American conservatives, still in a state of shock from President
Obama’s victory, must now live with the man for whom they didn’t
vote. We English conservatives have born a similar burden for the
last 12 years, and maybe we are in a position to give the benefit
of our experience. Here at least is the benefit of mine.
Axiom No. 1: There is no greater
political virtue than the ability to accept the government of
people whom you heartily dislike. In very few places in the world
today do we see this ability properly exercised. Nowhere in Africa,
only here and there in Asia, and only spasmodically in Eastern
Europe or the Middle East, do people accept the legitimacy of a
government of which they disapprove, even if that government was
democratically elected. The strength of Western political systems
lies in our ability to submit to laws that hurt us. This, which is
our form of islam, is a real contribution to political
stability—something that cannot always be said of Islam in its
religious meaning.
Axiom No. 2: Accepting laws that hurt
you is easier if you are also working to repeal them. This is slow
work. It requires building alliances, organizing high-level
discussions, exploring principles, and working out how to influence
opinion formers. You cannot rely on a political party to do these
things, especially a party that has just suffered defeat, since
parties are composed of politicians, who are thinking of their own
careers and are usually profoundly unwilling to attract the
attention of their critics.
Axiom No. 3: People vote
against things, not for things. This is something
that Obama saw very clearly; hence he promised nothing, only
“change.” I remember seeing an election poster put up on his
behalf, mimicking St. Paul: “Faith, Hope and Change.” I wanted to
add, “and the greatest of these is Change.” Obama was determined to
keep people’s attention fixed on present evils, without committing
himself to any concrete way of overcoming them.
In due course people will come to see that those once present
but now past evils were probably lesser evils than the
alternatives. Politics, after all, is a choice among evils. But it
will be impossible to make an election slogan out of that. Just
imagine: “Vote for the lesser evil!” “Now you see how wrong you
were!” “Back to the past!” People vote for promises, not regrets,
even if the regrets show greater understanding. Hence:
Axiom No. 4: The conservative message
must be constantly re-shaped, so as to look like an escape from
present evils. Mrs. Thatcher made the Conservative Party electable
(and thrice over) by presenting conservatism as an escape route
from the labor unions—an escape route that Americans will be
needing in four years’ time. But the message had worn thin by the
end, and John Major was unable to come up with another one. Had he
addressed people’s concerns over the European Union or the unwanted
tide of immigration he could have won again. But he did not dare,
and had in any case forgotten to do any homework on these or any
other relevant issues.
Axiom No. 5: Don’t trust big business.
Mrs. Thatcher rightly believed that conservatives endorse free
markets, and that business needs free markets. She therefore
wrongly concluded that business will always be on the conservative
side. She bestowed honors on business leaders, chose her advisers
from among their ranks, and ignored all rival sources of useful
policies and arguments. But people get to the top in business
because they have an instinct for what consumers want. As soon as
business leaders sense a change in popular perception, they too
will change. You will see this in America, as the business leaders
rebrand themselves as Obamists. This is not a tragedy. But in our
case it had the unfortunate result that the top positions in the
conservative movement were, during John Major’s time, occupied by
people who were no longer supporters of conservatism, while the
people who could have helped to redefine the message were out in
the cold.
Axiom No. 6: The intellectual battle
matters, and it is worth fighting. Here in America conservatives
have witnessed the takeover of the universities by a belligerent
liberal orthodoxy, which has adopted John Stuart Mill’s view that
conservatism is a sign of stupidity and preached this view to
several generations of students, who have in turn propagated it
through the culture. Conservatives have therefore turned away from
the world of ideas, dismissing the universities as enemy territory,
and nurturing the view that, after all, ideas don’t really matter,
since they are of interest only to a minority. The problem,
however, is that ideas have a tendency to lodge in minds that are
not equipped to dispute them, and which do not recognize them as
moves in a discussion, rather than absolute truths. Only in a
culture of debate and dissent will such people be persuaded to move
on from their orthodoxies, and even if those orthodoxies are rooted
in self-interest rather than ideology, they will be shifted, in the
end, only if we go on arguing against them
An example is relevant here. What Hayek said, in The Road to
Serfdom, was deeply alien to the socialist consensus in
postwar Britain. His life at the London School of Economics was
made difficult by Harold Laski, an establishment socialist who had
the ear of the Labour elite, and who was determined that
free-market philosophy should not be heard within the walls of an
establishment over which he presided. Hayek left for America, but
not without having first set up networks and recruited disciples
who would keep the message alive. It was 30 years before that
message finally took on political shape, in the Conservative Party
of Mrs. Thatcher. But by then, because the ideas had been kept in
circulation, and brought into play at each conspicuous failure of
the socialist alternative, people—not just the unthinking
majority, but also the thinking elite who, because they live by
ideas, are far more obstinately attached to them—were ready to
change course.
Axiom No. 7: No political movement can
succeed without the support of the young. Of course, populations
are getting older, and older people tend to be conservative.
However, older people are also weak, dependent, and afraid of
offending the young. They feel confident in expressing their
opinions only when those opinions find an echo among people younger
than themselves. The Republican Party woke up to this problem too
late. Having chosen McCain—someone who represented the America of
the Vietnam War—the party was suddenly confronted with the truth
that this great event, in so many ways definitive of America in the
last years of the Cold War, had no significance in the minds of
people born since the Soviet collapse. The party hurried to provide
a “cool” candidate for the vice presidency, and that too was a
mistake, since nothing irritates young people more than the
unconcealed desire to court their favor. One way or another, the
party made sure that Obama would win, by cutting itself off from
the major constituencies among the young.
We now have an ostentatiously young Conservative Party in
Britain. It may have the advantage at the next election. But it has
a formidable uphill struggle against the legacy of Tony Blair. When
the Labour Party shot to power in 1997 Blair and his cronies filled
all posts within their reach with people who represented a break
with the past. Most of these people were nonentities of whom nobody
had heard. But precisely for that reason they gave the sense that
something new was happening, that Britain was freeing itself from
the grip of the establishment, and that our government was
listening at last to the young people on whom our future depends.
The lesson to be drawn from this is that a conservative party
without a youth movement is bound to disappear. This was perceived
clearly by Disraeli, when he founded the Primrose League. And the
Young Conservatives, who took over from that institution, were
responsible for the long-running success of Mrs. Thatcher. American
Republicans should take a lesson from this, and support those
initiatives, such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which
are trying to form networks of conservative activism among the
youth.
Axiom No. 8: In the end conservatives
are nationalists. Europeans see modern politics as a conflict
between the old forms of territorial sovereignty and the new
elitist superstate. And they recognize that the conservative cause
lives and dies with the nation. Our cause depends upon custom,
loyalty, inherited law, religious leanings, and linguistic
conformity. It is in favor of the local against the global, and of
past allegiance against future experiment. This is true of
conservatism in America too, and that must be the bottom line of
the conservative message: that we love our country, wish to protect
its achievements and the privileges that it confers upon us, and
that the root of our politics is the defense of what we have. This
in turn means a concerted effort to define and uphold the “we.”
Conservative politics makes no sense without strong policies on
borders, immigration, language, culture, and inheritance. It does
not forbid change, or demand isolation. But it does require
continuity. “We” must be recognizably the same through all our
changes, recognizably united around our shared inheritance, and
recognizably committed to each other in any conflict with the wider
world. This is the strong point of conservative politics, and also
the weak point of liberalism.
The liberal establishment is only half heartedly in favor of
America, only half heartedly committed to the Western inheritance,
and in social matters largely opposed to the majority culture. You
see this clearly in situations of conflict, when the first instinct
of liberals is to side with the enemy. And that is the aspect of
liberalism which—when they wake up to it—ordinary people most
dislike. By keeping the idea of the nation, its rights, privileges,
and unity, at the heart of politics, conservatives will ensure
that, when the time comes and the message is right, voters will
turn against the liberal establishment and once again vote as they
ought.
