The Tory and Democracy

As we have seen, Toryism, the classical conservatism that upholds traditional royal and ecclesiastical authority in their shared vocation of pursuing the common good, while largely synonymous with “the right” when right and left first took on political significance in the French Revolution, is more difficult to place on the twentieth century map that makes politics into a spectrum between individualism on the right and collectivism on the left. The Tory is both an individualist, albeit in a different sense than the classical liberal, and a collectivist, but in a different sense than the leftist. Tory individualism is about real individuals whose individuality makes them stand out from the crowd, rather than the abstract individual of liberal theory whose individuality is defined by what makes him like every other individual. Tory collectivism is about a plurality of collective institutions that is both horizontal – family, parish, neighborhood – and vertical – parish, diocese, ecclesiastical province – rather than the single collective, the people, represented by a single institution, the democratic state, of leftism. We have also seen that liberal individualism and leftist collectivism converge in the direction of modern mass society – an aggregation of individuals under the modern state.

Liberalism and leftism also converge in their belief that democracy is the best form of government. Liberalism and leftism are both progressive, accepting the view that history, especially that of the modern age, is moving forward in a linear line towards a better future in a universal state. Both would identify that universal state with democracy. The word democracy has different connotations to the liberal and to the leftist, however. Liberalism is a form of representative democracy, which means that the idea of filling public offices by popular election is an essential part of the meaning of democracy to the liberal. In the leftist ideal, democracy is the state in which the distinction between governed and government is eliminated, and the state is the voice of the will of the people. A one-party state, in which the party is seen as the true voice of the people, as in Nazi Germany (1) and every Communist country, while obviously not fitting the liberal meaning of democracy, is compatible with the leftist view of democracy.

Where does democracy fit in the Tory view of things?

The Tory, being a traditionalist and a royalist, does not share the liberal and leftist belief that democracy is the best form of government. That does not mean that the Tory rejects all forms of democracy. Democracy has a long pedigree, going back two and a half millennia, to ancient Athens. Democracy there was different from modern democracy. The assembly, which voted on all legislation, did not consist of elected representatives, but of the city’s adult, male, citizens, a form of direct democracy more practical in a city-state than in a larger polity. The greatest minds of democratic Athens did not consider it to be either ideal or the best possible form of government. Aristotle continued the discussion of constitutional forms that Plato had begun in The Republic and Laws in his The Constitution of Athens, Ethics, and Politics out of which discussion emerged the classic analysis of constitutions as falling into three basic forms – the rule of the one, the few, and the many – which can be either good or bad, depending upon whether those governing, rule for the common good of all, or merely for themselves. Neither Plato nor Aristotle though very highly of democracy, which, after all, was the system of government that had put Socrates to death and both used its name for the bad form of the rule of many. They saw these forms as unstable, creating a cycle in which one form goes bad, then is replaced by the next which goes bad in turn. Aristotle suggested, however, that a superior, stable, constitution might be possible by mixing all three in a single constitution.

Our parliamentary constitution of the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries such as Canada is an example of this kind of mixed constitution. Queen Elizabeth, presides over a parliament that consists of the House of Lords – or, here in Canada, the Senate – and the House of Commons, consisting of members elected by constituencies as their representatives. The Tory does not object to the democratic element of this mixture, the House of Commons. He insists, however, that the only true authority the House of Commons possesses, is to be regarded as being rooted in tradition and prescription, like that of the other two institutions, and not as being due to it being inherently more rational than the others, or deriving some greater legitimacy due to its being filled by popular election. (2)

This is because the Tory knows that authority is not something that flows upward from below. The only thing a politician gains by convincing the masses to support him, is power. Authority is the right to command, power is the ability to coerce, and in a civilized order authority must always take precedence over power, relying upon power to back it up only when necessary. The modern theory of democracy, however, sees authority as a fiction and power as the only reality of politics. While the power represented by the majority vote in a plebiscite may be preferable to the power represented by the armed force commanded by a military junta, the Tory knows that unless it is made subordinate to the authority conveyed by tradition and prescription, that is to say, stability and order that transcends the present being ancient and established, power of any sort is a destabilizing threat to civilization.

Proponents of modern democracy might argue that in a state where the government truly embodies the will of the people, the possibility of the government ruling for their own sake rather than that of the common good is eliminated because people and government are one. The reality is, however, that the more the government sees itself as the voice of the people, the less it sees the need for restrictions on the use of its power. After all, how could we possibly need limitations on what the people do to themselves? History bears this out for over the last three centuries as government has become more and more democratic there have been less and less areas of peoples’ lives that it has not felt free to regulate. Modern democratic theory is the pathway to totalitarianism.

The liberal form of modern democracy is more palatable to the Tory than the leftist form because liberalism hinders democracy’s development into totalitarianism by placing limits on what even a democratic government can do by insisting upon the rights of the individual. Liberalism, however, has gradually been losing this ability over the course of the last century as it has become more closely aligned with the left. Today, some of the worst abuses of the power of democracy are committed in the name of liberalism. Therefore the Tory is surely right in saying that liberalism is an insufficient check upon the dark side of democracy, and that the necessary balance can only come from the other two elements of classical mixed government represented in our parliamentary tradition.

If, the advocate of modern democracy argues that it is a uniquely fair form of government, incorporating the principles of majority rule and an equal vote for all, the Tory responds that whatever fairness might be, this is not justice. The idea that majority rule is the most fair way to make group decisions assumes that good people outnumber bad, educated people outnumber ignorant, and the wise outnumber the foolish, or that collectively the masses possess more virtue, knowledge, and wisdom than they do as individuals. These assumptions, especially the last, seem incredibly naive, yet if they are not true letting the majority decide is a recipe for disaster. Nor is the idea of one person, one vote, particularly sensible. It translates into the idea that the criminal should have as much say as the law-abiding citizen, that the illiterate man’s opinion is worth as much as that of the learned man, and the village idiot’s vote is equal to that of the wisest man in town. Votes, the ancients wisely decreed, should be weighed, and not just counted. With this ancient wisdom, the Tory concurs.

Paradoxically, there is a sense in which the Tory will say that modern democracy does not extend the vote far enough or take in a large enough democracy. For he recognizes that the organic whole of society includes generations not present to cast their vote, those that have passed away and those that are yet to be born. It is through tradition that their voices can be heard and their votes counted and weighed against those of the present and living generation. G. K. Chesterton called this the "democracy of the dead" and it is only this kind of democracy to which the Tory can give his unqualified support.




(1) National Socialism (Nazism) was not a party of the “far right” as left-liberals maintain. It, and its Führer, were anti-monarchist, anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, populists, who preached an ideology that blended, as its name suggests, nationalism and socialism, both of which were leftist movements from the nineteenth century.

(2) As Enoch Powell remarked “Our whole constitution rests, uniquely in the world, upon what Burke called ‘prescription.’”

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.

Three Cheers For the Supreme Court

Those who sit as judges in Her Majesty’s courts perform a role that calls not only for an extensive knowledge of the law but for the virtues of justice and prudence and above all else for wisdom. The higher the court and the more final its decision the more vital it is that that its member judges possess these qualities. It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that the Chief Justice of Canada and the eight Puisne Judges who with the Chief Justice make up the highest court in the land, be models of Solomonic wisdom.

I have not always been impressed by the decisions that our courts have issued. Indeed, decision after decision to give the perpetrators of serious crimes a slap on the wrist while allowing frivolous and expensive lawsuits by people whose feelings have been hurt or, even worse, who wish to use the courts to harass their ideological opponents, have often left the impression that the path to appointment to the bench starts in the monkey cage at the zoo.

This was not the case with the ruling the Supreme Court handed the Prime Minister’s Office last Friday. Asked to review the constitutionality of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals for reforming the Senate, the Supreme Court told him that any such reforms would require the consent of the provinces. To make major reforms he would need the consent of a majority of the promises, to abolish it outright would require unanimous consent.

In issuing this ruling, the Supreme Court did its job and did it superbly. It did not create new law by fiat, but reminded the Prime Minister – and the Opposition Leader who has been beating drums for Senate abolition – of what they should have already known, namely, that Canada has a constitution, with a formula for amendment, and that there are no shortcuts to amendment because changing the constitution is a far more serious process than changing the law and is not something to be done on the quick. This is something that Stephen Harper, of all people, should have known because he is leader of the Conservative Party, and respect for the constitution and an unwillingness to allow it to be changed at a whim is a fundamental Tory principle.

It is not a question of whether Senate reform is in itself desirable or whether or not the specific reforms proposed by Prime Minister Harper are good or bad. That the Senate is in need of serious reform has been obvious for decades. The need is there but it is not urgent, despite the recent media hype over how certain Senators have abused their expense accounts. The Prime Minister’s proposals were for Senators to be elected to office and for term limits to be set for them. While I can understand why he thinks these are good ideas they are not the kind of reforms I would like to see. I think that the Senate should remain an appointed body but that control over who the Governor General appoints should be removed from the Prime Minister’s Office and put in the hands of an appointment committee composed of representatives of the provincial governments. I would like to see the property ownership requirements for Senators be updated to reflect the inflation that has taken place since 1867 and their salaries either eliminated or reduced to an honorarium. Rather than impose a term limit on Senators, I would prefer to see the minimum age for Senate appointment raised to about fifty. I think these reforms are more appropriate for Canada than the Triple-E model that the Reform Party favoured but I would not want to see them brought in without provincial consent either. The constitutional amendment formula must be respected because to fail to respect that process is to fail to respect the constitution itself.

The proposals for Senate reform that I just suggested differ from the Triple-E model that the Reform Party advocated and which is the basis of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals in that they are not based upon the assumption that making the Senate better means making it more democratic. The equation of good government with democracy is a very modern and very erroneous idea which lies beneath both the desire for an elected Senate on the part of the supposedly right-wing support base of the old Reform Party and the desire to abolish the Senate on the part of the left-wing NDP. The reforms that I would prefer to see are based upon respect for Canada’s parliamentary monarchy form of government and the tradition from which we obtained that form of government. They take into consideration both the current problems with the Senate, the role the Senate was intended by the Fathers of Confederation to play in government, and offer suggestions as to how to get fix as much as is possible the former and help the Senate to perform the latter that are consistent with the history and tradition of our constitution.

The problem with the Senate is that it is used by whichever party happens to be in power in the lower House as a means of rewarding people who have served the party by providing them with a cushy position that comes with a large salary and fat expense account and a minimal amount of responsibility. When Canada’s Fathers established the Senate, modifying the House of Lords in the British parliamentary model to fit the Canadian situation, they intended for it to serve as a sort of brake on those in power in the lower House. The Senate would review the legislation they passed and provide a “sober second thought” so that the party which commanded a majority in the lower House could not simply rush through legislation that might ultimately be to the detriment of the country. Needless to say, the Senate cannot very well perform this function if it is constantly being stacked by the government to which it is supposed to act as a brake.

Removing control of appointments to the Senate from the Prime Minister’s Office would prevent the Prime Minister from being able to stack the Senate and use it as a rubber stamp on whatever he wants thus enabling it to serve its original function better. Updating the property requirements for Senators and removing the perks of the position would help insure that Senate seats are filled by public minded and spirited people rather than those hoping to grow fat off the public purse. Raising the minimum age for Senators would help make sure that the Senate does provide the needed “sober second thought” because wisdom, contrary to the folly of the youth-worshipping zeitgeist, comes with age.

All of these reforms would be superior to just making the Senate more democratic. The ancients recognized that just as there are good kings and bad kings, and an elite may be either a wise and public spirited aristocracy or an arrogant and selfish oligarchy, so democracy can be both good and bad as well. Therefore, they reasoned, the best constitutional arrangement would include a king, an aristocracy, and a form of democracy so that each of these elements of government would check the tendency towards the bad in the others and bring out the tendency towards the good. This is, of course, what we have in the parliamentary monarchy system that we inherited and adapted from Britain. The desire to democratize the non-democratic elements misses the point altogether and replaces the wisdom of the ancients with the folly of the modern.

Reforms that respect the constitution and the tradition on which it is based are democratic in another sense of the word, the best sense of the word, that of which G. K. Chesterton wrote when he said that he wanted a democracy that does not exclude members of a society from the franchise on the grounds that they are no longer among the living. It is tradition to which he was referring, the only kind of democracy that can give a vote to all members of a society, the dead and the unborn as well as the living. In this sense of the word democracy, the will of the people is not to be equated with whatever the majority of the populace can be persuaded to say they want at any given moment. This concept of democracy suits our constitution well for in it, the task of representing the people as an organic whole, including past and future generations as well as the present, is assigned to an office that is above elections and the political process, the office of the Queen.

The Supreme Court, by insisting that any government wishing to make significant changes to the structure of the Senate must follow the amendment procedure in the constitution, has declared that the government must respect the constitution and the tradition upon which it is built. Critics of their decision may complain that the Court is standing in the way of the will of the people and of democratic reform, but it is in keeping with the Chestertonian “democracy of the dead” which is the best form of democracy and perhaps the only one truly worthy of honour.

So three cheers and kudos to the Supreme Court. This time, at least, they did their job well.