<Liberal>
Anarchism< -------------------------------------------------->Fascism
Communism< ----------------------------------->Monarchy/Theocracy
<Conservative>
Why does understanding some arcane definition of the word conservative make a difference? Why does it matter if we call reactionary right-wing populists “conservative” and progressive left-wing populists “liberal”? Why should we go against common usage and flip those terms?
There is dysfunctional populism on both the right and the left. As defined in the forgoing essays, the populism of the stridently “progressive” left, flows from the socially conscious conservative conception of humanity. The populism of the angry “reactionary” right flows from the individualistic liberal conception of humanity. Each of these populist extremes distorts and misuses its own fundamental principles. Each is heretical. To bring heretics back into the fold it is necessary for adherents of the “true faith” to explain to them how they got it wrong. It is reasonable liberals who must reach out to the misinformed and disinformed followers of the Alt-Right and q’anon. It is wise conservatives who must address the puritans of the lite-left and radical groups such as Antifa. The highest hurdle, in my view, is in correctly identifying the wise conservative voices by disassociating them from the noise on the reactionary right. America needs a thoughtful Tory presence on its political stage.
If you begin your thinking with the premise that the individual is inherently good, it leads to wonderful liberal ideas that can propel human progress. It can also lead to some very bad ideas. Not the least of these is the notion that all things enlightened flow from liberalism and that all things ill-informed, selfish and mean spirited are conservative. Let me explain with an example from my Canadian Past.
It is self-evident that men are not created equal. To assume the opposite is a liberal fantasy. Even when they prevaricate and say it really means “equal before the law” or “equal opportunity” it remains unattainable. It abets those who imagine they are self-made men and therefore care for no-one but themselves. It enables them to ignore those who by birth or circumstance are disadvantaged. It is an excuse for selfishness, bad manners and lawlessness. It allows people who have little ability or expertise to be thrust to the top and worse, it allows those who are clever orators and writers to manipulate decent honest folk and turn them into rabble. In a well-regulated world, cream rises to the top, in a world without stable institutions scum surfaces. Our liberties are better assured by the common law and traditions represented in the British Crown than they are by the high-sounding phrases of liberal scoundrels.
That, said my history teacher sixty years ago, was the view held by his great-grandmother. He used her thoughts to explain the conservative thread running through Canadian political history. She was the child of refugees who were forced to flee the civil war that created the United States of America. All men are created equal, she thought, was the great lie that had driven her parents from the New York farm their family had lived on for a century. She recalled her father telling the men from the visiting Committee of Safety that he could not join them, that he would remain neutral. Days later, at the age of six, she watched from the forest as their homestead went up in flames. Then came the long furtive trek through the woods to safety behind British lines. It was there that her mother died in child birth. It was 1778.
Our thoughtful conservative side hears “the still sad music of humanity”. The conservative ideas around which Canada was partly molded accepts human imperfection as a first premise. Within each population there are differences in aptitudes and the vicissitudes of fortune shape each life. Individuals are flawed by birth and by circumstance. We cannot go it alone and therefore having a responsible elite is a self-evident necessity. The best and the brightest in each field must be nurtured, even coddled, but their cultivation must give them a deep sense of noblesse oblige. Rather than exalting the individual liberty that pursues personal happiness, the conservative sees fulfilment flowing from the security of a community in which everyone has a place and a purpose. The pensive conservative instinct pursues contentment, not happiness; it is very hearth and home.
When I was a boy, there was a sawmill in our village that offered steady work for several people. One man who suffered from epilepsy could not work inside where a seizure might cause him to fall into the whirring belts and blades. His niche was in the lumberyard where he turned the boards by hand to be air dried. He had a productive place. Playing fields are never level and cannot be. People will always vary in ability and it is more important that each person has a niche as opposed to an elusive equal opportunity. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That was their sustaining belief.
Each of us, yearns for the village. Part of us wants to belong and to submerse our individual selves into family, tribe, and community. That conservative impulse wants stability, moderation, decorum, civility and respect. It values social norms that shelter us from reckless individuals, nurtures sustaining mythologies and is fearful about the erosion of institutional authority. It values stolid institutions such as a dispassionate press and risk adverse banks. It shelters institutions from the whims of the moment and the movement. It curbs reckless enterprise, husbands resources and seeks substantial, not speculative, wealth. The dynamism of the free market, to the conservative, is merely a tool, not an article of faith. Get rich slowly and keep it is a conservative thought.
All ideologies are flawed because they are human creations. Each of them wraps back on itself like an Escher drawing; each stairwell echoing human fallibility. The conservative, therefore, has a cautious view of liberal democracy. It is not the Holy Grail, but in keeping with political currents that flowed centuries before the birth of the American republic and at least as old as the Magna Carta, it is a useful tool. Democracy should reveal the popular will, but not be enslaved by it. We must be protected from our impulsive selves.
Institutions such as the law, religion and politics are organic outgrowths of culture that require tending. They should evolve slowly and be designed to regulate the pace of change. It is inexorable, but it should have a long view both to the past and to the future. (The Long Now Foundation that opened in San Francisco in 1996 is an American organization of which traditional Canadian conservatives could approve.) Conservative political thought influenced the development of constitutional monarchies as an option to republicanism. This temperate parliamentary approach to governing has developed stable, productive societies the world over from Scandinavia to Japan, Canada to Australia.
The liberal sees this conservative view of human nature as pessimistic. This is a misunderstanding. The conservative side of our mind does not bow at the alter of individual liberty, it draws inspiration from society and its institutions. Like the liberal view, it can be hopeful and optimistic about human progress, but it puts the choir above the soloist. The descendants of the Loyalists had a motto that described the spirit of their parents as they rebuilt their shattered lives. It was the Latin expression, spem reduxit, hope restored. The grand children of those who found refuge in the northern wilds helped cobble together the remaining British North American Colonies into a country guided by the old British saw Peace, Order and Good Government. Without those ingredients, they remembered, there was no liberty and no longer was an Englishman’s home his castle.
This perception of our nature is also inherent in the teachings of Roman Catholicism. “For now, we see in a mirror dimly …” There was thus some intellectual common ground between the Quebecois, those Acadians who had perilously escaped deportation and the newly arrived Loyalist refugees. These peoples, scattered across a majestic but daunting landscape, faced a similar challenge. It was, to the Francophones, la survivance and to the Loyalists, survival. That required stability, which required peace. Nothing good could come of war. Peace could only be assured if both the French and the English linguistic groups could preserve fundamental parts of their own culture; that is language, law and religion. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. The situation demanded, however grudgingly, inter-cultural tolerance. The European-descended inhabitants, of course, shared the human default of tribalism and that was amplified by the ubiquitous racism of the colonized world of the day. In due course, nevertheless, a grudging tolerance evolved into a modicum of inter-cultural understanding and respect; a tolerable comfort with enduring differences. That was the impulse that expressed itself ninety years after the arrival of the Loyalists in the federation we know as Canada. More recently, it has led many Canadians to recognize the racism that excluded Indigenous Peoples and those of Asian and African decent from their just place within the founding compromise.
The conservative part of our mind accepts that cultural differences will persist. It is the reasoned certainty of the liberal mind that envisions a world in which we all melt into a monocultural nirvana. The tribal paranoia that fuels the populist-right in America and across the Western World comes, to some extent, from the conservative instinct that seeks security in one’s own group, but it is mostly the unintended consequence of the reasoned liberal belief in that halcyon day when we all are enlightened and live as one. The skeptical conservative would parody this with, “Just as soon as everyone shares your beliefs, speaks your language and dresses like you.” or, as Phil Ochs defined the liberal, “Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it effects them personally.” The liberal Hippies of my youth exalted individuality, creativity, and personal liberty as they flaunted social norms, but they uniformed themselves in beards and blue jeans. Liberalism can lead to uniformity and conformity. It is the wise conservative side of our brain, not liberal reason, that has made Canada an imperfect mosaic, not a blissful melting pot. Canada the content, Canada the Un-Country.
The reader can see from this understanding of conservatism why a Canadian farm boy, indoctrinated in childhood, would be outraged by the testosterone driven, reactionary liberals who now run amuck and style themselves “conservative.” Boys will be boys and liberals will take liberties. To call those on the right “conservative” denigrates the term, sows confusion and shows an ignorance of history. If civility and stability are to be found, political ailments must be correctly labelled. We cannot successfully treat cholera, if we think it is measles.
Long, long ago, but not far away, an intransigent Tory elite governed stupidly and made bad matters worse by responding to disturbances forcefully. An educated commercial elite, inspired by liberal ideas, incited mob violence and allowed base instinct to prevail over law and order and common decency. The bullying braggarts who now strut the stage and their dissembling enablers are a throwback to those who drove my ancestors into the frozen north. But don’t get me wrong; “I think you had some very bad people in that group, but I think there is blame on both sides and you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”