William Stewart emailed me a video today (I’ve put it at the bottom of the post). The video argues that modern conservatism is a delusion. He’s half right: most conservatives are using the progressive policies of the last generation. In the email, he says
Nothing we don’t already know, but nice to see it expressed by someone who isn’t quite a rad trad, even though a confessing, traditionalist Reformed believer. And something worth sharing to shake up any Americans who still think there’s any worthwhile reason to park one’s vote with the GOP, as if it accomplishes anything, when it does worse than accomplishes nothing, but in fact permits the ratchet to turn only in the opposite direction…
I’d also challenge my fellow Canadians to consider whether a vote for the Conservatives here, accomplishes anything, either, or whether we continue to lose ground in all the things which are most important, in fact, notwithstanding some mostly symbolic / lip service gestures here and there, now and then…
Well, that could apply to the conservative parties throughout the English world. Politicians, at least outside the US, have to make alliances between multiple parties (there are eight in the NZ parliament at present) to get anything done. Moreover, every party has been taken over by the same political class that works from a series of consenses… the last socialist I trust notes that this involves liberal (market economics) as well as the tolerance of feminism and it’s sacrament of abortion that Will’s video alludes to.
DE MORTUIS nil nisi bonum – of the dead speak only good – is a compassionate maxim. I’m not sure Margaret Thatcher would have followed it, but in writing about the late British Prime Minister, I will do my best.
Perhaps the kindest (and certainly the truest) observation I can offer about Baroness Thatcher is that she tested the British Left and found it wanting.
So absolute has “Thatcherism’s” ideological triumph been that few now remember how little prospect of success the British Conservative Party’s new leader was granted – even by her colleagues.
The 1970s represented the high-water mark of the Left’s success in the English-speaking world. Even as late as 1979 – the year in which Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime-minister – the ideology we know today as neoliberalism was dismissed as extremist folly by practically all “serious” public intellectuals (including a number on the Right). If the Keynesian economic policies that had underpinned thirty years of post-war prosperity no longer seemed to be working, the cure was generally supposed to lie in a shift to the Left – not in a lurch rightwards
Now, as a bunch of Christians. what do we do? Well, this is one place where we should come at our rulers with that tool we can steal back from the feminists, the hermeneutic of suspicion. Instead of approaching the text of the day with an idea that it is malevolent and there is an underlying code we should approach it as the word of live and use the classical tools of hermeneutics to carefully delineate the meaning. We can reserve those post modern tools for the post modern politicians, for the post modern world, like the pre-modern world, hates us.
11For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. 12We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. 13Do not be astonished, brothers and sisters, that the world hates you. 14We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. 15All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. 16We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us — and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
Now, what does this mean? Well, we have to care for each other. We have to form alliances, we have to work with politicians, and being a politician, even a professional politician, is a job. We need to pray for our leaders, no matter how corrupt they are, remembering that we were given this command in the last days of the Claudian dynasty — which included Nero and Caligula.
And we need to do good. There is a place for a state run service. The area I work in — mental illness — is one where the state has for 500 years provided Asylum of varying quality. I could argue that it would be better to go back to the methods of education in the 1970s where most young men left school at 15 and 16 and entered apprenticeships, and only about ten percent went to university — where if they progressed, their course was funded — that the current higher education bubble (which is made worse by interest free student loans our current conservative gov’t will not repeal).
We cannot look to our politicians, because they (left or right) think like progressives. As I noted, at Chris Trotter’s Place.
Chris, you need to add that the left turned from a politics of class and economics to one of identity.
You can change your income. In the UK, there has always been a class system but people can rise — Maggie is an example of a lower middle class woman who rose to the top, and before her there were working class men who had been ministers of the crown.
But the new left instead set up a politics of identity. You cannot change your skin colour, or who your parents are. This exploitation of oppression allowed for the development of a minority coalition (which requires a lot of double talk: saying one thing to the rainbow coalition and another thing in Samoan churches). But it does not allow for a transformation of society for the common good.
The left have found themselves, willingly or unwillingly, acting as if they are feudal rulers of minority groups. This, long term, is a futile position: because if the majority goes fascist (as Winston would take them) the minorities will be facing dawn raids (if they are lucky, historically they will be facing living in a ghetto. Behind barbed wire).
I keep on thinking that there is something in the old — and I mean victorian — working class virtues that would be worthwhile promoting. The ideas of solidarity and self-education and self governance. Of communuality — the idea of the guild where the means of work and the regulation of work is controlled by the workers — and as we move to a post industrial age where the capital costs to start production are going down we do not need as much capital to start things — and of communal support of the injured and the widows.
The left has to find an analysis that works when factories are no longer industrial cathedrals but fungable commodities. Thatcher and the right know this.
The left need some new ideas. What worked in the 1930s will not work now.
Politics, Ruling, is a trade. A not that honourable one, but a trade with responsibility. As such, we need to support those of faith who are in the trade and pray for them all. But the methods of politics are not the whole sum of life. Those who see life completely through the lens of politics, or any ideology, are down an ideological rabbit hole.
And you should not rely on any politician or government: for even the most honest will find their work destroyed by the next generation. Not trusting princes is not only wise, it is scriptural.
—–
This is the video he sent.
<iframe width=”853″ height=”480″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/IVUMsImBSPo” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
It worked!!!