nth degree, with even such constraints on that sovereignty as those of nature and reality itself no longer recognized as valid. Thus, for example, gender is now being declared to be something that the individual decides for himself – or herself – or itself – or whatever! By consequence, liberalism is now declaring such self-determination of gender to be a right of the individual, which is to say something that belongs to the essence of the individual’s sovereignty. Since in liberal theory, the rights of the individual are what law and government exist to protect, the consequence of this will inevitably be that the legislatures and courts, will impose legal restrictions on what we can think, say or do, in order to protect such a “right”. The more the individual is declared to be sovereign, the more new “rights” are discovered, the more laws restricting our thoughts, speech, and actions are passed, so that what is called “freedom” today, often resembles a soft form of totalitarian tyranny. (3)

Contemporary conservatism, or what is called in Canada neo-conservatism, ought not to be faulted by Tories of the older tradition merely for being in favour of small government, low taxes, and freedom. It merits criticism for defining conservatism by such things, rather than by monarchy, institutional religion, the common good of the organic whole, and by such things as continuity, tradition, and established order for which the older Toryism stood, and which, as Roger Scruton argued in The Meaning of Conservatism, provide the necessary context for any real freedom to exist and flourish in a civilized society. There was nothing wrong with Canadian neo-conservatism's opposition to Canadians being taxed to death, overregulated, and treated as wards of a nanny state and it was for these things that this High Tory voted for and even took out membership in the neoconservative Reform Party in the 1990s. Where Canadian neo-conservatism did deserve censure was over the anti-patriotic contempt for Canada and wish that she was “more like the United States” that could far too often be found in its ranks, as well as the liberal equation of democracy with freedom and legitimate and accountable government evident in its wish to turn the Senate into an elected body which was such a marked contrast with the way the older Canadian Toryism defended our Westminster parliamentary monarchy, including the Senate, correctly perceiving that it and our traditional rights and freedoms, stood and fell together. (4) It was over these things that I walked away from the Canadian Alliance prior to the completion of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003.

(1) It is even less accurate to say that the older Toryism was the opposite of the other items mentioned in the first paragraph, although here too there are important distinctions to be drawn. The family that the older Toryism defended, for example, was not just the nuclear unit, but a larger, multigenerational, kinship group, headed by a patriarch. Also, the older Toryism tended to look to the organized Church for what “a traditional Christian morality and way of life” meant, while contemporary conservatism is more likely to be influenced by personal interpretations of the Scriptures.

(2) It was not uncommon in the last century for such High Tories as Anthony Burgess, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robertson Davies (as Samuel Marchbanks) to avow both a feudal, medieval royalism and an attitude of anarchistic contempt for the gargantuan, overregulating body that is the modern bureaucratic state in the same breathe, a sentiment which I heartily share.

(3) That liberalism was a doctrine that loudly proclaimed its faith in freedom while containing within itself the seeds of totalitarian tyranny was not something that was only evident after it had been brought to its apex in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Puritan progenitors of the first liberals, the Whigs, denounced the “tyranny” of the House of Stuart and proclaimed themselves to be on the side of liberty, but when they had seized power for themselves, made it illegal to participate in sports, games, and other amusements on Sundays after church, closed inns, alehouses and theatres, and banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter. In the century prior to that, the first Puritans, in the name of defending Christian liberty against “popish tyranny”, demanded that all practices that were part of the pre-Reformation tradition but which could not be shown to be explicitly authorized in Scripture should be forbidden, while Richard Hooker, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued on the contrary, that Christians ought to be free to observe, whatever practices of the pre-Reformation tradition could not be shown to be explicitly condemned in Scriptures. Hooker’s thinking, which helped lay a foundation for both a distinctive Anglican theology and Toryism, to any rational person, allowed a greater amount of freedom than that of the Puritans which eventually gave birth to liberalism.

(4) See, for example, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).

Change and Reaction

Conservatives are fortunate to have enemies who are always trying to help them out. The foes of the conservative – liberals, socialists, bleeding hearts, leftists, do-gooders, and everybody else who falls under the general umbrella of “progressives” – are always trying to tell us who we are and what our role is. Or rather, they are always trying to tell us who we are not and what our role is not. The “true conservative”, they tell us, is never a reactionary. There are those within the conservative camp who would echo this sentiment, particularly those on the left wing of conservatism, but I think this is a mistake, not only because by doing so we are allowing our opponents to define us and thus giving them an advantage over us, but because what they are telling us simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

Indeed, the only way the claim that the true conservative is never a reactionary would make sense would be if we accepted the definitions of conservative and reactionary which state that the former is the person trying to preserve the present status quo and the latter is the person trying to restore the status quo ante. If we accept these definitions, then, of course, a conservative and reactionary could never be the same person for their purposes are at odds with each other. These definitions, however, are notoriously woefully inadequate.

It is not that difficult to see what the Left gains by insisting upon this claim. Progressives see themselves as being the advocates of socially beneficial change. They grudgingly acknowledge a legitimate role for the conservative as the voice of caution, to argue the con-side against their changes as they propose them, but who, once they change has been made, is supposed to accept it as being written in stone and never attempt to reverse it. If the conservative accepts this limitation on his role then all the progressive has to do is obtain enough support at any given time to make a particular change and then he need never worry about defending that change from conservative attack ever again but can indeed, rally the conservatives to defend his changes against the reactionaries who would seek to undo them. It also boosts confidence in the progressive vision of history in which every change introduced by a progressive is seen as a positive step, moving history along in a linear fashion, towards a future, better, and more just society.

For the conservative to accept the role assigned to him by the progressives, however, would be to reject some of the most basic principles of conservatism. This is one of the reasons why I prefer the older term Tory. The newer label, conservative, has connotations of caution, risk-avoidance, and resistance to change, all of which are good enough in themselves but none of which, singularly or taken together, make much of an argument against the progressive definition of the role of the conservative. The same can hardly be said of the term Tory which from the seventeenth century has been the party of church and state, standing for apostolic authority in the former and the rights and prerogatives of the monarch in the latter. There is no way that this can be reduced to a mere defence of whatever the status quo happens to be at the present movement.

Indeed, the history of the Tories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very much gives the lie to the claim that a conservative – or a Tory at any rate – can never be a reactionary.

The antecedents of the Tories in the late seventeenth century were the Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War in the 1640s. They lost, the king was arrested, charged with treason in a mock trial conducted in a Parliament from which all of his supporters had been removed by the force of arms by the triumphant New Model Army of the Puritans, then murdered and martyred. After a mercifully short interregnum in which, under the evil dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans cancelled Christmas and Easter, stripped the churches of everything that was visually or audibly aesthetically pleasing, closed the theatres, forbade harmless amusements on the Lord’s Day, and basically went out of their way to make everybody gloomy and miserable, Charles II was restored to his father’s throne and the Church of England with its bishops, King James Bible, and a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer that would become the standard edition was brought back, in what was the most spectacular and successful act of reaction in the history of the world – the English Restoration.

Then, when the Tories lost the battle against the Whigs in 1688, and James II was ousted from the throne by Parliament and replaced by his son-in-law and daughter, those Tories who remained loyal to the House of Stuart, including the non-juror bishops of the Church of England, became the reactionary Jacobites who tried unsuccessfully to restore James and later his son Charles to the throne. While the case can certainly be made that the Jacobites acted unwisely it can also be argued that they were the most true to the principles of the Tory Party. Such later High Tories as Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth, while loyal to the kings of the Hanoverian succession, nevertheless looked back on the Jacobites with sympathy and romanticism.

At any rate, within the space of a single century (the last Jacobite rising was in 1745, less than one hundred years after the death of King Charles I) the Tories had sought to restore two different status quo ante’s, and whatever we may think of the Jacobite cause and movement, the first of these, the Restoration, is certainly an argument in favour of reaction.

The folly of the idea that the Tory or conservative is allowed to oppose progressive changes as they are put forward but must accept and defend them once they are made is quite easily demonstrated. If followed to the letter this would mean that we could never attempt to correct a change that has proven to be a mistake. It is no good saying “you cannot turn the clock back”. Not only is this a bad metaphor – the statement is not even literally true – it is a deadly one. To use another metaphor – a more apt one – when you have swerved off a road and are heading towards a cliff it is suicidal to shrug your shoulders, say “what’s done its done” and keeping heading in the same direction.

Perhaps the most bizarre argument I have ever encountered against the idea that a conservative could take the reactionary position was based upon the fact that conservatives are not traditionally opposed to all change but accept change that is in accordance with the rule of law and which is done “little and little”. This, however, is actually an argument against the declaration that conservative and reactionary are mutually exclusive because that declaration is based entirely upon the idea that the conservative must support the present status quo against all changes.

Yes, the conservative accepts certain kinds of change. His position is not that all change is bad – just that the onus of proof lies upon the person who proposes an innovation. The changes he accepts are lawful, accomplished slowly, and on a small-scale. More importantly, however, for a conservative to accept change it must be change that is consistent with and better yet a means of continuity. Furthermore, a conservative can accept changes of a sort that no progressive ever accepts – changes that acknowledge that a progressive innovation has been a mistake and go back to a way that was time-honoured, tested, and true. It is precisely because a conservative can accept this kind of change that he can be a reactionary.

Indeed, Tory principles demand that the conservative be a reactionary in certain situations. The Tory regards society as an organic whole that includes past and future generations as well. He does not accept simple, unmixed, democracy, whether as a constitutional form, or the idea that the majority at any present moment should rule. The voices of past and future generations must be heard as well and since the future generations cannot yet speak the past generations must be their voice against the present generation whose primary concern is always its own interest in the here and now. Therefore if some demagogue or some persistent group of activists is able at a given moment to obtain enough support in the legislative body or even the general public to make a change that goes against the wisdom of the ages embodied in the voices of the past generations passed down to us in tradition, the Tory has the duty to work to undo this change – to take on the role of the reactionary.

What is Conservatism?

The Meaning of Conservatism, 3rd Edition by Roger Scruton, South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine’s Press, 1980, 1984, 2002, 206 pp., $17

By the middle of the 1970s the Left was triumphant throughout the Western world. Marxism was orthodoxy in the university classroom even in classes where politics and economics had no discernable relevance. A battery of fraudulent new departments had been or were in the process of being launched throughout academia which purported to be devoted to the scientific study of this or that but which in reality were simply venues to allow gripes and grievances against Western civilization and its traditions and institutions, to be vented. Governments had committed themselves to the goal of reducing inequality through taxation and social programs, passed regulations and established bureaucratic agencies dedicated to the extirpation of non-egalitarian ideas and attitudes, and more-or-less declared war on those institutions which were believed to foster these non-egalitarian ideas and attitudes, especially the family and the church. They had further committed themselves to a combination of anti-natalism (sexual emancipation, birth control, abortion, etc.) and open borders, liberal immigration, that together comprised a population replacement program that bore an ugly resemblance to Bertolt Brecht’s joke about a Communist government dissolving the old people and electing a new one. Vocal opposition to this program was effectively suppressed by accusations of racism backed, in many countries, by race relations laws.. The poverty of third world countries was regarded among the intelligentsia as the legacy of European colonialism and imperialism rather than the work of the incompetent and kleptocratic dictatorships that had in so many cases replaced the imperial governments and so Western countries were expected to give large amounts of money in foreign aid to prop up those very incompetent and kleptocratic dictatorships.

Then the late 1970s saw a resurgence of the Right that in North America would manifest itself in the Reagan presidency in the United States and to a far lesser extent in the Mulroney premiership in Canada. In the United Kingdom, the resurgence began with Margaret Thatcher’s taking over the leadership of the Conservative Party from Edward Heath in 1975 and culminated in her premiership from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher’s rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party marked the end of the “post-war consensus”, i.e., the agreement of the Conservative Party leadership not to challenge, cancel or undo any of the policies, programs and changes introduced by the Labour Party that had more-or-less been Conservative policy since Clement Attlee’s Labour Party trounced Winston Churchill’s Tories in the 1945 election after World War II. After thirty years of this depressing capitulation to socialism, Thatcher’s leadership breathed new life into both the Conservative Party and the United Kingdom, but she and her ideas met with much skepticism and criticism from other Conservatives, and not just from the “Wets”, i.e., those like Heath who were ideological supporters of the post-war consensus. Statesman Enoch Powell and journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, both High Tories who had little love for the post-war consensus, were highly skeptical towards Thatcher from the beginning, although both later supported her in the leadership crisis that ultimately saw her ousted both as leader of the party and Prime Minister. (1) Among traditional Tories, there was concern that Thatcherism, with its rhetorical emphasis on the free market, personal choice, and democracy, powerful weapons as these concepts were against the enemy of socialism, would replace conservatism with liberalism or American republicanism.

One Tory who had such concerns opted to express them by writing a book outlining the concepts of conservatism. This was Dr. Roger Scruton, philosopher, polymath, and at the time professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in the late 1970s, as the Thatcher Conservatives were preparing to take office, and it was first published in 1980, shortly after they had come to power in the 1979 election. In Gentle Regrets, the collection of memoirs in which he tells how he came to hold his views, he said that writing this book made him persona non grata in both official Conservative Party circles and left-wing academia. It was also the book upon which his well-deserved reputation as the leading conservative philosopher of our day was built.

Scruton describes his book as a work of dogmatics and acknowledges that in writing it, he was doing something conservatives are usually unwilling to do, i.e., express the conservative instinct or attitude in a formulaic fashion, except in situations of crisis. This reflects a fundamental distinction he makes between conservatism on the one hand and both liberalism and socialism on the other. Conservatism is about real societies as they exist in the past and present, whereas liberalism and socialism are obsessed with finding the formula that will produce an ideal society in the future. In this distinction can be seen the influence of the thought of Michael Oakeshott, Britain’s leading conservative philosopher of the generation prior to Scruton. Oakeshott’s influence, like that of Edmund Burke and G. W. F. Hegel, can be found on almost every page of this book, and Scruton appropriately concluded the preface to the first edition by saying that “it satisfies the first requirement of all conservative thought: it is not original, nor does it try to be”. (p. xii)

Conservatism, Scruton says in his first chapter, begins as an instinct or attitude that arises out of a person’s sense of belonging to something larger than himself, not in the sense of a cause directed towards some ideal, but in the sense of an established social order, that is older than he is and will hopefully outlast him. This order might be that of any number of institutions, such as clubs or churches, but ultimately, at the political level it is that of the person’s society, country, or nation. The conservative instinct consists of a person’s identifying himself with this order, and feeling within himself its “will to live” (p. 10). Conservatism is not, therefore, an unthinking resistance to change, but a reflective rejection of change that would harm or kill the social order, and acceptance of change that helps to preserve and continue that order. Whereas liberals and socialists see politics, i.e., the exercise of government power, as means to external ends, freedom and social justice respectively, the conservative sees society’s government, as containing its own end, the health and life of the social order.

The conservative view of society, therefore, is that it is a living organism. In his second chapter, Scruton contrasts this with liberalism’s view of society as a contract, explaining that liberalism fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between freedom, rights, justice and the individual on the one hand and society and its order on the other. Drawing upon Kant’s understanding of justice which requires that we treat others as ends in themselves and not merely means to ends of our own, Scruton explains that contracts consists of reciprocal promises between individuals, which bestow rights upon each other in the sense of a claim upon the other person to fulfil his promise. This, Scruton says, cannot be the genesis of society, because the existence of an established social order is a precondition for this kind of bargaining.

It would be absurd, he points out, to regard the obligations which parents have towards their children and vice versa in contractual terms. The bonds within a family are transcendent, beyond the realm of contracts negotiated and agreed upon by self-interested individuals, and our duty to fulfil the obligations conferred by those bonds is a matter of piety rather than justice. This is true as well, he argues, of the bonds within civil society. Echoing Burke’s remarks about the “little platoons”, he maintains that the sense of loyalty and affection that we develop early in life towards our families and home, we later extend to the other social establishments we find ourselves in, and ultimately to our societies, nations, and countries in the form of patriotism.

Allegiance is the term for this feeling of affection and loyalty, which begins at the level of the family and rises, in patriotism, to the level of civil society, and one of the most important topics in this book is the relationship between allegiance and authority. If power is the ability to command obedience, authority is legitimate power, i.e., power that is held and exercised by those with a recognized right to hold and exercise it. It is the nature of allegiance to recognize that authority, in our parents as children and in the government of our society as citizen-subjects.

Scruton dismisses the Marxist theory that the concepts of legitimacy and authority are merely ideological constructions designed to justify the holding of power by those who so hold it as being of no practical political relevance regardless of whether it is true or not. Without these concepts we are left with sheer, naked, coercive, power and so clearly we need them. It is the way in which we conceive of our society that helps us to understand it, find meaning in it, and participate in it, that is truly important to politics, and here the idea of legitimacy is vital.

The liberal view of legitimacy, however, that it can only come from a contractual arrangement, is unacceptable to the conservative for the same reasons that the contract theory of society is unacceptable and in his third chapter, in which he discusses the political expression of civil society and its binding customs, culture, and traditions in the state and its constitution, he argues against the related modern concept in which democracy is equated with legitimacy. Democracy, like the social contract, is regarded as dubious by the conservative because it “privileges the living and their immediate interests over past and future generations” (p. 47). It is only by showing respect for the dead, he argues, that the interests of those yet to come can be safeguarded in the present, and therefore for the conservative, democracy must not be absolute but subject to limitations, and must “take place in the context of institutions and procedures that give a voice to absent generations”. (p. 48). This is one reason why conservatives are historically and traditionally, monarchists, because traditional monarchy is just such an institution:

Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood merely as representing the interests of the present generation. He or she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. If the monarch has a voice at all, it is understood precisely in the cross-generational way that is required by the political process. Monarchs are, in a very real sense, the voice of history, and the very accidental way in which they gain office emphasizes the grounds of their legitimacy, in the history of a people, a place and a culture. (pp. 48-49)

The equation of democracy with legitimacy is not the only modern sacred cow that Scruton butchers in this book. Earlier in the same chapter he showed the fallacy of the concept of human rights, which proposes the existence of rights in the absence of any tradition and social context that might secure them and give them meaning and which separates the rights people claim for themselves, from the rights they reciprocally confer on others, in which their own obligations and duties lie. Later, in the next chapter, he takes on the liberal/libertarian idea that the legitimate function of the law is limited to protecting citizens from harm and securing their rights, the “humanitarian” idea that the purpose of law and the penal system is to rehabilitate the offender, and the egalitarian concept of “social justice”. The first is too simplistic, abstract and individualistic. The law is the will of the state, the public face of civil society, and so is an expression of society’s moral consensus. The state punishes crime, the breaking of the law, in order to protect society, to which crime is an expression of antagonism. This view of the penal system, and not the idea of rehabilitation, is actually the more humane, for the rehabilitation view, by separating punishment from the crime to which it is a response and orienting it towards a desired effect in the person punished, subjects the latter to a process that has no clearly defined limits. “Social justice” is an affront to natural law and justice, being based not on the reciprocal rights and obligations that naturally arise between people in ordinary social existence, but on the unnatural ideal of equality.

In each of these cases, Scruton’s arguments against a popular modern notion, arise naturally out of his basic concept of conservatism as the instinct to maintain and preserve the health and life of the social order. This is true as well, of the arguments he presents when he turns to economics in his fifth and sixth chapters. Here he argues for private property against Marxism and socialism in general, but not on the basis of the rights and freedoms of the individual or purportedly scientific economic theory in favour of the free market, as Thatcher and Reagan did. His starting principle is that ownership is a human necessity, because it is through ownership that people are able to perceive physical objects through a lens other than desire, an essential precondition for relating to and interacting with other people in society. Property begins, he argues, not with the factory or marketplace, but with the home, where the family lives and accumulates its belongings. Marxists attack family and property together, and conservatives, who perceive natural affection in the family as the source of the feeling of allegiance that creates the bonds of civil society, must defend the two together against this attack. Scruton defends property, against the British socialist ideas of wealth redistribution as the goal of taxation policy, public ownership as a valid alternative to private monopoly in industries that are not essential public services, and the expropriation of accumulated wealth in his fifth chapter, and against the Marxist defamation of property as the source of social alienation in his sixth. In doing so, he presents the conservative position as a “qualified endorsement of modern capitalism”, rather than the unqualified endorsement of free-market ideologues, and the task of the conservative as being the preservation of the social order from the forces that threaten it in capitalism and socialism alike.

From this, Scruton moves on to offer a defense of the autonomy, not of individuals, but of institutions like the sports team, the family, and the educational institution. By autonomy he means their right to pursue their own internal ends, rather than be compelled to serve external ends imposed upon them from above, such as those of egalitarianism which is particularly destructive because these institutions, like society itself, are fundamentally hierarchical. It is through institutions like these that we participate in society, and it is the job of the state, as the governing body of society, to guard and protect their autonomy rather than to impose external ends like those of egalitarianism upon them. This leads to a discussion, in the eighth chapter, of how authority and power come together to form establishment, the conservative ideal, in both the state and the autonomous institution of society, and finally in the last chapter, of the boundaries between the public and private life of a society.

The implications for public policy of these conservative doctrines, all of which are expressions of that same basic conservative instinct to preserve the health and life of the larger self which is one’s society, are myriad, as Scruton himself says in an axiom towards the very beginning of the book. The purpose of the book was not to prescribe policy, but to express the beliefs regarding life, society, and government that arise out of a conservative frame of mind, and this Scruton has done marvellously. Whatever effect this book may have had on its author’s career, it earned him his place beside Hooker and Burke, Disraeli and Oakeshott, among the leading theorists of conservative thought.

(1) In Powell’s case the support was from the outside. He had left the party in protest over Heath’s compromises, particularly regarding the Common Market, but indicated that he would return if Thatcher retained the leadership, which, of course, she did not.

Tory Economics: Part One

“Are you a Calvinist or an Arminian?”

This is a question that theological students in the colleges and seminaries of North American evangelical Protestantism are fond of asking of one another. There is an assumption underlying the question that if one is an evangelical or even a Christian one must be either one or the other. This assumption is foolish for many reasons. When the Western Christian tradition split in the Reformation, the Protestant side itself divided into several traditions. Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, (1560-1609), was himself a theologian in the Reformed tradition that had been established by John Calvin (1509-1564) and his followers. Arminianism, in other words, is historically a dissenting opinion within Calvinism. While the controversy between mainstream Calvinism and Arminianism over predestination and free-will affected the way these matters were discussed in other Protestant traditions, neither Lutheranism, the oldest and least radical of the Protestant traditions, nor the Anabaptists, the most radical of the Protestant traditions, could be accurately described as either Calvinist or Arminian. Furthermore, the beliefs of the majority of North American evangelicals probably line up with neither the Arminian Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 nor the Calvinist canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619). There are those serious Calvinists and Arminians who insist that if you do not belong to their camp you must belong to the other but I cannot think of any better response to the absurdity of such a view than that given by fundamentalist educator Bob Jones Jr. who wrote:

Because a man refuses to believe in the doctrine of limited atonement, it does not follow that he believes that it is possible for a Christian to lose his salvation. This is as stupid and illogical as saying that a Jew who buys meat from a Protestant butcher believes in the infallibility of the pope. (1)

A similar sort of false dichotomy can be found in the discussion of political economics where it is widely assumed that if one does not support capitalism he must therefore support socialism and vice versa. This false dichotomy is particularly problematic for conservatives. Capitalism is liberalism expressed in economic terms. Indeed, economic liberalism is the more precise term for the theory of laissez-faire or free market economics. It was socialist philosopher Karl Marx who coined the word capitalism as a term of abuse for the industrial economic system that he wished to see overthrown and replaced by socialism in a revolution of the workers. If economics is a contest between capitalism and socialism then when the conservative approaches economics he must find himself faced with the unpalatable choice between liberalism and socialism.

Just as the theological discussion of predestination and free will is not limited to the two options of Calvinism and Arminianism, neither is the discussion of political economics limited to the options of capitalism and socialism. In “Tory Economics: Part Two”, we will look at a number of alternatives to capitalism and socialism that are more compatible with conservative views than either capitalism or socialism and will attempt to identify the most basic Tory economic principles. We will not attempt to draw up a “Tory economic system” and the first Tory economic principle will be that the very idea of an economic system is incompatible with Tory views. For the rest of this essay, we will attempt to clear up certain types of confusion regarding the relationship of conservatism to liberalism, capitalism and socialism.

“I thought conservatives were capitalists and liberals were socialists” some of you might be saying. While this idea is widespread in North America it does not reflect the historic meaning of either conservatism or liberalism. It reflects, rather, the way both conservatism and liberalism have changed in post-World War II North America, neither change being for the better.

Historically, liberalism is a system of thought, influenced by Renaissance humanism and “Enlightenment” rationalism that developed in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dominated the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, and became more or less universal throughout Western civilization in the twentieth century. Politically, liberalism is a faith in democratic elections and legislative assemblies, constitutional and legal protections of rights and freedoms, and the maximum freedom for the individual citizen in all walks of life that is consistent with the minimum rule of law needed to maintain civil order. Economically, it is a belief in legal protections for private property and contracts and in the ability of the free market to effect a just distribution of goods and services. Philosophically it is a belief that man is basically good and that he is by nature, first and foremost an individual.

Historically and traditionally, the Tories or conservatives were those who at first defended the older, pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of church and state from the challenge of liberalism and later, once liberalism had developed, spread, and triumphed, continued to defend the traditions, ideas and institutions that survived from the pre-liberal order against liberal absolutism. Tories do not merely negate what the Whig or liberal affirms and assert the exact opposite. If we did that we would be truly deserving of liberal J. S. Mill’s description of us as the “Stupid Party”. Philosophically, the Tory reminds modern man that knowledge, wisdom and truth did not begin at the Renaissance or the “Enlightenment” and calls upon modern man to heed the entire tradition containing the best of what has been thought and said since the most ancient time. In response to the liberal belief in the goodness of man the Tory says yes, man was made good in the image of God, but goes on to say that the image of God was marred in the Fall and that man is now tainted with Original Sin. In response to the liberal doctrine of the primacy of the individual, the Tory does not deny man’s individuality, but observes that man is born into his family, community, society, and nation, his membership in which must be balanced with his individuality. The Tory asserts the organic nature of community and society, against the contractual theory preferred by liberals, and insists upon the classical and medieval Christian idea that the good of the whole of society, for which laws are written and governments established, is more than just the aggregate of the individual goods of society’s individual members. The Tory defends the importance of faith, not just a private spirituality that means whatever a person wants it to mean, but religion as an organized, institution. Politically, the Tory does not reject the elected legislative assembly but speaks out on behalf of the other two ancient elements of parliamentary government, the upper house and especially the hereditary monarchy, insisting that the principles that these, however imperfectly, embody and represent, are needed to check and balance the principle of democracy. Where the Tory stands economically is what we are seeking to determine in this essay and its sequel.

In the twentieth century liberals, especially North American liberals, moved away from their eighteenth and nineteenth century ideas of maximum freedom and minimal government, especially in the economy, and accepted the idea of a larger, more active, economic role for government. In part this was due to their having seen governments successfully organize their economies to support the ends of war during World War I. They asked themselves why government, if it can coordinate the economy towards wartime goals, cannot do the same in peacetime to achieve positive social goals. The Great Depression came in the 1930s, providing them with the opportunity to experiment with that idea and in 1936, John Maynard Keynes provided them with a theory upon which to work in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes argued that to combat unemployment and the Depression, government needed to lower interest rates, inflate the money supply, and spend, spend, spend. As liberals abandoned the theory of Adam Smith for that of Lord Keynes they also developed various programs for the purpose of alleviating the effects of the Depression. As the twentieth century unfolded these would grow and expand into a more comprehensive attempt at finding a solution to poverty and other social ills through the means of government programs.

This overall shift in liberal thinking was seen by many as a move away from capitalism towards socialism although it would probably be more accurate to say, as many did (2), that both liberalism and socialism were converging towards something new that was neither capitalist nor socialist but in some ways a combination of both and in others something different altogether. Whichever way we look at it, this is the reason that liberalism is now widely equated with socialism. Liberals who did not approve of the direction liberalism took in the twentieth century and who still articulated the older ideas of eighteenth and nineteenth century classical liberalism, now called libertarians, formed an alliance with classical conservatives or traditionalists, against the new left-liberalism. One unfortunate consequence of this alliance was that the meaning of conservatism came to be watered down. For many, the older meaning of conservatism, the attempt to challenge the narrow, modern, ideology of liberalism with a vision of the good drawn from the older, broader, pre-modern, classical and Christian tradition and to preserve worthy ideas and institutions from the older tradition into the modern era, was lost and “conservative” came to mean little more than the attempt to conserve the older form of liberalism against the innovations of the new. Needless to say, for those who think of conservatism in such terms, conservatives are supporters of capitalism.

There are those, odd as it may seem, who would suggest that true conservatism is closer to socialism than to capitalism. Here in Canada this view is called Red Toryism. Red Tory is often used as a term of opprobrium on the right against people who are “Conservative” in their party affiliation but whose views are indistinguishable from those of the NDP and the left-wing of the Liberal Party. This is not how the term was originally used and it is not how I am using it here. The original meaning of the term, which is still usually its meaning when self-applied, referred to those who identify with the older, more authentic, classical Tory conservatism but who conclude that because this conservatism opposed classical liberalism that there is much common ground between conservatism and socialism which also opposes classical liberalism, and that therefore conservatism and socialism are closer to each other, than either is to liberalism.

The first thing that needs to be pointed out in response to this reasoning is that it is like arguing that King Charles I and his supporters had more in common with the Levellers than they did with Oliver Cromwell, (3) or that Dr. Johnson, the eighteenth century Tory who wrote against the rebellion of the American colonies, would have supported the French Revolution had he lived to see it, because it had been condemned by Edmund Burke who had earlier supported the American rebels. Moreover, while the Red Tories are right to criticize the trend within twentieth century conservatism towards ignoring the older, broader, tradition of classical conservatives and merely seeking to conserve the earlier, nineteenth century version of liberalism, this criticism loses its edge somewhat when those making it seem to be proposing that conservatives align themselves with something that is closer to the later, twentieth century version of liberalism.

There is an interesting observation, that is sort of related to the last point that I wish to make here. In Canada, traditional Tory conservatism historically opposed continentalism, i.e., the move towards economic, social, and cultural integration with the United States historically championed by the Liberal Party. Some Red Tories often linked this element of traditional Canadian conservatism, with which I am in sympathy, with a defense of our bloated welfare state. Ironically, in doing so, they not infrequently defended as “Canadian” taxes and government programs that we had actually borrowed from the Americans. The income tax, for example, is a Marxist concept that was adopted by the United States, long before Canada followed her example. (4) The United States introduced central banking twenty years before we followed suit in Canada. When our Prime Minister R. B. Bennett introduced a battery of subsidies, regulations, and social programs aimed at combating the Depression in 1935, he was consciously following the example of American President FDR. Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s exponential expansion of the welfare state into what he called “The Just Society” was patterned after Lyndon B. Johnson’s expansion of the American “New Deal” into the “Great Society”. Despite all of this, Dalton Camp, after describing our social security system as “confirmation of a social contract between Canadians and their federal government” and acknowledging that “Most of that contract has been proposed, endorsed and enacted in my lifetime” went on to say “I believe these measures have defined the country”. (5)

Although it is common to think of capitalism and socialism as polar opposites, actually capitalist liberalism and socialism are closer to each other than either is to conservatism. Both are products of the Modern Age. Both have a progressive view of history. The liberal, even if he is thought of as a neoconservative like Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, holds to what Sir Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, in which the ideas and institutions of democratic capitalism are thought of as the final achievement of history and the past is dismissed except as it is seen as leading up to democratic capitalism in the present. The most influential school of socialist thought, that of Karl Marx, taught that history was moving, through a series of revolutions by oppressed “have not” classes against oppressor “have” classes, to a future state of communism. Both are forms of economism, the idea that everything in society can be reduced to the economic, that the “real” explanation of any given social phenomenon is the economic explanation, and that man is best understood as homo oeconomicus, i.e., a rational being whose primary motivation to act is the acquisition of material goods. (6) Both were built upon a contract theory of society – liberalism upon that of John Locke, socialism upon that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

These areas of similarity between liberalism and socialism are far greater than the areas in which conservatism and socialism are supposed to agree. Benjamin Disraeli, who was Conservative leader and Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Victorian era, condemned the effects of industrial capitalism upon the poor in his novel Sybil and when in power introduced a number of social reforms aimed at alleviating the conditions of the industrial working classes. He drew upon traditional Tory principles, such as the feudal concept of noblesse oblige, to support these actions. None of this reflected any affinity with socialism and its ideas on Disraeli’s part. Disraeli saw socialism as a dangerous threat to the civil and social order and introduced these reforms to strengthen that civil and social order against socialism. The same can be said of similar reforms introduced by Prussian conservative Otto von Bismarck in the new Germany. In Canada, traditional conservatism was heavily influenced by this “One Nation” interpretation of the Tory tradition but Sir John A. MacDonald, R. B. Bennett, and John G. Diefenbaker, would not have been pleased with the suggestion that their programs had any similarity to socialism. (7) Stephen Leacock, remembered mostly as a humourist today, was also a political scientist, economist, and traditional Canadian Tory. While he wrote a lengthy critique of laissez-faire capitalism, subjected aspects of capitalism to satire in his Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, and supported social welfare programs in his The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, he was opposed to socialism. In The Unsolved Riddle he analyzed socialism and concluded that while it put forward a “beautiful dream” it “wouldn’t work” and that attempts to make it work would simply amount to slavery. Clearly it is a misreading of these traditional conservatives to say that because of their criticisms of liberal individualism and industrial capitalism and their support for various government programs designed to alleviate the conditions of the poor that they were closer to socialism.

One important Canadian conservative who did see socialism as an ally against liberalism was George Grant. Grant was undoubtedly the most important thinker in the history of Canadian conservatism. An Anglican Christian, Platonist philosopher, and Canadian nationalist who taught in the political science and religion departments of Dalhousie and McMaster Universities, throughout his career Grant drew from the best thoughts of modern thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger a critique of the Modern Age, its concept of progress, and of liberalism, that called modern men back to the wisdom of the ancients. In the book for which he is most remembered, Lament For a Nation, Grant argued that Marx was “not purely a philosopher of the age of progress” and that he was “rooted in the teleological philosophy that pre-dates the age of progress” because he had a concept of the good that imposed limits on human freedom and that therefore Marxists “fail to understand the modern age when they assume that socialism is a more progressive form of organization than state capitalism”. (8) All of this is mere wishful thinking on the part of a conservative, who correctly seeing capitalism as the instrument of modern progress, naively sought an ally in capitalism’s primary modern opponent. Grant went on to ask:

Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom? (9)

The answer to the first question is that socialism is the theory that the private ownership of productive property (farmland, mines, factories, etc.) is the cause of social, political, and economic inequality which is itself the root cause of most if not all social evils and that the good of society would be better served if productive property were collectively owned. Some forms of socialism, such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the nineteenth century French anarchist, do not involve the government at all! The answer to the second question, one so obvious that it is astonishing that it eluded a man of Grant’s intelligence, is that while conservatives believe in social order, not all theories of social order are conservative. (10)

To understand further, why their mutual disagreement with capitalism does not draw the Tory and the socialist together, it is important that we understand what the traditional Tory objections to capitalism were. Here is the Tory case against capitalism:

Capitalism shifts a country’s economy away from agriculture to manufacturing. This in turn causes the country’s population to migrate from rural areas to urban centres. This leads to all the problems associated with urban sprawl. Worse, by uprooting a large part of the population, which is itself a bad thing because people need roots, need a sense of connection and loyalty to place and people, it harms families and communities. Since in order to function it requires goods to be constantly produced and sold in large quantities, it promotes the production of consumer goods over enduring goods, which encourages both waste and the sacrifice of quality craftsmanship in the name of quantity. By encouraging constant consumption, it teaches people to make the acquisition of material wealth a higher priority in their lives, which promotes the habit of avarice that is traditionally considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Capitalism shifts power away from elites whose wealth is inherited and whose capital is fixed and immovable towards elites of the self-made whose capital is fluid. This undermines the sense of noblesse oblige and public spirit among the governing classes. Capitalism also has a bad effect upon the middle classes as their aspirations to upward mobility become less tied to the acquisition of manners, culture, and civil responsibility and come to rest almost solely upon the acquisition of wealth. Meanwhile, it leads to the growth of the proletariat class of industrial labourers creating the conditions which socialist demagogues exploit in their crusade against the civil and social order.

From all of this it ought to be clear that the Tory case against socialism does not bring the Tory and the socialist together. Much of what the Tory objected to in capitalism, the socialist praised. Marx and Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie, i.e., the urban capitalist class:

wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. (11)

If this sounds at all similar to the Tory criticism of capitalism that I outlined above it needs to be recognized that Marx wrote the quoted words, not as criticism but as praise.

In the sequel to this essay, we will look at economic nationalism, distributism, agrarianism, and what Wilhelm Röpke called economic humanism and will show that each of these is closer to the conservative view of economics than either capitalism or socialism as those terms are ordinarily understood.

(1) Bob Jones, Cornbread and Caviar (Greenville, S. C.: Bob Jones University Press, 1985), p. 187.

(2) Hilaire Belloc predicted that this would occur in his The Servile State (London & Edin burgh: T. N. Foulis, 1912). Thirty years later, James Burnham argued that a social transformation was occurring simultaneously in liberal North America, the fascist countries, and the Soviet Union, bringing about a system that was neither capitalist nor socialist but dominated by a new class of technocratic managers in The Managerial Revolution(New York: John Day, 1941).

(3) This is not just true by way of analogy. The Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles were the original Tories or Conservatives. The Puritan leaders of the New Model Army who established Oliver Cromwell as the Lord Protector were the progenitors of the Whigs or Liberals. The Levellers were an extreme egalitarian and democratic faction within the Puritan ranks. These are forerunners of the socialists.

(4) The income tax was first introduced in the United States in 1861. This was repealed in 1872 but in 1913 the Americans reintroduced the income tax with the sixteenth Amendment and have had it ever since. Canada introduced its income tax in 1917. Like the initial American income tax, which was introduced to raise funds for their internecine war, the Canadian income tax was introduced as a temporary measure to raise war funds, in our case for World War I. Unlike the United States, we never rescinded the tax. It is also worth noting, that for most of the twentieth century the American income tax system was far more socialist than Canada’s. From World War II until Reagan, their highest margin was taxed at 70% or over, and for two decades in that period, over 90%

(5) Dalton Camp, Whose Country Is This Anyway?, (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995) p. 38. The idea Camp puts forward here, that our social programs define us as a country, is a widespread notion. It is neither a true nor a conservative one. Note the significance of Camp’s acknowledgement that the social network he was describing was mostly set up in his own lifetime. He was born in 1920, over half a century after Confederation. This, combined with the facts pointed out in the text of the essay about how in much of this we actually followed the example set by the Americans, makes nonsense of his claim that it defines us as a country, by which, of course, he means as distinct from the United States, as the whole tenor of the column, and indeed the entire book, makes clear. The conservative answer to the question of what defines us as a country may be found in these words of Prime Minister Diefenbaker addressed to the United Nations on September 26, 1960 in response to an arrogant anti-Western speech by Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev “We were the first country which evolved by constitutional processes from colonial status to independence without severing family connections”. John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: Memoirs of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, Volume II: The Years of Achievement 1956-1962 (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1976), p. 133. The most complete explanation of the Tory answer to what defines Canada as a nation can be found in Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1972). Dalton Camp was the one who was personally responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1967.

(6) “Economic conservatives' and libertarians' free market, liberals' welfare state and Keynesianism, and radicals' socialism and communism all presuppose that the good life is one of gratification through consumption.” – John Attarian, “Economism and the National Prospect, Part One”, The Social Contract, Volume 10, No. 2, Winter 1999-2000.

(7) R. B. Bennett’s introduction of a moderate version of FDR’s “New Deal” towards the end of his premiership was clearly done with the Disraeli-Bismarckian goal of robbing socialism of its steam. Unlike FDR, who showed a naïve attitude towards Soviet Communism throughout his entire administration, Bennett loathed both Communism and socialism, between which he saw little difference, and for better or worse, invoked Section 98 of the Criminal Code against left-wing labour agitation. Diefenbaker, while a champion of the downtrodden, and a supporter of a generous social safety net in the Disraeli tradition, and a Canadian nationalist opposed to continentalism, was also a defender of free enterprise against the socialism of Tommy Douglas’s NDP and a strong anti-Communist Cold Warrior. See chapter five of Those Things we Treasure.

(8) George Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1989), pp. 56, 58.

(9) Ibid. p. 59.

(10) University of Toronto professor Gad Horowitz in an article entitled “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation” that appeared in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science in May 1966, defined socialism as “an ideology that combines the corporate-organic-collectivist ideas of toryism with the rationalist-egalitarian ideas of liberalism.” This definition of socialism was clearly influenced by Grant, repeating the same basic mistake of equating the conservative and socialist views of the common good and the social order. It was Horowitz who had coined the term “Red Tory” in an article reviewing Lament for a Nation that had appeared in the May 1965 issue of Canadian Dimension. Grant disliked the term and did not use it to refer to himself, as William Christian explained in George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 266. Others did adopt the term “Red Tory” as a self-description. Of these, a Red Tory of the highest caliber of Toryism is Professor Ron Dart of the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B. C. Dart is an Anglican and Canadian Tory very much in the tradition of Leacock and Grant. While he asserts that which I have argued against in the text of this essay, i.e., that Tories and socialists have much in common, nevertheless in his account of the dialogue between Grant and Horowitz, he remarks that “the tory notion of the commonweal is not the same as the socialist notion of the collective” in The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes – a Series of Essays by Ron Dart (Dewdney B. C.: Synaxis Press, 1999), p. 46.

(11) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Chapter One: “Bourgeois and Proletarians”.

For and Against

Before his retirement, Charley Reese was a conservative opinion columnist with the Orlando Sentinel. He believed that writers owed it to their readers to regularly give a full disclosure of their biases. He put this belief into practice by writing, once a year, a column in which he gave such a disclosure, generally around the time of New Year’s. I consider this to be a practice worthy of emulation and so began the last two years with essays in that style. In “Here I Stand” I stated my basic religious, political and cultural beliefs. In “The Testimony of a Tory – A Brief Memoir” I gave an autobiographical sketch that told how I came to my positions, beliefs, and prejudices.

Despite the predictions, based upon the Mayan calendar cycle, that the world would end last December, a new year is upon us, which means that it is once again time for one of these essays. This year I have decided upon a format of alternating positive positions with negative ones. First I will state in one paragraph something I am for, something I believe in. Then in the next paragraph I will state something I am against. I am arranging these in sets, so that the negatives in one paragraph will go together with the positives in the paragraph immediately preceding it, like opposing sides to a coin.

I am a small-o orthodox Christian. I believe the faith declared in the Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. I accept the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as the authoritative and unerring, written Word of God. I worship the One God Who is eternally the three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I am a sinner, a member of Adam’s fallen race, who will be judged according to his works on the day when Jesus Christ returns in glory to judge the quick and the dead. My faith and hope, for today, for that day, and for all eternity, rest entirely in the love, mercy and grace of God, given to the world in the Incarnation, sacrificial Atonement, and Resurrection of our Saviour Jesus of Nazareth Who is Christ the Lord, the Son of the Living God.

I reject and oppose the arrogant, anthropocentric concepts of materialism, rationalism and positivism. Materialism is the idea that the physical world, which we know and experience through our senses, is all that is, all that can be known and/or all that matters. Rationalism is the notion that human reason, aided by empirical science, can sufficiently explain all things without recourse to divine revelation. Positivism is the belief that human knowledge has advanced from mythology through theology and religion to a materialistic and rationalistic understanding of the world, and that this latter understanding is superior to the “superstition” that preceded it.

I am a Canadian patriot and nationalist. I am an old-fashioned “blood and soil” kind of patriot, whose country consists of real people, living in real territory, with real institutions, rather than a set of abstract ideals about human rights and democracy, that anyone on the planet can theoretically subscribe to. My country is the Dominion of Canada which was founded by the Fathers of Confederation in 1867, out of the English and French speaking provinces and territories of British North America, which has her own Parliament under the Sovereign we share with the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. I am proud that my country was not born out of rebellion and revolution but was founded by Loyalists within the established tradition they had received from their forebears.


I despise the phony “Canadian nationalism” of the liberal political, academic, and media elites who hate Canada’s British roots and traditions and dismiss our country’s history prior the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau as our “colonial past.” This pseudo-nationalism consists of little more than support for the socialism, multi-culturalism, and left-wing ideology in general that the Liberal Party shoved down our throats in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, combined with anti-Americanism of the crudest, most vulgar sort. I equally loathe the anti-Canadianism of many so-called “conservatives” in Canada, who love the United States but hate their own country, and never miss an opportunity to put down Canada and to compare her unfavourably with the American republic.

I am a conservative. I believe that man is a social animal and that it is therefore human nature for men to live together in societies. I believe that the flaw in human nature that theologians call “Original Sin” is the root source of the evils, injustices, and other ills human beings suffer from. It is because of this flaw that men need laws to govern and order their societies. Since governments, the institutions that make and administer laws, are themselves composed of human beings tainted by sin, governments have a tendency to abuse their power and authority and to become tyrannical. For this reason, I believe that government powers and laws should be limited to what is absolutely necessary to maintain order.

I am against both classical and progressive liberalism. Classical liberalism is individualism, which places the individual before the nation, society, community, and even the family and which in its most extreme anarchist form, would sacrifice order in the name of individual liberty. Progressive liberalism is a form of statism which regards the modern democratic-bureaucratic state as the agent of social progress, and believes that the state’s powers to tax and legislate should be used to eliminate the social and economic inequality that the progressive liberal regards as the cause of evil and injustice. Both forms of liberalism are based upon mistaken views of human nature. Classical liberalism wrongly thinks that people are first individuals who by mutual agreement form families, communities, and societies when, in reality, people are born into their families, communities, and societies and within the context of these, later develop into who they are individually. Progressive liberals wrongly think that social and economic inequality are themselves evil and unjust and are the source of other evils and injustices. The root error of both forms of liberalism is the idea that flaws in the organization of society rather than flaws in human nature are the cause of the evils and suffering that plague mankind.

I am a High Tory. I believe in the institution of monarchy, in particular the parliamentary monarchy that developed in Britain and which was inherited by Canada and other Commonwealth countries. I believe in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the organic community and organized institution established by Christ and His Apostles, which administers the Sacraments instituted by Christ and has been governed, since the Apostolic age by the bishop-successors of the Apostles, and especially the English branch of that Church which is both catholic and reformed. I believe that for there to be order in society, there must be hierarchy, and that a ruling class is inevitable, although the ruling class may govern poorly and often does. I believe that an essential task of the upper classes is to sponsor the creation and preservation of high culture. High culture is the true mark of a higher civilization, rather than technological advancement as is the assumption of most modern thought. Culture is the creative expression of a community, society, or civilization and the means whereby that community, society, or civilization transmits its understanding of itself and the world down through the generations. High culture is part of both a particular culture and a universal culture. It consists of the best literature, music, and other art produced within a particular culture, and what makes it the best is that it transcends its particular culture and speaks to all people, in all places, and at all times. It elevates a culture and society, by directing them upwards towards the classical and universal ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

I disagree strongly with modern democratic theory. I do not object to public offices being filled by popular election when the established constitution and prescription call for them to be so filled but I object to the notion that popular election is the best way of filling public offices. It is, in fact, the worst, because someone who runs for public office by means of popular election, demonstrates in doing so that he seeks power and that he is willing to obtain power by means of a contest as to who can successfully deceive the greatest number of people with his lies. While I have nothing against the classical Greek republican ideal of government constituted so as to govern for the public good, I do not accept the Roman republican ideal of a government headed by an elected official rather than a king or queen. I most vehemently oppose that ideal when it is proposed by would-be reformers in Canada who wish to turn our country into a republic by replacing our hereditary head-of-state with a politician. I reject Rousseau’s concept of the General Will of the people, the foundational doctrine of both modern democracy and totalitarianism, and Jefferson’s idea that governments derive their authority from the consent of those they govern. Bottom-up theories of government are great for populist rabble-rousing, which I detest, but are irrational and unsound. All real authority is either intrinsic or delegated from above. In arguing against the Divine Right of Kings, John Locke, father of modern liberalism, rejected the only true check on the abuse of government power – the recognition that it comes from God (Rom. 13) and that the governor is therefore answerable to God for how he used or abuses his authority. I do not believe in secularism or the modern dogma of the “separation of church and state”. Church and state are distinct institutions with distinct functions but the idea of “separation of church and state” forbids government’s from acknowledging God’s higher authority and undermines religion by privatizing it. Belief is a private, personal, matter, but religion is not. From the Latin word that means “to bind together”, religion is organized, community, worship which cannot, by definition, be private, and which cannot perform its essential role in society, if it is declared to be private and personal. I consider most of the art funded by modern governments through bureaucratic arts councils to be fraudulent, especially that which is called “modern” and “post-modern”. I object to public funds going towards its creation, although I also strenuously object to the defunding and closing of institutions which make preserve and make available to the public, the artistic and cultural heritage of the past. I deplore the way genuine popular culture, i.e,, song, stories, and art produced by people for their own use, has been largely replaced by “pop” culture – canned culture, mass-produced in culture-factories in Hollywood or some other equally horrible place, to be mass-marketed for mass-consumption. If true high culture elevates a society, pop culture, which to be mass-marketed must appeal to the lowest common denominator and which is therefore oriented to the lowest part of human nature, drags us down into the mud.

I am a communitarian. I believe in community, which is more than just a group of individuals who happen to live in the same place at the same time. It is people who are connected with each other and the place they live in so as to form an organic whole. The ties that bind a true organic community together stretch into the past and the future so as to include previous generations and generations to come. The indispensable elements of an organic community are race and culture. Race is the biological descent of the present generation of a community from all preceding generations and its biological ancestry of all successive generations. Race is not absolute and pure – people can and do enter and become part of communities from the outside while other people leave – but a community cannot exist if it is altogether absent. Culture, of course, is everything non-biological that is passed down from generation to generation in a community. Together, race and culture form the commonality, which binds a community into an organic whole. Simone Weil explained best what community provides to its members: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” (1) The spirit of community is stronger in rural than in urban areas and in smaller rather than larger neighborhoods.

I oppose both the liberal individualism that breaks down and dissolves communities, alienating individuals and atomizing societies, and the collectivism that swallows up individuals and communities alike into large, faceless, masses.

I am a traditionalist and a reactionary. I believe in tradition, prescription, and continuity. Not all change threatens continuity and some change is necessary for the preservation of traditional order and institutions. Beneficial change is ordinarily slow and can only truly be said to be salutary after having been shown to be so through a long period of testing. If an innovation is harmful, however, this is often apparent almost immediately. When an innovation is shown to be harmful the wisest choice, when it is available, is not to continue down the path opened up by the innovation but to return to that which is known, time-tested and true.

I don’t believe in progress, the idea that man through reason, science, and innovation, will continually build newer, brighter and better futures for himself. The doctrine of progress comes in two varieties, technological and social, and I don’t believe in either one of them. The concept of technological progress is more than just the obvious fact that we invent new tools and techniques and improve upon old ones. It is the idea that by merging human knowledge with human innovation man will be able to solve every problem that comes his way as he extends his dominion over himself and over nature. Social progress is the idea that man, by leaving aside traditional social arrangements and institutions, and eliminating inequality between individuals, classes, the sexes and the races, can rationally design a new society, free from the evils of the past. Both versions of progress are doomed to failure and will only make things worse. Both are attempts by man, exiled from Paradise for his sin, to regain Paradise through the force of his own efforts, rather than through reliance upon the grace of God.


I believe in a class system with a high degree of social and economic freedom and mobility. For as long as human beings live together as families, in which fathers and mothers raise their children together, they will form classes. A class is a group of families with similar social and economic status. Sons, partly because they inherit half of their fathers’ genes and partly because they are raised by their fathers, have a tendency to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and take up their trades, crafts, professions, labour and careers. This tendency and the fact that human societies value and reward different kinds of work differently, make class inevitable. Neither of these factors, the human family or the fact that society places different values on different kinds of work, is something any sane person would want to change. Class is not a bad thing but a good thing, which contributes to the order of society. It is not absolute, however, anymore than race as an element of community, is absolute. The tendency of sons to follow their fathers is universal only in the sense that it is observable in every place and time, not in the sense of being true of every son without exception. Individual talents, strengths, desires, and ambitions vary greatly. Sometimes a son lacks the strength or talent to take up his father’s profession, at other times a son might be strongly gifted for a specific vocation that is different from that of his family. There should be social/economic freedom for individuals to pursue the work their talents best fit them for.

I disagree with those who wish to see either element in the balance of class and social freedom and mobility for individuals removed. I do not think that classes should harden into castes in which a person’s social and economic status, role, and labour are inflexibly predetermined from birth. Nor do I believe in the ideal of a classless society. I do not agree with the liberal individualist who would redefine class as “level of income” and otherwise have pure social mobility. I especially disagree with the Marxist who regards the existence of classes as the source of conflict and oppression and who holds to the ideal of communism in which both class and individual liberty are eliminated. In this desire for a classless society the liberal individualist and the Marxist communist are strange bedfellows.

I am a libertarian of sorts. While I do not believe in the underlying philosophy of libertarianism – the classical liberalism mentioned above – I generally accept the basic libertarian theory that the law should only forbid and penalize that which is actually and quantifiably harmful to other people. This is not the only input a society should have into how its members live their lives, but for the most part social and moral order is better maintained by other authorities and institutions than government. Too much government and too many laws actually harm the social and moral order because the concentration of control in the government weakens these other social institutions and authorities. For this reason I believe this kind of libertarianism complements rather than contradicts social conservatism and I also believe it to be the position most consistent with the emphasis upon personal freedom in the English tradition.

I do not like laws that are not necessary either for the maintenance of public and social order or for our protection against the violence of others.

I believe in property. A man has a right to that which he can legitimately and honestly obtain, whether as payment for his labour, as a gift, in exchange for other goods he already possessed, or by inheritance. If a man can honestly and legally obtain enough property that he can hire others to work that property and live off of the profits, there is nothing wrong with that and much to be praised in it for he provides a living to others as well as himself in doing so. If this right to what is one’s own is not secure and protected, no other right will be either. For this reason property ownership and the right thereof are the foundation of all other rights and of any true concept of justice.

I consider, therefore, all forms of socialism to be loathsome and evil. All nineteenth century socialisms, from Proudhon’s anarcho-syndicalism to Marx’s communism, were based upon the idea that property is the source of inequality and that inequality is the source of injustice and evil. However much they may have disagreed amongst themselves, they agreed that property must be done away with and replaced with a form of collective ownership. This idea continued into some socialisms in the twentieth century, but what we ordinarily call “socialism” today is something different. This kind of socialism calls upon government to play the role of Robin Hood, to rob from the rich and give to the poor. All forms of socialism are ideological expressions of the Deady Sin of Envy.

I believe in business. I agree with Dr. Johnson that “there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” (2) I think that a man’s business is his own, and that government should not try to run it for him. While I prefer small farms and businesses to large companies, I do not think that there is anything wrong with a business prospering and growing.

I disagree therefore with those who speak of business as if it were something dirty, and those who attack the profit motive. I disagree with those who think that government action should be taken to limit the growth of businesses within their borders or that the size and prosperity of a business is a reason for that business to be penalized. I think those people to be mentally and morally sick who think that it is right to place a larger portion of taxes upon people and business that have prospered and who actually have the audacity to call the tax burden they wish to place on the prosperous “their fair share”.

I am an economic nationalist. I believe that while government would be horrendously incompetent at running a man’s private business for him, it should be capable of administering the economic interests of the country as a whole. It is in the interests of a country that it have domestic production of essential goods so as not to be entirely dependent upon the importation of such goods from foreign sources. It is in the interests of a country that it not be stripped of capital and jobs. It is the government’s duty to look out for the country’s interests by protecting protection if necessary to maintain domestic production of essential goods and by penalizing companies that move capital and jobs out of the country. While no government should punish a business for growing and prospering within it’s borders, all governments have legitimate reasons to curtain the activities of companies that operate across national borders and which are accountable to the laws of no society being able to move activity that is illegal in one country into another where it is legal.

I detest globalism and the ideology of “free trade”, that seeks to integrate the economies of the world into one big market, that respects no borders, that dissolves national identities, undermines national sovereignty, and is effectively building a “new world order”, paving the way for the global government that liberals and socialists have dreamed of for centuries.

I believe in the “one nation conservatism” of Benjamin Disraeli and John G. Diefenbaker. The constitutional order requires broad support from every class and element of society in order to ensure its security and stability, and to have that broad support the order must ensure that belonging to the society and commonwealth is beneficial to all its members. For this reason, and in order to take the wind out of the sails of demagogues and revolutionaries, a social safety net to catch members of the commonwealth who are for whatever reason unable to meet their own basic needs and who do not have anyone else to do so for them, is necessary.

I do not believe that it is healthy to allow such a social safety net to grow too big, however. It should not have been allowed to grow into what we call “the welfare state” today. In the early twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc predicted that both capitalism and socialism would evolve into “the servile state”, in which the middle classes would shrink away, the vast majority of people would belong to a wage-labourer class which the government would agree to maintain in periods of unemployment, for when the small class of capitalists needed them again. Today’s “welfare capitalism” or “socialism” resembles Belloc’s “servile state” in many ways, and has other unattractive features as well. Welfarism kills the spirit of charity and compassion among those who are better off and kills the spirit of gratitude among its recipients. To raise the kind of government revenue necessary to support welfarism requires taxes on business or personal income, the former of which discourage enterprise, the latter of which are unjust and intrusive. Welfarism is the foundation of the “nanny-state”, in which the government, citing the fact that it is paying for people’s health, welfare, and upkeep as justification, intrudes into their lives and businesses and bosses them around “for their own good”.

I believe in environmental stewardship. God placed man upon a limited world with resources that are limited but mostly renewable if they ware watched over with care and wisdom. We have a duty to preserve and not waste these resources. We are to use them but not to use them up. We are to look upon God as the owner of the earth’s resources, and ourselves in the present as having been entrusted with the use and care of them, with the understanding that we will make sure that they continue to be available for future generations.

I have no use, however, for the kind of environmentalism that worships nature as a goddess, opposes human industry and activity, embraces a culture of death for human beings, and makes wild predictions about immanent global catastrophes.

I believe that conflict among human beings is inevitable. As individuals, groups, and as entire societies we frequently argue. While it is always preferable, it is not always possible that these disputes be settled peacefully. One of the basic functions government is the arbitration of disputes between individuals and groups so as to arrive at an agreement without violence. Government has the force of law to back up its rulings. The arbitration of disputes between governments and nations is more difficult and such disputes will, from time to time, break out into war. War is highly destructive of human life, liberty, property, and civilization and for this reason it is always deplorable. It is not, however, the supreme evil to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is necessary and right for a country to go to war. If one’s country goes to war, one has a duty to heed the call to arms, if and when it comes. War provides a unique opportunity for certain virtues, especially those of bravery and sacrifice to be exercised, and when such virtues are practiced they deserve the reward of honour.

I disagree, therefore, with pacifism, non-resistance, and other doctrines that forbid men from answering the call of duty. Such doctrines may be sincerely believed but they have the effect, if not the intention, of encouraging free riding – the enjoyment of the benefits of being part of a civil commonwealth without making the contributions to the commonwealth expected of its members. I am skeptical of plans for world peace. I regard the efforts to build a universal council/court in the United Nations to provide the arbitration between nations that national governments provide between individuals, as doomed to failure. Either the United Nations will be ineffective because it lacks the power to enforce its rulings, or it will have the power to enforce its rulings in which case it will have too much power and will cause a host of other problems. Powerful empires have served as efficient arbitrators between arguing nations and governments in the past, but they did not prevent all wars, no empire lasts forever, and empires are prone to waging war themselves. I am also skeptical of most things governments say in justifying their wars. I do not believe in sending the military to topple foreign governments we do not like if our own country’s people, territory, security, and other vital interests are not threatened. I do not believe war is appropriate as a means of attaining humanitarian ends. While I do not believe in appeasing bullying tyrants, neither do I believe in sabre-rattling and I think that many who practice the latter have drawn the wrong lesson from Neville Chamberlain’s experience at Munich. I have nothing but contempt for the doctrine of the American neo-conservatives who believe that their country’s war-machine should be used to bring liberalism and democracy to the utmost parts of the earth.

I believe that it is necessary for a society to have rules about sex. Sex is a fundamental fact of human nature. It is the division of the species into its two most basic categories, male and female, the internal force that attracts them to each other, and the relationship between them. The sexual libido is among the most powerful of the human passions. For there to be order and harmony in a society, people must be governed by the law. For an individual to be governed by the law he must himself govern his own passions and appetites. If he does not govern his passions, he will be enslaved by them rather than governed by the law. For this reason, and the fact that families, communities, societies, civilizations, and the species itself, unlike the individual, all have intergenerational lifespans and so depend upon sex, the means of reproduction, for their survival, society needs to have a say when it comes to sex. Society should uphold the pattern of a man and a woman marrying and raising their children together as father and mother as the expected norm, encourage behaviour that supports this pattern such as premarital abstinence, marital fidelity, and monogamy, and discourage behaviour that undermines this pattern such as promiscuity, adultery, and divorce. While these sorts of behaviour should be encouraged or discouraged among both males and females alike there are also roles appropriate to each sex which society should encourage. The role of motherhood – conceiving, bearing, giving birth to, and nursing children – has been biologically assigned to women by God and nature, and cannot be reassigned. It is in society’s own interests to encourage and expect women to perform this role. The role of fatherhood has only been biologically assigned to men in the limited sense of siring children. Society should encourage and expect men to perform the role of fatherhood in the fullest sense of taking responsibility for, providing for, and protecting their children and the mothers of their children, and raising those children in partnership with their mothers. These roles are what society should expect and encourage of men and women as groups. The roles are complementary and complementarity, not “equality” or “subservience” is the best word to describe the relationship between the sexes. Specific men and women may, for one reason or another, be incapable of fulfilling or unsuited for the role assigned to their sex. Such individuals should be accommodated and tolerated but not to the extent that society abandons the roles of wife-mother for women and husband-father for men as the general expectation and pattern. These roles, the pattern of the family, and rules regarding sexual behaviour, are best taught in the family, by fathers to sons and by mothers to daughters, with the support of the church.

I strongly disagree with the belief that all matters pertaining to sex are to be left up to the individual. This belief spread rapidly in the latter part of the twentieth century and has been taken to absurd extremes. In the decades after World War II, the sexual liberation movement pointed to the development of effective artificial birth control as the technological justification of its message that traditional moral rules concerning sexual behaviour were now obsolete, as if those rules had existed solely to protect the individual from inconvenient consequences of his behaviour, and not to guard society’s interest in human reproduction. The second wave of feminism, the so-called “women’s liberation movement”, declared that different societal roles for men and women were part of a conspiracy on the part of men to oppress women, that society should ignore sex and treat men and women only as individuals, and to ensure equality between the sexes and “women’s rights”, demanded that abortion be legalized and made accessible to all women, that universal public daycare be made available, and that marriage laws be re-written to allow for no-fault divorce, and encouraged women to put off marriage and motherhood and pursue careers instead. Yet that was only the moderate, liberal, branch of the movement! Both movements I consider to be despicable. They are the most significant contributing factors to the devaluation of human life and embracing of the “culture of death” that has swept Western civilization. A third movement, that demands that society cease to uphold marriage between a man and a woman as the norm, recognize same-sex erotic relationships as being of equal value with traditional, heterosexual, marriage, acknowledge as valid the decisions some individuals make that they are of a different sex – whether the opposite or a new one of their own creation – than their biology would indicate, and change all of its rules and traditions to accommodate the small minority of people who are attracted to their own sex or are in some other way confused as to their sexual identity, has arisen and is rapidly seeing Western societies give in to its demands. This movement’s advocates and defenders, who frequently profess ignorance of the existence of such a movement and pretend that these changes are just natural social evolution, like to ask questions like how expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples will harm other people? Such questions miss the point. This movement and its success is the symptom, not the disease. It is an indicator of just how badly society, morality, and the institution of marriage have already been damaged.

An unapologetic man of the Right, I believe in the importance of race and nationality. Race is not a matter of morphological differences such as skin and hair colour, as progressives would have us believe, but is rather the biological succession of generations that is a fundamental element of every level of social organization, from the family up through the community to the nation, and which also exists at the level of the species, hence the expression “the human race”. Race is the factor that makes it possible for families, communities, nations, and even the species itself, to exist as groups across the lifespans of multiple generations. Nationality is our sense of identification with those with whom we share a common language, a common religion, common customs and manners, a mutual history, and the same stories and songs. Race and nationality are indispensible elements of our social existence and we should regard them as contributing positively to that existence rather than bemoaning them and dreaming of a world in which they are reduced to insignificance or eliminated.

There are two opposite dangers with regards to race and nationality, both of which I try to avoid. These are the dangers of attaching too much importance to race and nationality on the one hand and not attaching enough importance to them on the other hand. When we make race and nationality so important that we demand that all smaller loyalties and attachments, to family, for example, or to friends and neighbours, be sacrificed for the good of race and nation and do not recognize even the most basic sense of a shared humanity with those beyond our own race or nation, we have made idols out of race and nation, and no good can come out of this. On the other hand, when we insist that natural ties of race and nation be ignored, and that our loyalty and attachment to our own, race, nation, and people be sacrificed for the good of a greater human unity, we make the same mistake on a much larger scale. I am not a “white nationalist” for, although I agree wholeheartedly with white nationalism’s indignation at the way the progressive spirit of the age expects all white nations and only white nations to commit racial suicide through a combination of mass immigration and antinatalism, self-loathing and idolatrous worship of “the Other”, I do not agree with the way white nationalism – or any other kind of racial nationalism – demands that a man’s race be his highest or only loyalty, and I dislike it’s Nietzschean tendency to blame Christianity for the evils of liberalism. I also do not agree with the way some white nationalists revere Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, although I tend not to hold this against them because I detest the way self-appointed progressive thought police, whose own political soulmates worship Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, and “Che” Gueverra, insist that pariah status be conferred upon anyone who shook hands with someone who lived next door to the third cousin, twice removed of the college roommate of a person who once expressed the opinion that Hitler might have been something less than the absolute incarnation of all evil who makes the Antichrist look like a saint in comparison. Having said all this, it is clearly the opposite danger, that of undervaluing race and nation and making an idol out of a greater human unity, that is the threat in this day and age, at least in the Western world.

I believe that we have both universal and particular duties towards other people. I believe that while we have a general duty to treat all people with justice and mercy we have more specific duties to those to whom we are connected by ties of kinship, friendship, shared culture, faith, and citizenship, and propinquity. For example, we have a duty to respect our elders in general, but we also have a stronger and more specific duty to honour and obey our own father and mother. I believe that our specific duties to our family, friends, neighbours and countrymen must come first, before our general duties to all people.

I consider the thinking that is currently prevalent about inclusiveness and equality to be very harmful. Equality is not justice. To say that we should treat all people equally is to say that we should treat our friends like enemies, our family like strangers, our countrymen like foreigners. This is the reality of egalitarianism, lurking behind the ideal which is stated as the opposite of this, i.e., that we should treat our enemies like friends, etc. I abhor the recent phenomenon, now ubiquitous amongst Western intellectual elites, that Roger Scruton calls oikophobia, “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” (3) Oikophobia is a far greater evil than racism. Specific duties are more important than general duties and if racism is the evil of denying to other people, because of their race, the justice and mercy we are commanded to show to all people, oikophobia is the evil of denying to one’s own family, friends, neighbours and countrymen the specific loyalty, love, and duty owed to them. White liberal anti-racists are typically oikophobes, who accuse their own people of the evil of racism, whenever they practice the virtue of piety.

Recognizing that all men, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are sinners, and have their failings and weaknesses, I honour and respect the “dead white males” from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Milton, from Pindar and Horace to Tennyson and Kipling, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes and Richard Hooker, from Sophocles and Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Marlowe, from Aristophanes and Juvenal to Dean Swift and Stephen Leacock, from Cicero and Cato to Edmund Burke, Lord Salisbury, Sir John A. MacDonald and Sir Winston Churchill, from Palestrina to Haydn and Mozart to Wagner, from Michelangelo and Raphael to Caravaggio and El Greco to Rembrandt and Rubens, the architects and builders of Western civilization, and all their achievements.

I refuse to bow my knee to the human idols erected in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether they be rock stars and rappers, professional athletes, television and movie actors, or other media-manufactured celebrities like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

Happy New Year everyone and God save the Queen!

(1) Simone Weil, The Need For Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), p. 41.This is a translation by A. F. Wills of a work first published in French in 1949.

(2) Quoted by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson, the entry for March 27, 1775.

(3) Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2006), p. 36.