Donal Blaney writes about a sort of division within the Conservative Party. In short, Mr Blaney objects to a large part of David Cameron’s repositioning of his party as progressive conservatives. The bulk of his argument is that liberalism and fascism both descend from progressivism, and so are alike. I may well pick up a copy of the “searing tome” he mentions, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg.
The idea that the descendant must be fundamentally the same as the ancestor philosophy, or other descendants, is flat wrong. Aristotle studied under Plato, but said “so good riddance to Plato and his forms, for they make no more sense than singing la la la”. The Young Hegelians were at odds with the Old Hegelians, and neither would have agreed with Marx. Even amongst followers of Marx, you have to account for the likes of Georges Sorel.
To say, then, that Tony Blair is in hock to the thinking of Lenin is about as fair as to say that all conservatives would have supported slavery.
The specific example – that liberalism and fascism descend from progressivism – is similarly a load of rot. Progressivism is an ill-defined word, but starts to come into play in the late nineteenth century. Liberalism in one sense dates from rather earlier – Locke’s Two Treatises date from 1689 – while the ‘other’ form of liberalism (in the American sense of the state supporting the unfortunate) could, after a fashion, be said to date from the 1597 Act for the Relief of the Poor. If that is too much, the Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, was able to write in the mid nineteenth century
What is a communist? One who hath yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings:
Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his penny, and pocket your shilling.
If that is too abstract, Thomas Paine was arguing for a welfare state and progressive taxation to prevent the creation of a hereditary aristocracy in The Rights of Man of 1791.
Fascism is a similarly piebald term, but it is, I would argue, the third to emerge as it is only possible, as I understand it, in a modern, industrial society. In short, his analysis is conceptually and factually wrong.
In any case, Progressive Conservatism is nothing new. John Diefenbaker was elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1957 as a Progressive Conservative, while Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican and then a Progressive.
Blaney continues:
Progressivism is diametrically opposed to everything that conservatives believe in
The Conservative Party has always been a coalition of interests; at the moment, it has one-nation, traditionalist and Thatcherite1 wings. This is true of the other parties (the LibDems have the Orange Bookers and social democrats, while Labour has Campaign Group, Compass and Progress). What’s interesting is the source of Blaney’s rights:
‘God-given or natural, fundamental freedoms inherent in my being a free-born Englishman’
It would be fascinating to hear an enumeration of those rights; I suspect that they would be neither natural nor fundamental, but contingent on the existence of a state. Unless the almighty gives different rights to those born English and Ethiopian, they cannot be natural; unless the creator brands at birth the slave and lets the yeoman go free, they cannot be fundamental.
In other words, the source of Donal’s rights is verbiage. The question is whether he speaks just for the Thatcherite part of his party, or the others.
Much of Donal’s paean to conservativism is then a roll call of people and quotes. I would simply answer: what of Havel, Walesa, Dubcek and Horn?
I have a quote, too:
O Liberty, liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!
– Mme Roland.
Blaney sets up a dichotomy between conservatism and progressivism and tries to say that the latter is tantamount to fascism, thus coming awfully close to an invocation of Godwin’s Law. As I hope I’ve shown, this is bunk as descent does not mean what he thinks it means and, in any case, isn’t there. From Donal’s point of view, Cameron’s positions mean he cannot be a conservative; I think it’s rather more likely that the positions advocated by Blaney are pretty far from the mainstream of conservatism. I hope so, as if I’m wrong, the zeitgeist of the British Conservative party is similar to the GOP in the US.
xD.
1 – I deliberately say ‘Thatcherite’ rather than ‘neo-liberal’ as the emphasis on liberty in neo-liberalism is at odds with the social conservatism of Thatcher.
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