Alberta's Left Turn

I had not been following the recent provincial election campaign in Alberta. I found it interesting, therefore, when Kevin Michael Grace over at The Ambler predicted an NDP win shortly before the election, but I was not really surprised when this prediction came true. Mr. Grace has frequently demonstrated his acute insight into the myriad of aspects of Canadian politics and the NDP and Alberta are not as odd of a match as many people seem to think. Capitalism and socialism have never really been polar opposites, they are more the opposite sides of a single coin, perhaps the plugged nickel. Both think that the acquisition of money is the purpose for human existence, with the difference between the two being that capitalists think that money should be obtained through the free exchange of goods, services, and labour whereas socialists think it is better for the government to take money from those who already have it and give it to other people. I don’t wish to trivialize this difference – the former, being relatively the more honest of the two, is clearly to be preferred by sane, decent, and normal people over the latter, the preference of crooks, scoundrels, and fools – but the difference pales in comparison to that between the shared assumptions of capitalism and socialism and the truth that there are many things more important in life than making money.

For as long as I can remember I have heard Alberta described as Canada’s “most conservative province” but I have long questioned the accuracy of this designation. It might have been true at one time. In the fall of 1936, Stephen Leacock, the famous Canadian professor, economist, social commentator, and humorist began a lecture tour of the Western provinces and he described his experiences in My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West In Canada, which was published by Thomas Allen in Toronto in 1937. In his ninth chapter, “Monarchy in the West”, Leacock wrote that:

People who know nothing about it always imagine that the West of Canada is far less British than the East. Apart from the Maritime Provinces this is not so. It is even the reverse of truth.

From this he went on to argue that the large number of Americans who had moved up to the Canadian West between 1905 and 1914 made “no great difference as to the British connection and British institutions” because Americans had been British originally, and were reverting to their roots. He put it in these memorable words:

It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.

If Leacock’s assessment of 1936 Alberta was accurate, that those settling the province valued Canada’s British institutions, had not a trace of republicanism, and that the former Americans among them would be the ones to fire that last shot on behalf of the Crown, then it might have been true to say, at that time, that Alberta was the most conservative province in the Dominion. That was then. This is now.

In Canada, a conservative is someone who believes in and supports the traditional British institutions of this country. This was historically true even of conservative French Canadians – and until the 1960s French Canadians were very conservative indeed – for while their primary concern might have been the preservation of their language, Roman Catholicism, and their traditional way of life, they understood that these things had been guaranteed by the Crown since 1774 and that had all of British North America gone over to the American Republic in the Revolution their language, religion, and culture would not have survived. The two best articulations of the political meaning of conservatism in the Canadian context, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and John G. Diefenbaker’s These Things We Treasure, the first by a central Canadian who grew up in Ontario and Quebec, the second by a Westerner, who grew up and practiced law in Saskatchewan before entering federal politics, both argued that Canada’s British institutions were the foundation and framework of our traditional rights and freedoms and that the latter stand and fall with the former.

If Alberta were the most conservative province in Canada that would mean that the ideas in the preceding paragraph would be more prevalent in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. Is this the case? Hardly. Indeed, one of the most curious things about many who identify as conservative in the province of Alberta is an inability to put two and two together and come up with four on this matter.

From 1963, when Lester Pearson became Prime Minister until 1984 when Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister, the Liberal Party of Canada waged an aggressive war against Canada’s British institutions and traditions. They removed the designation “Royal” from many institutions including the post office and the navy. They insisted that we needed a new flag of our own, even though the Canadian Red Ensign had been declared our country’s flag by Order-In-Council in 1945, three days after the end of the war in which it had been baptized our national flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in our country’s finest hour. It was the Union Jack in the canton that made the old flag objectionable to them. These are just two examples, many more could be provided. At the same time the Liberal Party was attacking Canada’s British heritage and institutions it was also attacking and undermining the basic traditional freedoms of Canadians. In the early 1970s they added a law against “hate propaganda” to the Criminal Code, which set a bad precedent for freedom of speech by making certain types of speech illegal on the basis of the thoughts expressed within them. Existing laws governing speech, such as the law against incitement, only made speech illegal when it called upon people to commit violence and break the law. Then the Liberals passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, an attack on freedom of association patterned on the American Civil Rights Act of the previous decade, which further attacked freedom of speech with its chilling Section 13, designating hate speech as an illegal act of discrimination and defining it so broadly that virtually anything offensive to those protected against discrimination would qualify. Finally, when they repatriated the British North America Act, they tacked onto it a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that under the guise of securing for us the rights and freedoms we already possessed by prescription as subjects of the Crown, nullified those rights and freedoms. (1) These attacks upon traditional and basic prescriptive rights and liberties, producing the oppressive politically correct atmosphere that Albertan “conservatives” rightly object to, were carried out at the same time and by the same people who were ripping apart our British heritage, proving the analysis of traditional Canadian Tories like Farthing and Diefenbaker, that our freedoms stand and fall with our British traditions, institutions, and heritage, to be correct.

Yet many Albertan “small c conservatives” don’t seem to get this. To the last man they have an intense loathing for Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party, yet many of them show little interest in turning to Canada’s British institutions, traditions, and heritage. Indeed, I have known more than a few of them to approach our British heritage with an attitude of contempt scarcely distinguishable from Trudeau’s own. Royalism is the sine qua non of conservatism in Canada, a non-negotiable, and Pierre Trudeau was notorious for, among other things, his disrespect for Her Majesty, yet you will encounter in Alberta, far more than anywhere else in Canada, people who claim to be Trudeau-hating conservatives but who are republicans rather than royalists. Self-identified Albertan “conservatives” tend to be continentalists – sometimes to the point of being annexationists – and free traders, both of which, ironically, are positions that historically belonged to the Liberal Party. It is further ironic that free trade was only embraced by the Conservative Party in the 1980s under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the Conservative leader most hated in Alberta, whose misgovernment drove traditional Conservative Party voters, not only in Alberta but throughout the West, into the Reform Party of Canada.

This does not sound like a conservative province – more like a belligerently regionalist province with a chip on its shoulder. Localism is an important element of conservative thought, but in a form similar to the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, never anti-patriotism.

Where then does Alberta’s “conservative” reputation come from?

Is it the most socially conservative province?

When one thinks of social conservatism – in the sense of opposition to the moral and social disintegration that has taken place in the United States, Canada and the rest of the Western world since World War as manifest in such things as the collapse of social authority, no-fault divorce, birth control, abortion, the sexual revolution, cohabitation without marriage, serial marriages, alternative sexualities, and the like – three voices come to mind as having spoken louder on behalf of social conservatism in Canada than any other – George Grant, William Gairdner, and Ted Byfield. All three were from central Canada.

Yes, that’s right, all three. Ted Byfield, the founder of the Alberta Report which joined Christian social conservatism with a defiant Western and particularly Alberta populism, was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. That, in itself, does not perhaps say much, especially since moral and social decay, and worse, government brainwashing of the young against traditional norms, has gone further in Ontario, under the premierships of McGuinity and Wynne than anywhere else in the country. Nevertheless, it is in Alberta that the Rev. Stephen Boissoin was dragged before the Human Rights Tribunal – they have one of these odious kangaroo courts in Alberta too – for writing a letter to the editor, criticizing the actions of the politicized homosexual movement.

More substantially, Albertans more than any other Canadians, love American popular culture and oppose any attempt on the part of the national government to protect domestic Canadian culture. While our cultural protectionist policies have been a complete failure, and indeed have done harm rather than good, my point is that there is nothing that has done more to erode traditional social institutions, the authority of parents, teachers, and churches, and moral standards, than Hollywood films, pop and rock music, and television programming. A social conservatism that is wed to an objection, at the theoretical level, to cultural protectionism on the liberal grounds of market freedom, is a social conservatism that has laid down, raised the white flag, and given up.

The other grounds on which some have claimed that Alberta is the most conservative province are those of fiscal and economic conservatism. Fiscal conservatism is the idea that the state should live within its means and not export its costs into the future for posterity to pay. The economic ideas regarded as being conservative in Alberta are actually economic liberalism – free markets, free trade, and low taxes to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, promoting economic growth that creates jobs and generates wealth. These two ideas are not always compatible. The goal of economic liberalism is constant growth so it always calls for lower taxes, whereas fiscal conservatism recognizes that to meet its goal, of not creating burdens for future generations, taxes may sometimes need to be raised in the present. It has been my impression that for most Albertan conservatives when these two ideas and goals clash, it is economic liberalism that wins out over fiscal conservatism. At any rate, actual economic conservatism is a variation of economic liberalism called economic nationalism, in which the government passes laws and taxes that favour and protect domestic production, thus exporting its costs not to future generations but to foreign companies and countries, as an entrance fee for access to the national market. Needless to say this idea would go over like a ton of bricks in Alberta.

Which brings us back to what I said at the beginning about capitalism and socialism – they are not polar opposites, but two sides of the same coin. That Alberta, the bastion of economic liberalism in Canada, would flip the coin and a give a majority government to the socialist party of high taxes and even higher spending, the very opposite of fiscal conservatism, is less of a shock than it would have been had the province managed to put fiscally conservative economic patriots into power.

The NDP is about more than socialism, of course. It is also about feminism, abortion-on-demand, anti-white racism, climate change alarmism, the Orwellian thought control that is political correctness, and the triumph of the abnormal over the normal and the average over the exceptional. Albertans will find to their horror that it is these latter things, even more than socialism, that they have in store for them under an NDP government.

The NDP is also, however, the most anti-Canadian of parties, when Canada is rightly understood as being the British country, confederated under the Crown in Parliament in 1867, upon a foundation rooted in Loyalism. The NDP wish to finish what he Pearson-Trudeau Liberals started in the 1960s-1980s, and obliterate our British heritage entirely, abolishing the upper chamber in Parliament, and severing the country’s ties to the monarchy. Had Alberta truly been the most conservative province in the country, the NDP’s contempt for Canada’s British traditions and institutions would have prevented them from ever giving the NDP a single seat. Many Albertans, however, chose to join what ideas they had that were fiscally or socially conservative, to a very unconservative anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism that is not that far removed from that of the NDP, making this election’s outcome much less of a surprise, although no less of a disaster.

(1) Section 33 effectively nullifies all the rights and freedoms listed in section 2, and sections 7 through 15.

Tory Economics Part Two

In Tory Economics: Part One we saw that neither capitalism, the economic system of laissez-faire advocated by classical liberalism since the eighteenth century, nor socialism, the economic system of collective property ownership/management advocated by radicals since the nineteenth century, adequately represents the economic views of the Tory, the classical conservative who is the modern spokesman for pre-modern, pre-liberal, ideas and institutions, such as monarchy, aristocracy, the Church and the classical and Christian tradition with its vision of the good of the whole. We saw that in the twentieth century, liberalism abandoned laissez faire for Keynesian economic interventionism and the welfare state, which was perceived as a move towards socialism, prompting liberals of the older type, now called libertarians, to form an alliance with conservatives against the alliance between the socialists and the new type liberals. This led to the widespread confusion of conservatism with capitalism and of liberalism with socialism. We also saw, how in reaction against this confusion of conservatism with the older type of liberalism, some classical conservatives began to argue that true conservatism was closer to socialism, an argument called Red Toryism here in Canada, and we saw how that reasoning was a classic example of the enemy of my enemy fallacy, whether arrived at honestly and with good intentions by George Grant or though the alternate route taken by Dalton Camp.

In this essay we will look at the economic principles that arise out of the Tory position and will examine four alternative economic theories that are more compatible with the conservative project of preserving the best ideas and institutions that have been accumulating in our collective tradition since the most ancient times than either pure free market capitalism or socialism.

Note the significance of the word “pure” before free market capitalism. Each of these economic theories – economic nationalism, distributism, agrarianism, and economic humanism – is, as we will see, itself a modified version of free market economics, a voice dissenting against the mainstream of liberalism from within. In a very real sense this could even be said of socialism, the economic theory of which was built in the nineteenth century upon the foundation laid by the liberal classical economists of the eighteenth. There is an explanation for this. It was the classical liberals who pioneered the science of economics, if it can truly be thought of as a science, that laid the foundation and established the framework of economic theory, and all subsequent systematic thinking about economics has built upon their work in one way or another.

What is today called capitalism, the classical economic theory that men individually pursuing their own material self-interest in a voluntarily contractual marketplace will be led by the “invisible hand” of market forces to serve the public good by serving their own and so the best economic policy on the part of government is a hands off or laissez-faire policy, is the first economic system of its type. It is the first attempt at a comprehensive blueprint, drawn up according to modern, rational, principles, for the managing of the production and distribution of a nation’s material wealth. What the Tories defended, in response to the Whigs’ introduction of this system, was a set of arrangements that had evolved in a very different manner. Nobody had sat down, thought about the best way to organize a country economically, and come up with these arrangements. It would have been impossible to arrive at these arrangements in that way, they could only have come about as feudal agrarian nations gradually adapted to the reality of the growing bourgeois mercantile trade. Liberals and other progressives maintain that this made the Tory position weak and indefensible. The rational mind can surely come up with a system superior to any set of arrangements that are the outcome of the gradual evolution of history and tradition they maintain. The Tory position, however, is one of deep skepticism towards precisely this claim. The Tory believes that modern, progressive man has greatly overestimated the amount of positive change that can be devised and effected by the rational mind and greatly underestimated the importance of tradition which contains a self-correcting mechanism that over long periods of time operates in a way that is not dissimilar to how liberals say the “invisible hand” of the free market is supposed to work. (1) From this we derive our first Tory economic principle, that economic arrangements that have gradually evolved over long periods of time are more trustworthy and to be preferred, over the products of the rational mind’s attempt to draw up a technical schematic for a newer, better, more efficient economic system.

This principle bears something of the appearance of being a non-individualist argument for liberalism’s doctrine of laissez-faire. A rationalist design for a new and improved economic system must be imposed over an existing economic order from the top down and our first principle clearly says the government should not do this but let the existing arrangements be. Is this an illustration of what Dr. Johnson meant when he said “A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different”?

While the answer is not a clear-cut “no” it is rather more nuanced than a plain “yes.”

The evolution of economic arrangements over time in a civil, ordered, society will involve the passing of laws, the levying of taxes, and various government projects of one sort or another, laudable and lamentable. These are all part of what governments do in their role of overseeing and administering the affairs of a civil society. For the process of natural, economic evolution to end up in a liberal laissez-faire system it would have to have occurred in the absence of government, which, whatever anarchists may claim to the contrary, is not the natural condition of man.

There is a significant implication in this last statement. If natural, economic, evolution could only give us liberal laissez-faire if it occurred in an unnatural state of anarchy, then actual liberal capitalism did not arise through the practice of the policy it preaches. This is confirmed by history. The industrial capitalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not the result of the English government suddenly becoming enlightened by the publication of Adam Smith’s book and adopting laissez-faire policies. Smith’s book came out at the end of over two centuries of aggressive state action taken by Parliamentary Whigs representing the rising new urban merchant-manufacturing class against feudal-agrarian arrangements. These actions, such as the Acts of Enclosure that privatized the commons, were designed to break the feudal security of agrarian workers, uproot them, and drive them from the farms and villages and into dependence upon the new factories in large cities such as Manchester. (2) Liberalism’s promotion of the doctrine of laissez-faire resembles the way in which certain merchants, after having made their fortunes off of the transport and sale of slaves, began to preach the abolition of slavery.

Ironically, therefore, the Tory principle of preferring natural evolution to rational planning would seem to promote a policy of laissez-faire towards traditional economic arrangements, with the understanding that those traditional arrangements include certain state actions, whereas the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire required massive state intervention into those economic arrangements.

One of the oldest rivals to the classical liberal economic doctrine of laissez-faire is economic nationalism. Classical liberals frequently equate economic nationalism with mercantilism but while there are similarities between the two they should not be confused. Mercantilism, depending upon how you look at it, was either the last phase of the pre-industrial economy or the first phase of capitalism. It was the policy of European governments, in the age of discovery, exploration, and increasing international trade, before the industrial revolution and the development of mass production, of managing their country’s trade balance with the goal of always running a surplus, i.e., exporting more than they imported. The idea behind mercantilism was that by running a constant trade surplus, goods would keep going out, currency in the form of precious metals would keep coming in, and the country would keep getting richer and richer.

Economic nationalism is not mercantilism. Whereas mercantilism was a form of pre-industrial economy, economic nationalism, like the liberal classical economics of Adam Smith, is a theory about the development of an industrial economy. Smith argued that an industrial economy would be best served by a domestic laissez-faire policy and by international free trade. Economic nationalism is basically the idea that a country’s government should protect its developing industries with tariffs and use tax revenues to build and maintain such industry supporting infrastructure as roads, railroads, and canals.

To the historian it may seem odd to argue that economic nationalism is more Tory-friendly than Smith’s economic liberalism. In the first major free trade argument in the late seventeenth century, it was the Tories who argued for free trade with France and the Whigs who argued against it. This had more to do with politics and religion than economics, with the Tories supporting James II in his desire for closer ties with Catholic France and the Puritan Whigs aghast at the suggestion, but at least one of the Tory free traders, Sir Dudley North, made the case in economic terms. (3) Apart from this early debate, the Tories were historically protectionists but the protection they favoured was agricultural protection. The first economic nationalists were Whigs, before Adam Smith’s ideas became liberal orthodoxy, and the first elaborate economic nationalist system to be developed was that developed by American republicans after the revolution. This was the “American system” of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The major nineteenth century theorist of economic nationalism, the German liberal Friedrich List was largely inspired by the Hamilton-Clay American System which he encountered while living in exile in the United States from 1825-1830.

Although historically economic nationalism is liberal in origin, having been first proposed by English Whigs, developed by American republicans, and systematically expounded by a German liberal, it came to be accepted by Tories or conservatives as an alternative that is preferable to laissez-faire. Thus List’s treatise (4) inspired the economic policy of Prussia’s traditionalist, aristocratic, and royalist “Iron Chancellor”, Otto von Bismarck, in the unified Germany. List’s theories were also the theoretical basis of the “National Policy” of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir. John A. MacDonald, and remained part of the Conservative Party’s platform until Brian Mulroney became a free trader in the 1980s. In the United States the Republican Party was built upon the Hamilton-Clay system and it too remained on the Republican Party platform until the Reagan era. (5)

We do not have to look far to see what in economic nationalism would be appealing to a traditional Tory. The Tory believes in the pre-modern idea that society is an organic and corporate whole, and that as such its good is greater and higher than the accumulated goods of each of its individual members. The liberal doctrine of laissez-faire, in which each individual looks out for his own interests and the forces of the free market work like an “invisible hand” to bring about the greater good of the society, does not acknowledge this. The liberal doctrine is not entirely wrong – remember that the Tory does not simply assert the contrary of whatever the liberal says. When it comes to our individual goods, the liberal doctrine is largely correct. You are better qualified to know what is best for you, and I am better qualified to know what is best for me, than any government could possibly be qualified to know what is individually best for you, me, and everyone else in society. The larger the society over which the government rules and the further removed the government is from those it governs, the more true this is. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as those with some sort of mental disability that hinders them from being competent judges in their own affairs, but for most people it is true that they are better judges of their own affairs than government could be. Therefore, as far as the individual goods of a society’s members go, the arguments for the free market are sound. The good of the society as a whole, however, is more than just the sum of these individual goods and is exactly what government exists to look out for. In economic nationalism, government looks out for the national good, whereas individuals look out for their own good in the market as in liberal capitalism. This balance between the national and individual good is in keeping with traditional Tory views.

This then is our second Tory economic principle, that the good of the nation as a whole, is more than the sum of the goods of its individual members. .

As liberal capitalism has progressed it has developed beyond an economy of small, family shops and businesses into an economy of large corporations. In the twentieth century the idea of free trade became more popular. Classical liberals continued to believe in it, but the newer kind of progressive liberal who abandoned domestic laissez-faire for Keynesian interventionism and the welfare state was also a free trader. Thus, in the United States, the transition from the high tariff, economic nationalism that the Republican Party had introduced in the nineteenth century to free trade, was largely overseen by the same liberal Democrats – FDR, JFK, and LBJ – who constructed America’s welfare state. Later in the twentieth century, the Conservative Parties of Canada and the United Kingdom and the Republican Party in the United States, converted to free trade as well. This nigh-universal acceptance of free trade dogma coincided with various regional and global free trade agreements. Regionally, Canada and the United States signed a Free Trade agreement, then brought Mexico in on NAFTA, and negotiated with Latin America for the FTAA, while the nations of Europe dropped their trade boundaries to form the Common Market. Globally, free traders had been working towards the integration of the world’s markets since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947 which eventually led to the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Laissez-faire purists will argue – correctly – that these agreements are not true “free trade” in the Smith-Ricardo-Cobden sense, but the difference is not relevant to the point I am making. These agreements have established, as true free trade would, markets that transcend national boundaries and therefore favour the creation and growth of corporations that transcend national boundaries and have no national loyalties. Advocates of free trade, the regional integration of markets, and globalism argue that this promotes the economic good of all nations involved and especially to the consumer who benefits from lower prices because of it. This is questionable, but even if it demonstrably the case that globalism is economically beneficial to each country involved it can hardly be said to be to the overall good of any country that it is part of an international economic system that promotes the growth of companies that transcend national boundaries, have no national loyalties, and answer to no national laws. This sort of economic integration promotes on the one hand, the cultural and social dissolution of the communities and societies involved, and on the other their cultural, social, and ultimately political integration into a new, international order. Observe the way the economic integration of Europe has led to the rise of the European Parliament and the European Courts of Justice and Human Rights and the continental attack upon the local traditions and national identities of each of the European Union’s member states. Apart from economic theory, one of the main reasons the Conservative Party in Canada traditionally supported MacDonald’s National Policy was to combat continentalism, this economically fuelled pull towards continental social, cultural, and political integration. One does not have to sympathize with the crude and generally ignorant anti-Americanism of the Left to see that the triumph of continentalism, whether it is economically justifiable or not, is harmful to the greater good of our country and that the same is true on a much larger scale of globalization.

Our third Tory economic principle, therefore, is that the economic good, whether of the nation or its individual members, does not outweigh the cultural, social, and political good of the nation.

Capitalism had not developed into anything remotely close to globalism yet, when a couple of English writers, who politically were dissident Liberals but religiously were conservative, traditionalist Roman Catholics, began to speak out against the direction in which they believed capitalism was headed, i.e., towards the swallowing up of the small business owner by the large company, the concentration of property in the hands of a small number of capitalists, and an agreement between those capitalists and the state whereby the bulk of the population would become an industrial labour force that would be maintained by the state during periods when the factories could not provide full employment. Socialism had been around for almost a century at the time but these writers were not socialists, being influenced by social teaching of their church which condemned socialism and its attack on private property even more vehemently than it condemned capitalism. “The problem with capitalism”, G. K. Chesterton wrote “is that there are too few capitalists”.

Chesterton, who wrote everything from mysteries and spy novels to serious and light verse to literary criticism and Christian apologetics, was one of the writers in question. His friend Hilaire Belloc who wrote poetry and historical biography and ran for office as a Liberal was the other. After Chesterton converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922 and became an advocate with Belloc for a modified liberal economic system that incorporated Catholic social teaching their mutual friend and enemy, Irish playwright and Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw dubbed them the “Chesterbelloc.”

The term for the system of economics they promoted, which is probably best explained in Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, (6) is distributism. Late in the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII had issued an encyclical entitled Rerum Novarum, in response to the ”spirit of revolutionary change” that had been “disturbing the nations of the world” and which had “passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics”. (7) In the encyclical the Pope opposed this spirit of revolution and condemned the socialists who “working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies” in no uncertain terms. “They are”, the Pope wrote, “moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.” (8) This condemnation was not an endorsement of liberal capitalism. The Pope also condemned the conditions that had given birth to revolution and socialism and called for “some opportune remedy” to be found “for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” which he attributed to the abolition of “the ancient workingmen's guilds”, leaving a vacuum in which the working man was “surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.” The encyclical defends the private ownership of property against socialism, which strikes “at the interests of every wage-earner” by seeking to “deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life” but laments that “the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few” and calls for changes whereby the conditions of the working classes improve are improved and it becomes easier for them to save their wages and become property owners themselves.

It is from this teaching, that faithful Catholics like Chesterton and Belloc derived their idea of distributism, which is basically the idea that property, rather than being owned collectively by society through the state as in socialism, or privately by a small class of capitalists, ought to be privately owned but that private ownership should be widely distributed throughout the largest number of people in society. What the distributists were basically advocating was a large middle class of small property owners. Here again it may seem strange, regardless of the origins of the idea in Roman Catholic teachings, to suggest that distributism is closer to the views of the Tory than orthodox liberalism. The Tory Party that supported the House of Stuart against the Puritans in the seventeenth century, drew its support from the titled nobility, landed gentry, Anglican clergy, and the country peasants. It was the Puritans who sought support among the middle classes, particularly the merchant trading classes. Later, in the nineteenth century, it was Robert Peel the heterodox Tory leader who championed liberal policies to attract the middle class vote, whereas Benjamin Disraeli, the more orthodox Tory leader, sought to attract the vote of the lower, working classes. (9) Nevertheless, it should be remembered that between those two centuries was the century of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the son of a middle class bookseller and a man of impeccably orthodox High Tory views. Tories have always believed in hierarchy and in society’s need for aristocratic leadership, but they also believe in the maintaining the stability and security of the social and civil order, and it has been recognized as wisdom since the days of Aristotle (10) that a society is most stable when the middle class is the largest. Much depends, of course, upon what is meant by “middle class”, a term that has become so flexible as to be almost meaningless. A rising commercial class that threatens the civil order in its avarice will meet with Tory opposition as it did in the seventeenth century, whereas a settled bourgeois class of civilly responsible property owners as the bedrock of a secure social and civil order will meet with Tory approval and support.

Our fourth Tory economic principle, therefore, is that economic policy must support the stability and security of the social and civil order. Related to this principle and also derived from the preceding discussion are our fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Tory economic principles which are respect and support for the private ownership of property, support for the leadership of an aristocratic class (11), support for a secure, stable, and large middle class of bourgeois small property owners, and support for the rights and well-being of the labouring classes. (12)

In the same period in which Chesterton and Belloc were promoting distributism in England, several American writers were promoting a related concept in the United States. A group of poets, essays, and novelists who had met at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in the early 1920s founded a journal called The Fugitive which ran for about three years and earned them the label “The Fugitives”. The leaders of this group later became the core of a group of writers who called themselves “The Twelve Southerners.” The most distinguished members of this group were poet and critic Allen Tate, (13) poet, historian and essayist Donald Davidson, novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, novelist and playwright Andrew Nelson Lytle and literary critic John Crowe Ransom. They came together in 1930 to publish an anthology of essays entitled I’ll Take My Stand. (14) It was an eclectic collection but it had the general theme that just as how in the American internecine conflict of 1861-1865 and the following Reconstruction period the industrial, Puritan, North had invaded, sacked, and conquered the traditional, agrarian, South, destroying forever her old way of life so modern industrialism as a whole was invading and destroying the way of life of small town, rural, America. There was enough similarity between their ideas and those of the distributists that a sequel of sorts, entitled Who Owns America? (15), was later published that included contributions from many of the original twelve and from some English distributist writers.

The Southern Agrarians were not primarily defending an economic system so much as a way of life. They argued that a rural way of life, based upon agriculture, was healthy for families and communities, and promoted religion, virtue, and respect for tradition. All of this they saw threatened by modern technological progress, industrialization, and urbanization. This was an unmistakably conservative point of view. One of their students was Richard M. Weaver, who became an English teacher at the University of Chicago, and who launched a revival of conservative thought in North America with the publication of his book Ideas Have Consequences in 1948, which traced the development of modern thought and the decay of classical and Christian civilization from the nominalism of William of Occam in the fourteenth century to the development of the atomic bomb in the twentieth.

Today, the most widely known spokesman for their views is Wendell Berry of Kentucky, an acclaimed essayist, poet, and novelist who lives out his agrarian philosophy by farming his homestead in as close to the old ways as is still possible. In his essays he defends localism against globalism, small farms and businesses against mega-corporations, and traditional ways against modern ways, reminding us of our basic human need for a way of life that listens to and is in harmony with the natural rhythms of life. In his novels, which tell the stories of the Coulters, Catletts, Feltners, Beechums and Wheelers of Port Williams, Kentucky he provides a portrait of the old way of life whose passing away he chronicles as a testimony to the fact that modern man has paid a price for the advantages that come with technological and industrial advancement and that what has been lost may very well have been worth more than what has been gained. Andy Catlett, a recurring character and often narrator of these novels, speaks with the voice of his creator when he says:

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and proper never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that has replaced it. (16)

The English Tories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fought for a rural, agrarian, lifestyle against the encroaching urbanism and industrialism of modernity. The agrarian lifestyle they fought for was one rooted in feudalism, the lifestyle of squire and peasant. This was different kind of agrarian lifestyle from that of the small, family farm, lifestyle promoted by Wendell Berry although Berry’s antecedents, the Twelve Southerners, had looked for their inspiration to the antebellum South, the culture and civilization of which was one of the closest to feudalism that North America has ever seen. Nevertheless, in modernity, with its vision of progress, its materialistic worldview, its drive to dominate nature with technology and to emancipate the human will from traditional constraints, the agrarianism of the traditional English High Tory and that of the Southern Agrarian have a common enemy, and it is not surprising that the critique of modernity in the writings of Canada’s premier Tory philosopher George Grant and that in the writings of America’s agrarian sage Wendell Berry, often echo one another.

What can we glean by way of principle from this? The major agrarian insight is that rural life, the life of the farm and small town, is in many ways more conducive to the cultivation of virtue, to the practice of religion, to raising a family, to neighborliness and community, and to the good life in general, than the hurly-burly of modern city life. This does not mean that cities are an evil. In ancient times Plato identified the reason cities are organized and built as the promotion of the greater good of the whole. It seems paradoxical that the life of the country is better suited to fulfilling the raison d'être of the city than the life of the city, but it is best to think of the country and the city as symbiotic, each needing the other. Our ninth Tory economic principle is that no economic policy, whether it be capitalist or socialism, can be properly regarded as good which promotes the expansion of the city at the expense of the life of the country.

In 1973 a book came out that was met with support on both the left and right from those dissatisfied with capitalism, socialism, and the way the two had become increasingly indistinguishable from each other. This book, written by a German born, British economist who had studied under Keynes, garnered insights from the Buddhists in Burma, and then converted to Roman Catholicism and become an acolyte of the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc, was E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. (17) Schumacher blasted modern, large-scale economies, as being unsustainable systems of production that would rapidly deplete natural resources and called for the development of new types of technology, more appropriate for use in decentralized, local economies. The subtitle of his book was “a study of economics as if people mattered” a title that hints at that of a work that appeared thirteen years previously, by another German born economist influenced by the distributists. That book was A Humane Economy (18) by Wilhelm Röpke. Röpke’s “economic humanism” is the fourth and final economic theory that we will be discussing in this essay.

Like Schumacher, Röpke was born in Germany and also like Schumacher, had fled Germany at the rise of the Third Reich. He later returned to help Germany rebuild its economy after the war, although he ultimately settled in Switzerland. Whereas Schumacher had learned economics from John Maynard Keynes, the father of the progressive liberal idea of kickstarting the economy with low interest rates and government spending, Röpke was a disciple of the Austrian School of economics. The Austrian School of economics was a school of laissez-faire liberalism that had started in the late nineteenth century with Carl Menger as a response to Marxism. Its most important theorist was Röpke’s mentor and contemporary, Ludwig von Mises, and its best known exponent was Friedrich A. Hayek. Like his Austrian colleagues Röpke was a life-long defender of the free market and private enterprise but in less absolute terms. The difference is perhaps best illustrated in an anecdote that Russell Kirk liked to share about how a couple of years after the end of World War II, Mises had come to visit Röpke in Geneva, and Röpke had shown him the garden plots that the city had allocated to citizens during the war for growing their own vegetables, a practice that had been extended due to its popularity. Mises’ response was to shake his head and say “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs”, to which Röpke rejoined “But perhaps a very efficient way of producing human happiness.” (19)

It was Russell Kirk who suggested the title A Humane Economy to Röpke, for a book which offers a free market critique of Keynesianism and the welfare state in the context of a larger critique of mass society. This critique expands upon themes that Röpke had addressed in earlier works, like The Social Crisis of Our Time, in which he had identified trends within the liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, towards proleterization, i.e., the process whereby “a considerable part of the world’s population has been pushed into a sociological and anthropological position which characterized by economic and social dependence, a rootless, tenemented life, where men are strangers to nature and overwhelmed by the dreariness of work” (20) and the “cult of the colossal” (21) that had led to the rise of the totalitarian systems that were threatening Europe and the world at the time, such as National Socialism and Communism.

There are five chapters in A Humane Economy, the first of which is a re-appraisal of what he had written in The Social Crisis of Our Time. The second is an extensive critique of mass society, defined by the condition of omnipresent crowdedness, as people live together in mass dwellings (apartments, condominiums, etc.), move from place to place en masse (traffic), work in mass factories and office buildings, and spend their leisure time in mass activities. These conditions are obviously the result of a growth in world population, Röpke notes, and while the West may have escaped the more obvious Malthusian consequences of exponential population growth through economic expansion, the proleterization of the bulk of the population and the expansion of welfarism and inflationary Keynesian policies, make this an unsustainable solution in the long run. The fourth chapter gives a more in depth explanation of why welfarism, which destroys the character of those who pay for it and those who receive it alike and inflationary spending do more harm than good. Even if, however, the combination of economic expansion and population growth could be kept up long term, however, why would we want to go further in the direction of mass society? “What happens” Röpke asked, “to the things which cannot be produced or expressed in monetary terms and bought but which are the ultimate conditions of man’s happiness and of the fullness and dignity of his life?” (22)

Expanding upon that question, Röpke wrote:

Is it not, we may modestly ask, part of the standard of living that people should feel well and happy and should not lack what Burke calls the “unbought graces of life”—nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure, as distinct from that break in the rush which is called “spare time” and has to be filled by some hectic activity? All these are things, in fact, of which man is progressively deprived at startling speed by a mass society constantly swollen by new human floods. (23)

The answer, of course, is yes, Burke’s “unbought graces” are part of the standard of living, and not an insignificant part at that.

Röpke continued to detail the negative consequences of mass society in cultural decay (24), the breakdown of community and the social fabric, and the spread of boredom which he saw as the “product and curse of mass society” (25), a loss of interest in life in a society whose human members are treated as cogs in a machine.

Mass society, in other words, while it may come with an increase in the availability of consumer goods, also brings with it a scarcity of other goods that are fundamental to the good life and which meet deep and essential needs in human nature.

It is significant that Röpke places his critique of mass society in the chapter immediately preceding the two chapters that deal with economics proper, for this illustrates the thesis of the book that is hinted at in its subtitled “The Social Framework of the Free Market”. Early in the third chapter on the “conditions and limits of the market”, Röpke notes the market’s advocates:

in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. (26)

The forces that govern the market cannot govern society, Röpke went on to say. He identified an “occupational disease of the mind” of the professional economist that he called social rationalism, the tendency to identify the market with the whole of society. “Social rationalism”, he wrote:

misleads us into imagining that the market economy is no more than an “economic technique” that is applicable in any kind of society and in any kind of spiritual and social climate. (27)

This reasoning, however, if applied by socialists or Communists, can be made to make the market serve a totalitarian system. Against the social rationalist, Röpke asserts that the market economy is not universally applicable, that it “has a bourgeois foundation” (28), and that only in the proper spiritual, moral, cultural, social, and political framework can it possibly function properly. This framework, as Röpke describes it, is remarkably similar to framework that Chesterton and Belloc derived from Roman Catholic social doctrine, and Röpke, a Protestant, acknowledges his debt to the distributists and to the Roman Catholic Church.

Röpke’s economic humanism, then, combines the liberal concept of the free market and private property and the neo-liberal critique of Keynesian spending and the welfare state, with the distributism vision of small property ownership in a social and moral order influenced by orthodox Christianity. The market, in economic humanism, functions the way it functions in any other version of liberal economics, but it does not define the rest of society, it itself is ruled by the limits of the larger order.

From Röpke’s theory, we derive our tenth and final Tory economic principle, which paraphrases what our Lord had to say about the Sabbath day. That principle is simply this: the market is made for man, and not man for the market.


(1) See Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics”, The Cambridge Journal, Vol I, 1947 and Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press: 1980).

(2) See Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text Book for Tories (London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1915, 1933), particularly the second through fourth chapters, pp. 31-164.

(3) Albeit in a pamphlet, Discourses Upon Trade, that was published anonymously after his death in 1691.

(4) Georg Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1856).

(5) It is wrong, of course, to simply say that the Republican Party is the conservative Party of the United States, although many make that error. The Republicans, historically, were the successors to the Whigs after that party dissolved in 1860. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century the most conservative region in the United States was the antebellum South, a rural society where religion was more traditional (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran) and less influenced by Puritanism, with an agrarian economy and a traditional class system topped by a landed aristocracy and a culture with an almost feudal code of manners and chivalry. Ironically, this society voted for the Democrats, then as now a liberal party, although the liberalism of the time was classical Jeffersonian liberalism. The Republican Party set out to destroy this society in the war of 1861-1865 and in the Reconstruction period that immediately followed. Nevertheless, the political and economic positions of the Republican Party, like those of the Federalist Party to which Alexander Hamilton had belonged, were closer to the traditional views of the Tory Party than the views of the Democratic Party and its antecedents were, keeping in mind that on one fundamental plank in the Tory Party platform, i.e., royalism, no American party is Tory.

(6) G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1927).

(7) Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour” , 1891, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html


(8) Ibid.

(9) Peter Viereck, Conservative Thinkers From John Adams To Winston Churchill (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1956, 2005 ), p. 43. Viereck writes “The Disraeli solution was to combine both ends against the middle: to ally rural landlords and urban workers against the commercial middle class.” This greatly exaggerates, I think, the extent to which Disraeli’s policies were anti-middle class.

(10) Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, Part XI. “Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.” (Benjamin Jowett translation). A somewhat related piece of wisdom can be found in Holy Scriptures in Proverbs 30:8-9.

(11) One way or another, whether we like it or not, we will be led by an elite or ruling class. This cannot be avoided. See Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962), a translation by Eden and Cedar Paul from the original 1911 German edition. Since we must have an elite, it is better to have an aristocracy than an oligarchy, in Aristotle’s use of these terms. An aristocracy in the sense of a class of old families whose wealth is land and who may or may not have inherited titles and senate seats is not necessarily identical to Aristotle’s use of the word aristocracy to describe a ruling class that governs with the public good in mind, but a ruling class whose wealth is tied to the land is more likely to be public spirited than a ruling class whose wealth is based upon commerce, and both are more likely to be public spirited than a class that derives its power, position, and wealth from the management of transnational companies with no loyalty to any particular country. Obviously, a landed, feudal aristocracy cannot be created from scratch but that is not what I am suggesting in this priciple. The principle is that the economy should support an elite that will see its fortunes tied up with those of its country and therefore cultivate a spirit of public mindedness and not an elite that sees its fortunes as tied to a new, global, order.

(12) Labouring classes here refer to any classes who depend upon wages received in exchange for manual labour for their living.

(13) He was the United States’ Poet Laureate for 1943-1944.

(14) The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1930, 1978).

(15) Herbert Agar, Allen Tate, ed., Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1936, 1999). Agar was not one of the twelve, or even a southerner for that matter, but was a northern distributist who supported their ideas.

(16) Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), p. 93.

(17) E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973).

(18) Wilhelm Röpke A Human Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 1998, original edition, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960).

(19) Among other places, Kirk tells this story in his foreward to Röpke’s The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992, a translation of a work originally published in Switzerland in 1942). It can be found on pages viii and ix.

(20) Ibid, p. 14.

(21) Ibid., p. 62.

(22) A Human Economy, p. 48.

(23) Ibid, p. 49.

(24) His evidence that mass society produces cultural decline is more than anecdotal, of course, but he illustrates his point well by contrasting an educated student who was ignorant of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus with the Greek owner of a used bookstore in Istanbul, that he had overheard reading and discussing the Odyssey with his young daughter. “These two experiences, juxtaposed” he writes “illustrate the meaning of discontinuity and continuity in cultural tradition.” Ibid, p. 60.

(25) Ibid, p. 80.

(26) Ibid., pp. 90-91.

(27) Ibid, p. 93.

(28) Ibid., p. 98.

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.