The Right way

Book review of CONSERVATISM: The Fight for a Tradition

From its very origins in resistance to revolutionary movements in the late 18th century, conservatism has had two broad contrasting moods. The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything. The second is an attachment to what once was  — and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past. Some have attempted to distinguish these two responses by defining conservatism as the more moderate version and reactionism as the more virulent. But Edmund Fawcett, in Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, a truly magisterial survey of the thought and actions of conservatives in Britain, France, Germany and the US, insists more interestingly that they are both part of conservatism in its different moods.

Most conservatives have experienced both these sensibilities. A defence of the status quo against disruption comes naturally to anyone truly comfortable in the world. Its mood is sceptical, defensive, pragmatic, and it is rooted in sometimes inexplicable love of country, or tradition. But this can often shift toward acute discomfort and near-panic when change seems overwhelming and bewildering. The mood of this type of conservatism is certain, aggressive and ideological, and it can become obsessed with its enemies to the left and extremist in countering them. The first mood defends liberal democracy as a precious inheritance that requires tending; the second excoriates it for its spiritual shallowness, cultural degeneracy and tendency toward an individualist myopia or socialist utopia. Mr Fawcett calls the second not the “far right” but the “hard right,” keeping it central to the conservative tradition as a whole, rather than a departure from it.

Edmund Burke was both right and hard right. He was as in favour of the American Revolution as he was horrified by the French; he believed in pluralism, modest but necessary reform and the dispersal of power. But he could equally be viewed, Mr Fawcett notes, as “a conservative nationalist, an early exponent of geopolitics treated as a conflict of ideologies (England, Burke wrote in 1796, “is in war against a principle”) or as a down-to-earth defender of British power concerned with efficient taxes, lively commerce and a stable empire.” He could be as rhetorically brutal as he was intellectually supple. He had Irish fire and English sense.

Burke could defend liberalism because it emerged organically in English and British history — and therefore was a conservative inheritance. And this conservative defence of liberal democracy is in many ways the history of conservatism in the West, and a core reason for its endurance and resilience, as well as its remarkable success in winning governmental power. But what liberal democracy eroded — the authority of religion, the coherence of a community, a sense of collective belonging, home, meaning and security — could prompt far more radical responses. Mr Fawcett sees these not as anomalies, but as part of a conservative spectrum.

CONSERVATISM: The Fight for a Tradition

Author: Edmund Fawcett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Price: $35; Pages: 544

Burke could be contrasted with Joseph de Maistre, who found adaptation to modernity to be indistinguishable from surrender to it. This kind of conservatism saw decline everywhere and always, enemies within and without, and responded with a programme of not just resistance but also “stigmatisation of the Other; denial of social diversity and hounding of internal enemies; exclusionary nationalism; tarring of moderate opponents as radicalized and extreme.”

You have, then, the calm conservatism of George H W Bush and the fevered conservatism of Patrick Buchanan; the balm of Jeb Bush and the bluntness of Donald Trump; the moderation of Theresa May and the flamboyance of Boris Johnson; of Angela Merkel, perhaps the most properly conservative of our contemporary leaders, against the radical outliers of reactionary German nationalism. Mr Fawcett sees this as the core conflict within the right, always present, forever waxing or waning, and central to the future of Western democracy.

The strength of this book is in its international reach. Conservatism is by its nature specific and local, but Mr Fawcett’s grasp of the commonalities and the differences within the West, from Catholic Bavaria to the antebellum South, from Bismarck’s pragmatism to Baldwin’s patriotism, from de Maistre’s radicalism to Buchanan’s insurrection, is, quite simply, formidable. What he finds is that the party most opposed to liberal modernity has, in fact, ended up dominating its governments.

Mr Fawcett has surprises and sharp judgements. Seeing the British conservative who most shaped Margaret Thatcher’s worldview, Keith Joseph, described as a domestic neoconservative makes blinding sense when you think about it. Jesse Helms and the great intellect of the Tory hard right, Enoch Powell, resonate equally in their racial reactionism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Powell remains a fascinating figure, especially now. A Tory member of Parliament, and briefly in the cabinet in the early 1970s, he insisted, against his party, on the nation-state as inviolable and solely authoritative, held that non-whites would be forever alien in Britain and profoundly opposed the project of the nascent European Union. His views, hugely popular among the Tory masses but deemed taboo by party elites at the time, were not so much countered as repressed. And like many repressed ideas, they eventually came to the surface, long after his death, in the anti-immigrant, nationalist fervour of the Brexit campaign.

There are some strange omissions. Neoconservatism as a foreign policy doctrine barely appears; the Iraq war — the moment the mainstream completely lost the thread in America and Britain — is almost ignored; there is no mention of the radicalising woke left — which has played a key part in radicalising the right in recent years and for good reason.

This books is a tour de force of intellectual eclecticism, and a vital recognition that the war within conservatism matters. In that sense, the battle for moderate conservatism is now inextricable from a battle for liberal democracy itself.

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