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Edward Fawcett was ‘formerly chief correspondent of The Economist’ that might lead The Reader to doubt his ability, to be an objective observer of the political scene, in both Britain and America? Because this is The Financial Times, and as such Fawcett’s political beliefs, his inherent prejudices, indeed his Conservatism, make an ideal choice to write a highly attuned propaganda, to a readership that shares in his political enthusiasm? The first two paragraphs takes it’s imperatives from a self-serving outline of the political territory.
These are bad times for conservatism’s self-image as the political tradition of good sense and stability. Britain’s exhausted Conservative party limps to defeat in the coming election under its fifth prime minister in just nine years. Its moderates have mostly fled or been driven out. Hard-right parties vie for primacy in Europe’s conservative mainstream. A convicted felon is on track to head the Republican ticket for president of the United States.
Conservatism’s image always had a strong element of myth. Since the late 19th century, when most conservatives made peace with modern life, they have held out a golden but conflicted promise: flourishing capitalism and social stability. Capitalism harnesses technological progress to generate and — if democratic — to spread wealth. In doing so, it forever turns society upside down. Conservatives, accordingly, must be skilful circus-riders, cantering the ring with one foot on a pony called “Capital” and the other on a pony called “Tradition”
Edward Fawcett then uses part of Edward Luttwak’s 3222 word essay of 7, April 1994 to hold aloft his next 311 words!
That two-pony conflict was understood by the shrewd, far-sighted American conservative Edward Luttwak when, 30 long years ago, he foresaw the rise of today’s hard right. His article in the London Review of Books was provocatively titled “Why fascism is the wave of the future”.
You can quarrel with the title as overblown or unhistorical, but Luttwak’s point was a good one. The typical conservative after-dinner speech, Luttwak wrote, was “a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one.” The question for today’s conservatives is if that double promise — be it delivered over a pay-for-a-chair dinner or to your phone — is still convincing.
Hard as it looks, it’s worth recalling how well in electoral terms conservatives have turned the trick. Take a small but salient core of big parties. Since the Federal Republic’s founding in 1949, Germany’s Christian Democrats have shared or held office for 52 of those 75 years. France’s presidents have been on the centre-right for 39 of the past 65 years — 46 if you include the ex-Socialist Emmanuel Macron. The right-left balance is more even in the US but in Britain, Conservative dominance is striking: in the past 110 years, the Tory party has held or shared office for 76 of them.
Doing that took skill and balance. Skills wear out, however. Runs come to an end. Some think that British conservatism as a centre-right tradition is already done for. Sir Oliver Letwin, a former Conservative minister and manifesto drafter, is convinced, as he has told me, “The party, as we’ve known it, is dead.” Not all Conservatives will agree with that, but something is happening to conservatism everywhere of which Britain’s Tories are an exemplary case.
Edward Fawcett then resorts to subtitles, as the in-order-too of managing his ‘History Made To Measure’.
A tradition of conflict
Editor: This is what I find of interest:
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In the US and Britain, the first-past-the-post voting system favours two big parties that enjoy wide reach and long life at the price of endemic inner conflict. American Republicans have — or long had — left and right wings. Globalist Dwight D Eisenhower kept Robert Taft Sr’s Americanist Republicans in check. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller fell to anti-liberal Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon held together Northern business and aggrieved white Southerners-turned-Republican. Since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the party has expunged its liberals and moved solidly and illiberally to the right.
For Britain’s Tories, infighting is a second name. The party’s Cain-and-Abel history is biblical: Robert Peel vs Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain vs Lord Salisbury, Edward Heath’s “Wets” vs Margaret Thatcher’s “Dries”, Europeans vs anti-Europeans. Its taste for self-slaughter makes its record in office the more remarkable. That continuity alone — and the oddly rare use of the label “conservative” itself — has always encouraged the thought that British conservatism was notably pure and exceptional. It wasn’t and isn’t. The party’s collapse towards the hard right reflects a general weakening of the centre across western democracies
The hard right.
Editor: This is what I find of interest
To nail the type, the hard right is an unstable and uneven alliance of three tribes: free-market globalists, national welfarists and ethico-cultural traditionalists. Globalists want a small, nightwatchman state, with undemocratic freedom for foreign capital to come and go as it pleases. Welfarists want an effective state that cares for the national people and protects them from immigration. Globalists and welfarists disagree with each other on taxes, regulation and trade. They each combine smoothly enough with the traditionalists, whose sermons about moral decay and national decline they mimic or sit through out of tactical courtesy. Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.
The Day After:
Editor: this is what I find of interest:
By comparison, the Conservatives’ 13 years in the wilderness after defeat in 1997 was fallow time. The party chose to copy Tony Blair and New Labour, above all in its devotion to presentation and style. No compelling picture of conservatism emerged. Borrowing Stanley Baldwin’s all-purpose and under-informative label “one-nation conservatism”, Cameronism was thin on content. Add their 14 years in office, and for more than a quarter of a century Conservatives have left obscure what it is they stand for.In search of ideas, Conservatives had, it is true, three handicaps. The first was a loss of geopolitical bearings after the end of the cold war, which the right shared with the left. That disadvantage is party-blind. Everyone is baffled. The second two, however, were distinctly Conservative. Thatcherism, love it or not, calcified into dogma, and the collective self-wounding of Brexit sucked time, thought and energy out of everything else in politics.
New Thinking :
Editor: look at this Cast of Characters!
Tory brains, Rupert Harrison, a former banker, George Osborne’s chief of staff, Adrian Wooldridge has called “Notting Hill conservatism”, the Conservative’s future lies in appealing to voters there, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s ideas person, the radical-turned-Conservative Unionist Joseph Chamberlain), Remaking One Nation (2020), The trouble is the demons. Liberals, for Timothy, are “tone deaf to voters, ignore community and short-change ‘love of Britishness’”. Patrick Deneen is a professor at the distinguished Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana and star of the American hard-right. In Regime Change (2023), At others, he came close to calling for an American theocracy, Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Hazony is the brains behind National Conservatism, In May 2023, Hazony’s foundation ran a three-day conference in London, which drew stars of the British hard-right, including Suella Braverman and Miriam Cates, as well as much bien pensant mockery from right as well as left.
Space left for liberal conservatives
Editor: These final paragraphs sum up this long meandering essay come to it’s end, yet he offers an almost pleasing, even a near poetic style!
No convincing narrative with rhetorical appeal is on offer either from an equally confused and silent liberal left. Well-identified problems and intelligent offers for their solution abound in a troubled liberal world but defences of that world itself and its values are barely heard. They are spoken for in well-hewn essays, yes, but not crowed and shouted as they ought to be.
Into that silence has burst the seductive, angry music of a hard right. The future health of conservatism in any historically recognisable form will depend a lot on whether or not there remains a strong voice in politics for liberal conservatives — the kind who do not need enemies.
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