I'm reading 'Comrades: Communism:A World History by Robert Service.
The chapters on Stalin are a revelation of just how far communism under his rule invaded every aspect of Soviet life, facilitated by the ruthless use of purges and state terror:
'The order entrenched by Joseph Stalin involved centralism,hierarchy,discipline, mobilisation and terror; state power on a scale unprecedented in world history-until Hitler's Third Reich-had been amassed.Political intrusion into private life was like a dagger plunged into butter.Privacy was devalorised.The state counted for everything, the individual for nothing.'
My sense is that our present disarray-an essential hollowing out of what remains of the British way of life-is a symptom of the impositions of a technocratic elite,completely divorced from the mounting concerns of us, the ordinary, increasingly alienated folk.
This entitled complacency has fostered entryism on an alarming scale: wokery pokery on the one hand and radical Islamism on the other, the ever expedient scapegoat being our Jewish communities and Israel, now facing a decidedly ugly increase in blatant anti-Semitism.
I agree with the author that matters will become explosive before any resolution is established and I fear for pur future.
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.
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.
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 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'm reading 'Comrades: Communism:A World History by Robert Service.
The chapters on Stalin are a revelation of just how far communism under his rule invaded every aspect of Soviet life, facilitated by the ruthless use of purges and state terror:
'The order entrenched by Joseph Stalin involved centralism,hierarchy,discipline, mobilisation and terror; state power on a scale unprecedented in world history-until Hitler's Third Reich-had been amassed.Political intrusion into private life was like a dagger plunged into butter.Privacy was devalorised.The state counted for everything, the individual for nothing.'
My sense is that our present disarray-an essential hollowing out of what remains of the British way of life-is a symptom of the impositions of a technocratic elite,completely divorced from the mounting concerns of us, the ordinary, increasingly alienated folk.
This entitled complacency has fostered entryism on an alarming scale: wokery pokery on the one hand and radical Islamism on the other, the ever expedient scapegoat being our Jewish communities and Israel, now facing a decidedly ugly increase in blatant anti-Semitism.
I agree with the author that matters will become explosive before any resolution is established and I fear for pur future.
You are something of a virtuoso yourself, David.
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.
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.
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.
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!