On reflection, the conservative tradition aligns with Nature’s solution to uncertainty: variation. Maximum subsidiary allows adaptation to local conditions, through trial-and-error, providing a hedge against uncertainty in the future through the inevitable variation it engenders. This hedging strategy has led to the survival of life on this planet for over 3 billion years, despite major environmental changes. This suggests it works. Totalitarian, statist solutions eliminate variation, imposing monolithic structure. Global ‘solutions’ such as the proposed WHO IHR changes, seek to impose single, technocratic responses to disease but allow no variation and therefore, no scope for the ‘experts’ being wrong. They invite catastrophe. They also stymie innovation, which is a bottom-up phenomena. Progressive statist systems, communist, fascist or liberal, are, with profound irony, the very antithesis of progressive, destroying innovation and making us deeply vulnerable to our environment. It is a reflection of contemporary incoherent thinking on the left that those who drink organic soy lattes are the most harridan exponents of inorganic, statist solutions to all problems.
Yes, this is the 'immanent critique' of statism. Statism is built on the image of the state solving any and all possible problems. But the State usually only exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and creates new ones of its own.
Massively interesting. I was reading Michael McConkey’s ‘Managerialism on Trial’ who also argues that managerialism needs to be considered as part of the same group of ideologies as fascism and communism. It does seem that alternative coherent ideologies that can be rallied round are starting to form but as it is so outside of current discourse it will take a lot to get across and form part of everyday intellectual discussion (I was thinking of Matthew Goodwin in a recent Trigonometry podcast who gets the issues but then veered off into old liberal remedies the left me exasperated). Thank you for such a readable introduction to these concepts.
There is also a book by somebody called Enteman on that subject (and Burnham too). I'm not sure I am convinced - I think managerialism is fundamentally a method which cuts across all ideologies, almost as the ur-ideology itself.
Didn't know that Duke's Substack.was going to appear. Except as a mistake, it doesn't exist. What does exist is Reactionary Essays, dukemaskell.substack.com.
Who do you think (in the existing party) is fit to become the Blair of conservative values? As a onetime strongly liberal leftist (now strongly 'conservative-curious') I retain a certain snooty contempt for the current crop of right populists. So I conceptually see what Braverman represents as reasonable, but if she is the best they've got, there's no way that people turned off by shrill culture war discourse will listen.
It is not a talented group of individuals. The money has to be on Kemi Badenoch, who has played everything with a straight bat so far. But there is nobody about at the moment with an ounce of Blair's charisma except Boris Johnson, and Boris Johnson is neither a conservative nor any longer able to act in frontline politics.
*I* experience her as shrill and therefore a turn-off. And the centrist mums and dads seem to too, so she's too easy a target and that makes her unlikely to convert rather than entrench people where they are now. I agree with her on some substantive issues but strongly dislike the way she articulates them.
It is indeed utterly bizarre that a statist such as Franklin Roosevelt, many of whose "New Deal" policies were based on Mussolini's Italy, was called a "liberal" - the political meaning of the word has been reversed.
I really struggled with this piece, David, not that it doesn't have some good thinking in it. But it is as if you've taken the 100-chapter Big Book of Political Positions, taken a few dozen chapters on conservative positions, one chapter on liberal positions, and thrown away everything else in order to defend your opening thesis. We've spoken before about how the terms 'left' and 'right' are overloaded, and not helping with clarity any more, and this remains the case when these are converted or corralled into liberal and conservative. I don't recognise this thing you called 'liberal' as anything other than a corruption of classical liberalism.
I will give just one counter example. Kant's political philosophy is not a call for totalitarianism, even if Rawls manages to bastardise it into something like this. Kant's political philosophy is liberal in the traditional sense and leaves more than enough space for conservativism to thrive as well. Centuries of misreading Kant have done inestimable damage here, but what Kant calls for is no part of your critique of liberalism here.
Let me ask you what I ask the libertarians: yes, a smaller State apparatus could be better for everyone (could not would), but with a smaller State the corporate and oligarchical power becomes stronger and has no counterweight to constrain it. How will this play out in practice...? The nightmare we face today is that the larger State can be co-opted by oligarchical power (including but not restricted to corporate power), doubling our disastrous political trajectory. But making the State smaller removes the one tool - law - we have to even potentially constrain oligarchical power from corrupting human flourishing and degrading the natural world.
I can't see the path forward, but I don't think what you've traced here solves enough of the big problems to be decisive. My fear is that nothing can, but my hope is that through discourse, thinkers like you and I and myriad others might be able to chart a course that will get us beyond the horror of where we are.
Many thanks for everything you do, even (especially) what I disagree with!
I think you miss that a small state is one that limits itself to defence and the rule of law, including limiting corporate power. A big state exceeds these limits and becomes totalitarian by being into everything, as David has set out in pieces like his one on Jouvenel. The average size of a British company in the 19th century was 20 people and the British government around 12% of GDP. Big government and big corporations, rather than being oppositional, are symbiotic: companies need to grow to comply with ever-growing government regulation, exploiting the regulation to strangle competition, achieving monopoly. This in the totalitarian ‘China Convergence’ N S Lyons writes about on his Substack.
Thanks for your challenge, Dan, appreciated. However, I'm not sure that I miss this so much as I'm sceptical that this is the panacea it is assumed to be.
Regarding your point about big government and big corporations being symbiotic, I would hesitate to use such a word because the latter corrupt the purpose of the former (on a republican assumption, at least...). So I would rather say the large corporations are parasitic upon the state (conceived of as 'the will of the people'). It cannot surely be claimed that making a smaller state will magically reduce the power of the large corporations, can it...? This feels absurd to me.
We are all in this sidebar agreed of the dangers inherent in the 'big state', but only I seem to have concerns about the dangers of 'the small state' in terms of it failing to limit the power of money to corrupt government. Given that the medium-to-large scale states we currently have bend to the power of accumulated cashflow, I find it implausible to think that a smaller state would not be at least as prone to the same weakness. This is a problem I have oft thought about and can not only see no immediate solution, it seems to me nobody else has even seriously wrestled with this complication.
In the US conversations I have in this regard, the libertarians don't seem to have an answer even though it threatens all their assumptions, and they share with the red team an unshakeable faith in 'the free market' while acknowledging at the same time that markets are not free, and have not been so for a long time (if indeed they ever were). I don't tend to have this conversation with folks in the UK as my immediate circle of friends has always leaned left and thus caught up in other follies. I am finding it invigorating engaging with folks with different views, however.
I have sometimes wondered about a state that would set a legal limit on the size of organisations allowed to pursue certain commercial tasks, but even this seems to me to be riven with unavoidable loopholes. I am quite stumped on this point, even while I acknowledge it is not so much our immediate problem, as it is an argument that the problems we're currently facing sit atop of a mountain of other problems.
I welcome your further thoughts on this, if you have the time and inclination.
You are something of a virtuoso yourself, David.
If only!
On reflection, the conservative tradition aligns with Nature’s solution to uncertainty: variation. Maximum subsidiary allows adaptation to local conditions, through trial-and-error, providing a hedge against uncertainty in the future through the inevitable variation it engenders. This hedging strategy has led to the survival of life on this planet for over 3 billion years, despite major environmental changes. This suggests it works. Totalitarian, statist solutions eliminate variation, imposing monolithic structure. Global ‘solutions’ such as the proposed WHO IHR changes, seek to impose single, technocratic responses to disease but allow no variation and therefore, no scope for the ‘experts’ being wrong. They invite catastrophe. They also stymie innovation, which is a bottom-up phenomena. Progressive statist systems, communist, fascist or liberal, are, with profound irony, the very antithesis of progressive, destroying innovation and making us deeply vulnerable to our environment. It is a reflection of contemporary incoherent thinking on the left that those who drink organic soy lattes are the most harridan exponents of inorganic, statist solutions to all problems.
Yes, this is the 'immanent critique' of statism. Statism is built on the image of the state solving any and all possible problems. But the State usually only exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and creates new ones of its own.
Massively interesting. I was reading Michael McConkey’s ‘Managerialism on Trial’ who also argues that managerialism needs to be considered as part of the same group of ideologies as fascism and communism. It does seem that alternative coherent ideologies that can be rallied round are starting to form but as it is so outside of current discourse it will take a lot to get across and form part of everyday intellectual discussion (I was thinking of Matthew Goodwin in a recent Trigonometry podcast who gets the issues but then veered off into old liberal remedies the left me exasperated). Thank you for such a readable introduction to these concepts.
There is also a book by somebody called Enteman on that subject (and Burnham too). I'm not sure I am convinced - I think managerialism is fundamentally a method which cuts across all ideologies, almost as the ur-ideology itself.
Also Managing Britain, Robert Protherough and John Pick, Brynmill Press 2002
Didn't know that Duke's Substack.was going to appear. Except as a mistake, it doesn't exist. What does exist is Reactionary Essays, dukemaskell.substack.com.
Who do you think (in the existing party) is fit to become the Blair of conservative values? As a onetime strongly liberal leftist (now strongly 'conservative-curious') I retain a certain snooty contempt for the current crop of right populists. So I conceptually see what Braverman represents as reasonable, but if she is the best they've got, there's no way that people turned off by shrill culture war discourse will listen.
It is not a talented group of individuals. The money has to be on Kemi Badenoch, who has played everything with a straight bat so far. But there is nobody about at the moment with an ounce of Blair's charisma except Boris Johnson, and Boris Johnson is neither a conservative nor any longer able to act in frontline politics.
*I* experience her as shrill and therefore a turn-off. And the centrist mums and dads seem to too, so she's too easy a target and that makes her unlikely to convert rather than entrench people where they are now. I agree with her on some substantive issues but strongly dislike the way she articulates them.
No such thing as Liberal Conservative? The Canadians went one better than that. They used to have the Progressive Conservatives.
(Ignore 'Duke's Substack'. No such thing. Instead see Reactionary Essays.)
It is indeed utterly bizarre that a statist such as Franklin Roosevelt, many of whose "New Deal" policies were based on Mussolini's Italy, was called a "liberal" - the political meaning of the word has been reversed.
I really struggled with this piece, David, not that it doesn't have some good thinking in it. But it is as if you've taken the 100-chapter Big Book of Political Positions, taken a few dozen chapters on conservative positions, one chapter on liberal positions, and thrown away everything else in order to defend your opening thesis. We've spoken before about how the terms 'left' and 'right' are overloaded, and not helping with clarity any more, and this remains the case when these are converted or corralled into liberal and conservative. I don't recognise this thing you called 'liberal' as anything other than a corruption of classical liberalism.
I will give just one counter example. Kant's political philosophy is not a call for totalitarianism, even if Rawls manages to bastardise it into something like this. Kant's political philosophy is liberal in the traditional sense and leaves more than enough space for conservativism to thrive as well. Centuries of misreading Kant have done inestimable damage here, but what Kant calls for is no part of your critique of liberalism here.
Let me ask you what I ask the libertarians: yes, a smaller State apparatus could be better for everyone (could not would), but with a smaller State the corporate and oligarchical power becomes stronger and has no counterweight to constrain it. How will this play out in practice...? The nightmare we face today is that the larger State can be co-opted by oligarchical power (including but not restricted to corporate power), doubling our disastrous political trajectory. But making the State smaller removes the one tool - law - we have to even potentially constrain oligarchical power from corrupting human flourishing and degrading the natural world.
I can't see the path forward, but I don't think what you've traced here solves enough of the big problems to be decisive. My fear is that nothing can, but my hope is that through discourse, thinkers like you and I and myriad others might be able to chart a course that will get us beyond the horror of where we are.
Many thanks for everything you do, even (especially) what I disagree with!
I think you miss that a small state is one that limits itself to defence and the rule of law, including limiting corporate power. A big state exceeds these limits and becomes totalitarian by being into everything, as David has set out in pieces like his one on Jouvenel. The average size of a British company in the 19th century was 20 people and the British government around 12% of GDP. Big government and big corporations, rather than being oppositional, are symbiotic: companies need to grow to comply with ever-growing government regulation, exploiting the regulation to strangle competition, achieving monopoly. This in the totalitarian ‘China Convergence’ N S Lyons writes about on his Substack.
Thanks for your challenge, Dan, appreciated. However, I'm not sure that I miss this so much as I'm sceptical that this is the panacea it is assumed to be.
Regarding your point about big government and big corporations being symbiotic, I would hesitate to use such a word because the latter corrupt the purpose of the former (on a republican assumption, at least...). So I would rather say the large corporations are parasitic upon the state (conceived of as 'the will of the people'). It cannot surely be claimed that making a smaller state will magically reduce the power of the large corporations, can it...? This feels absurd to me.
We are all in this sidebar agreed of the dangers inherent in the 'big state', but only I seem to have concerns about the dangers of 'the small state' in terms of it failing to limit the power of money to corrupt government. Given that the medium-to-large scale states we currently have bend to the power of accumulated cashflow, I find it implausible to think that a smaller state would not be at least as prone to the same weakness. This is a problem I have oft thought about and can not only see no immediate solution, it seems to me nobody else has even seriously wrestled with this complication.
In the US conversations I have in this regard, the libertarians don't seem to have an answer even though it threatens all their assumptions, and they share with the red team an unshakeable faith in 'the free market' while acknowledging at the same time that markets are not free, and have not been so for a long time (if indeed they ever were). I don't tend to have this conversation with folks in the UK as my immediate circle of friends has always leaned left and thus caught up in other follies. I am finding it invigorating engaging with folks with different views, however.
I have sometimes wondered about a state that would set a legal limit on the size of organisations allowed to pursue certain commercial tasks, but even this seems to me to be riven with unavoidable loopholes. I am quite stumped on this point, even while I acknowledge it is not so much our immediate problem, as it is an argument that the problems we're currently facing sit atop of a mountain of other problems.
I welcome your further thoughts on this, if you have the time and inclination.