Profound as ever, David. I listened to several long podcast interviews with some of these figures, such as Kevin Roberts, who runs the Heritage Foundation and was struck by not only the content but the tone. These are serious people who have thought hard about America and its predicament, forming a clear plan what to do, which is coherent and convincing. They are also not messing around, grimly determined to shift the American right away from being slower progressivism and will not be deterred by legacy media whining about it. Sadly, I see no one of this seriousness in either Reform or the Conservatives. The IEA and other once serious think tanks have been assimilated to the blob. Insight into Britain’s remedy to its predicament lies with you and Stacks like this one. I fear it will take more than one term of Labour for the British right to realise.
I think it derives from how the USA came about, and the extraordinary zeal of the Founding Fathers to get it right. At its best - as we seem to be witnessing at the moment - the same zeal comes into play. And it's a fine thing to observe.
Whether we can emulate that, with our different origin, and out now profound malaise and, I think, our civilisational tiredness, is another matter. We may have to fall much further before we rise again
You are of course right. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Boris Johnson sacked any Tory of any talent from his front bench because they weren’t Brexiteers. A similar phenomenon also played out on Labour’s side - the reason why most of the current cabinet are so uninspiring is that they were prepared to sit it out under Corbyn; hardly an affidavit of originality of thought or political courage. So I’m afraid you’ll have to step up to the plate and become the new Scruton to the next generation of Tories to have even a chance of government. Most of the current lot are still hopelessly in denial as to the causes of their recent eviction from power and are lobby-fodder at best. Maybe they should skip a generation (or two) as I was very struck by your recent point that for the Conservatives to have a future, the 30-somethings have to be given a reason to want to conserve a society which actively militates against their interests in so many respects. La lotta continua!
I completely agree, David. (And it is noteworthy that the last successful Conservative government, that of Margaret Thatcher, was preceded by just this kind of reflection and thought about what the party stood for.)
Looking at the Right in British politics today, I see no evidence of the Conservatives even beginning to grasp what is needed. Instead they seem to think that if they just wait, Labour will implode and the country will give them back the power that is rightfully theirs.
On the other hand, Reform does seem to be different. Time will tell, but there does seem to be an understanding in that party of the task that lies ahead.
Dan Hitchens' recent article in The Critic, 'Scruton and the roots of modern conservatism', gives a flavour of the deep re-think that preceded and birthed Thatcherism. While reading it, I kept thinking to myself, this is what the Right desperately needs today. I'm not a fan of Thatcher's Gladstonian Liberalism, but mutatis mutandis.
The problem is that project took place before the internet age, when people were simply more focused and less interested in personal celebrity. So there needs to be some recognition by politicians that they need to stop worrying about social media for a while and focus on more important underlying issues.
I'd just add that the idea that we have to worry about social conservatives taking over and making things *more* authoritarian is pretty laughable. The 'elite human capital' people are doing a fabulous job of that already!
I didn't know what you were referring to (I think Richard Hanania is, frankly, a glib midwit and I don't pay a great deal of attention to him), so I looked it up. I'm not sure it's possible to untangle causation from the knot of correlations it is caught up in, here. Are more intelligent people more likely to be liberal because there is a causal relationship or is it just because intelligent people in a modern Western society are more likely to have gone to university and therefore been inculcated in liberal values? Impossible to know, and disingenuous of him to behave as though the matter is in any way settled.
It would be interesting to hear your views on which components of political form (as opposed to content) that UK needs to develop. You are right that UK needs a substantial practical and philosophical political wisdom if it is to survive liberal progress. That said, there is so much against it, it's hard to imagine that it can be brought about at all. Paradoxically, our best hope is the scale of the damage already done and the probable bleakness of the future. Hard times make it necessary to express what is going wrong, and to search for good enough responses, so maybe that will provoke what is needed.
What is clear is that it has to be more than electoral manifestos. We are suffering from decades of cultural neglect, deliberate in my view, and this is not something that can be fixed with taxation and public spending.
Indeed, although taxation and public spending (ie, reducing it) is part of the picture. A smaller state is necessarily conservative - so this does have to be a part of the agenda.
I so agree with this. I wrote to Professor Matt Goodwin about this (in a much more prosaic way!) a few months ago. You and he would be a brilliant team to formulate a philosophical template for Reform. I feel that Nigel Farage is a brilliant communicator, but he needs some intellectual heft behind him. When I listen to interviews with people on the right of American politics, I am amazed at the coherence of their ideas, their breadth of knowledge and sheer intelligence. Kemi Badenoch with her obsession with optics and woke, is froth in comparison, and I don't think there are any serious thinkers behind her.
Spot on Bettina. There is no philosophy, no thought, no coherent ‘way of living’ underpinning the modern right. I worry it is simply beginning to get comfortable in opposition. Opposition to woke, leftism, mass immigration and the rapacious elites. I know I am as guilty of this as anyone.
But maybe we need a bit more ‘tidy your room’, ‘go see your mum’, ‘help out your community’, and a bit less moaning about Drag Queen Story Hour. In short we need to attract more than we repel.
That's so true LSO. Everything on the right wing of politics here is simply negative. There needs to be a positive vision. Something deep in the American psyche responds to the image of independence, the self sufficient pioneer - it's part of their mythology isn't it. Ours is Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor (not at all socialist haha). We can't seem to pull ourselves out of medieval feudalism with our ridiculous honours system (rewarding political grift just like William the Conqueror a thousand years ago parcelling up the country to his lords) and the notion of peasants paying tithes to their masters in exchange for 'protection'. We simply haven't moved on from this mindset.
Exactly. We need to stand for something. Nation. Duty. Family. Self reliance. Some places we might start.
Why would anyone young join us now? All their reasons are negative. Things they want, but have been denied them. Like housing, prosperity, a future.
I want young people to look at our way of life and think ‘I want to be like them’. Basically, I want young people to look at us, the way I look at the Amish. 😂
😂 I know! I've never been a church goer particularly, but what I've slowly come to realise is that the things we took for granted about our society and governance were underpinned by a strong culture of Christianity. Hence our envy of the Amish communities, which still are! It's obvious when you think about it at all. Pretty much all of the countries we consider civilised / safe / humanitarian, are Christian countries. I'm trying to think of an exception. Japan - but that is culturally and racially homogenous and I think they have their own binding philosophies and certainly a peaceful religion 🤔
Youd better help Farage and others then, with definitive things to do; because there is a vacuum which youve described here, that they will not fill without help. Alot of it. Farage for one needs to stop playing the victim to the debanking assholes and 'economists' who were really bank tellers. He needs to poke them in the eye. Hard.
Freddie Sayers really? I would see him as a centrist at heart. One who gets a buzzl from playing on the naughty side of the line occasionally. He's no Douglas Murray, who puts his reputation on the line most weeks with bold positions of real integrity.
I think the next GE will be within 4 years though, if this shower can last even that long. Starmer hasn't got the guts for it and will resign in 2027 imo and then there will be even worse chaos and an early election in a desperate attempt to avoid defeat.
As others have said, Conservatives don't seem to understand the problem and many of us will not want to be let down by them again.
Reform have the potential but need some serious intellectual underpinninings that could come from you David, Matt Goodwin and James Alexander. Please not Cummings though...
No GE immediately no, but after Streeting or Rayner wins I think here will be so much in-fighting from the left and right wings of Labour that there'll be even more chaos and they'll have to go early to have any chance.
Ha Roger. I can’t quite work out if I hope you’re right or not…It’s a tough one. Fingers crossed though that we’ll be rid of them sooner rather than later. ATB.
I have of late been listening to 'The Servile State', and found it absolutely fascinating, compelling and a timely piece. I am minded to say that what we might want for a conservative revival could and should be an integration of the distributive ideas espoused by Belloc and Chesterton into a reformed Conservative Party. It would have the utility of being able to appeal to both the despised working class (by labour) and the equally despised un-progressive right. I would venture to suggest (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that the zeal of the founding fathers is a close relative of that distributism. I fully acknowledge that some worthwhile elements of the capitalist regime would be difficult if not impossible under a distributist system, but would contend that one of the main maladies of our age, that sense of 'unconnectedness' to anything or anybody etc would find remedy in such a movement. The contention that increasing specialisation (which is axiomatically at the heart of capitalism) is fundamental to flourishing is as unproved and logically empty in the same way that communism has shown itself to be equally deluded in the opposite direction. The joint stock company is not the same thing as a small family business.
In 2007 I employed 6 Polish builders. One of them was like me, a bit of an uneducated armchair philosopher, and whilst chatting to him one lunchtime I was suddenly made aware of the passage of history happens before our very noses, and we often fail to see it happening until after the events. For he had been a conscript in the Russian Red Army as his home in Poland happened to be very close to the Russian border, whereas the nearest Polish army units were some distance away. Thus I was employing somebody, who for all my earlier years I was led to believe were an enemy, and now, I was chatting over builders tea and sarnies about our histories and observations. One thing he said however, has stuck in my mind to this day, and that was this, " the problem was not communism, it was just an extreme communism that broke us, but I tell you this, I think you will have an extreme capitalism, and that will break you too"
It looks like he was right, and whilst I am happy to see the events happening in the US, I do not see any evidence of a more distributed wealth creation system that I think is desperately needed both there and here.
Something in this, and yes, Conservatives should be the party of the shopkeepers, artisans, small business owners and yes, the workers and therefore the people of place and nation. There are votes there especially as Labour has also become the party of big business and rootless progressives.
Great insight. A lack of serious thought is a particular attribute of British public life, probably for a few decades. A class that believes in very little will achieve little. We could do worse than imitate the Empire, it’s just a shame we can’t think for ourselves, in terms of our own interests, culture, history, strengths and challenges. Either way, there is a serious reckoning coming and we shall see if necessity gets us thinking again.
This is a concern I share. The frustrating thing in the last 8 years or more was the UK left aping the terminology and concerns of the American left which lead to such insane outworking as BLM protestors in the UK chanting "don't shoot" at unarmed police, the adoption of the term BIPOC (excuse me - I'm English in England but somehow I don't think that I applies to me). I welcome the wrecking ball aspect of Trump and the pricking of bubbles but for the love of God we don't need our own MAGA movement.
Profound as ever, David. I listened to several long podcast interviews with some of these figures, such as Kevin Roberts, who runs the Heritage Foundation and was struck by not only the content but the tone. These are serious people who have thought hard about America and its predicament, forming a clear plan what to do, which is coherent and convincing. They are also not messing around, grimly determined to shift the American right away from being slower progressivism and will not be deterred by legacy media whining about it. Sadly, I see no one of this seriousness in either Reform or the Conservatives. The IEA and other once serious think tanks have been assimilated to the blob. Insight into Britain’s remedy to its predicament lies with you and Stacks like this one. I fear it will take more than one term of Labour for the British right to realise.
I completely agree and had exactly the same thoughts, probably listening to exactly the same podcasts!
Ditto.
Maybe. I do think that people like Zia Yusuf fully grasp the scale of the challenge.
I think it derives from how the USA came about, and the extraordinary zeal of the Founding Fathers to get it right. At its best - as we seem to be witnessing at the moment - the same zeal comes into play. And it's a fine thing to observe.
Whether we can emulate that, with our different origin, and out now profound malaise and, I think, our civilisational tiredness, is another matter. We may have to fall much further before we rise again
You are of course right. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Boris Johnson sacked any Tory of any talent from his front bench because they weren’t Brexiteers. A similar phenomenon also played out on Labour’s side - the reason why most of the current cabinet are so uninspiring is that they were prepared to sit it out under Corbyn; hardly an affidavit of originality of thought or political courage. So I’m afraid you’ll have to step up to the plate and become the new Scruton to the next generation of Tories to have even a chance of government. Most of the current lot are still hopelessly in denial as to the causes of their recent eviction from power and are lobby-fodder at best. Maybe they should skip a generation (or two) as I was very struck by your recent point that for the Conservatives to have a future, the 30-somethings have to be given a reason to want to conserve a society which actively militates against their interests in so many respects. La lotta continua!
Good points, well made!
"... you’ll have to step up to the plate and become the new Scruton ..."
Love the suggestion.
Me too. Quite a burden. Stumbling across Sir Rog some years back made me realise that philosophically, I am a conservative. Bless him
I completely agree, David. (And it is noteworthy that the last successful Conservative government, that of Margaret Thatcher, was preceded by just this kind of reflection and thought about what the party stood for.)
Looking at the Right in British politics today, I see no evidence of the Conservatives even beginning to grasp what is needed. Instead they seem to think that if they just wait, Labour will implode and the country will give them back the power that is rightfully theirs.
On the other hand, Reform does seem to be different. Time will tell, but there does seem to be an understanding in that party of the task that lies ahead.
Time will indeed tell - there really is everything to play for.
Dan Hitchens' recent article in The Critic, 'Scruton and the roots of modern conservatism', gives a flavour of the deep re-think that preceded and birthed Thatcherism. While reading it, I kept thinking to myself, this is what the Right desperately needs today. I'm not a fan of Thatcher's Gladstonian Liberalism, but mutatis mutandis.
The problem is that project took place before the internet age, when people were simply more focused and less interested in personal celebrity. So there needs to be some recognition by politicians that they need to stop worrying about social media for a while and focus on more important underlying issues.
What do you make of Richard Hanania's view of the lower intelligence conservative voters?
He seems to be onto at least *something* and if he is, what does it mean for mainstream conservative presentation?
I'd just add that the idea that we have to worry about social conservatives taking over and making things *more* authoritarian is pretty laughable. The 'elite human capital' people are doing a fabulous job of that already!
I didn't know what you were referring to (I think Richard Hanania is, frankly, a glib midwit and I don't pay a great deal of attention to him), so I looked it up. I'm not sure it's possible to untangle causation from the knot of correlations it is caught up in, here. Are more intelligent people more likely to be liberal because there is a causal relationship or is it just because intelligent people in a modern Western society are more likely to have gone to university and therefore been inculcated in liberal values? Impossible to know, and disingenuous of him to behave as though the matter is in any way settled.
I missed out the 'of' there, which changed the question rather.
It would be interesting to hear your views on which components of political form (as opposed to content) that UK needs to develop. You are right that UK needs a substantial practical and philosophical political wisdom if it is to survive liberal progress. That said, there is so much against it, it's hard to imagine that it can be brought about at all. Paradoxically, our best hope is the scale of the damage already done and the probable bleakness of the future. Hard times make it necessary to express what is going wrong, and to search for good enough responses, so maybe that will provoke what is needed.
What is clear is that it has to be more than electoral manifestos. We are suffering from decades of cultural neglect, deliberate in my view, and this is not something that can be fixed with taxation and public spending.
Indeed, although taxation and public spending (ie, reducing it) is part of the picture. A smaller state is necessarily conservative - so this does have to be a part of the agenda.
I so agree with this. I wrote to Professor Matt Goodwin about this (in a much more prosaic way!) a few months ago. You and he would be a brilliant team to formulate a philosophical template for Reform. I feel that Nigel Farage is a brilliant communicator, but he needs some intellectual heft behind him. When I listen to interviews with people on the right of American politics, I am amazed at the coherence of their ideas, their breadth of knowledge and sheer intelligence. Kemi Badenoch with her obsession with optics and woke, is froth in comparison, and I don't think there are any serious thinkers behind her.
Spot on Bettina. There is no philosophy, no thought, no coherent ‘way of living’ underpinning the modern right. I worry it is simply beginning to get comfortable in opposition. Opposition to woke, leftism, mass immigration and the rapacious elites. I know I am as guilty of this as anyone.
But maybe we need a bit more ‘tidy your room’, ‘go see your mum’, ‘help out your community’, and a bit less moaning about Drag Queen Story Hour. In short we need to attract more than we repel.
That's so true LSO. Everything on the right wing of politics here is simply negative. There needs to be a positive vision. Something deep in the American psyche responds to the image of independence, the self sufficient pioneer - it's part of their mythology isn't it. Ours is Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor (not at all socialist haha). We can't seem to pull ourselves out of medieval feudalism with our ridiculous honours system (rewarding political grift just like William the Conqueror a thousand years ago parcelling up the country to his lords) and the notion of peasants paying tithes to their masters in exchange for 'protection'. We simply haven't moved on from this mindset.
Exactly. We need to stand for something. Nation. Duty. Family. Self reliance. Some places we might start.
Why would anyone young join us now? All their reasons are negative. Things they want, but have been denied them. Like housing, prosperity, a future.
I want young people to look at our way of life and think ‘I want to be like them’. Basically, I want young people to look at us, the way I look at the Amish. 😂
😂 I know! I've never been a church goer particularly, but what I've slowly come to realise is that the things we took for granted about our society and governance were underpinned by a strong culture of Christianity. Hence our envy of the Amish communities, which still are! It's obvious when you think about it at all. Pretty much all of the countries we consider civilised / safe / humanitarian, are Christian countries. I'm trying to think of an exception. Japan - but that is culturally and racially homogenous and I think they have their own binding philosophies and certainly a peaceful religion 🤔
Youd better help Farage and others then, with definitive things to do; because there is a vacuum which youve described here, that they will not fill without help. Alot of it. Farage for one needs to stop playing the victim to the debanking assholes and 'economists' who were really bank tellers. He needs to poke them in the eye. Hard.
He may well do if he gets serious political power.
This analysis is so very important, David. A dream team might include Freddy Sayers, Dan Astin-Gregory, and you. Make it happen!
Freddie Sayers really? I would see him as a centrist at heart. One who gets a buzzl from playing on the naughty side of the line occasionally. He's no Douglas Murray, who puts his reputation on the line most weeks with bold positions of real integrity.
Much to agree with here and in the comments.
I think the next GE will be within 4 years though, if this shower can last even that long. Starmer hasn't got the guts for it and will resign in 2027 imo and then there will be even worse chaos and an early election in a desperate attempt to avoid defeat.
As others have said, Conservatives don't seem to understand the problem and many of us will not want to be let down by them again.
Reform have the potential but need some serious intellectual underpinninings that could come from you David, Matt Goodwin and James Alexander. Please not Cummings though...
If Starmer resigns we will get Rayner, or Streeting, not a GE.
No GE immediately no, but after Streeting or Rayner wins I think here will be so much in-fighting from the left and right wings of Labour that there'll be even more chaos and they'll have to go early to have any chance.
Ha Roger. I can’t quite work out if I hope you’re right or not…It’s a tough one. Fingers crossed though that we’ll be rid of them sooner rather than later. ATB.
I have of late been listening to 'The Servile State', and found it absolutely fascinating, compelling and a timely piece. I am minded to say that what we might want for a conservative revival could and should be an integration of the distributive ideas espoused by Belloc and Chesterton into a reformed Conservative Party. It would have the utility of being able to appeal to both the despised working class (by labour) and the equally despised un-progressive right. I would venture to suggest (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that the zeal of the founding fathers is a close relative of that distributism. I fully acknowledge that some worthwhile elements of the capitalist regime would be difficult if not impossible under a distributist system, but would contend that one of the main maladies of our age, that sense of 'unconnectedness' to anything or anybody etc would find remedy in such a movement. The contention that increasing specialisation (which is axiomatically at the heart of capitalism) is fundamental to flourishing is as unproved and logically empty in the same way that communism has shown itself to be equally deluded in the opposite direction. The joint stock company is not the same thing as a small family business.
In 2007 I employed 6 Polish builders. One of them was like me, a bit of an uneducated armchair philosopher, and whilst chatting to him one lunchtime I was suddenly made aware of the passage of history happens before our very noses, and we often fail to see it happening until after the events. For he had been a conscript in the Russian Red Army as his home in Poland happened to be very close to the Russian border, whereas the nearest Polish army units were some distance away. Thus I was employing somebody, who for all my earlier years I was led to believe were an enemy, and now, I was chatting over builders tea and sarnies about our histories and observations. One thing he said however, has stuck in my mind to this day, and that was this, " the problem was not communism, it was just an extreme communism that broke us, but I tell you this, I think you will have an extreme capitalism, and that will break you too"
It looks like he was right, and whilst I am happy to see the events happening in the US, I do not see any evidence of a more distributed wealth creation system that I think is desperately needed both there and here.
Something in this, and yes, Conservatives should be the party of the shopkeepers, artisans, small business owners and yes, the workers and therefore the people of place and nation. There are votes there especially as Labour has also become the party of big business and rootless progressives.
Great insight. A lack of serious thought is a particular attribute of British public life, probably for a few decades. A class that believes in very little will achieve little. We could do worse than imitate the Empire, it’s just a shame we can’t think for ourselves, in terms of our own interests, culture, history, strengths and challenges. Either way, there is a serious reckoning coming and we shall see if necessity gets us thinking again.
Thanks Uncibal, an excellent discourse in line with my own Letters from Great Britain. But had you thought that although the lackeys (politicians et al) are not party to the City of London where the real power resides? Perhaps the Westminster theatre is mere distraction? https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/the-financial-jigsaw-part-2-32-the?r=hhrlz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Available to read FOC on LinkedIn:
This is a concern I share. The frustrating thing in the last 8 years or more was the UK left aping the terminology and concerns of the American left which lead to such insane outworking as BLM protestors in the UK chanting "don't shoot" at unarmed police, the adoption of the term BIPOC (excuse me - I'm English in England but somehow I don't think that I applies to me). I welcome the wrecking ball aspect of Trump and the pricking of bubbles but for the love of God we don't need our own MAGA movement.