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The monograph below (a monograph is essentially a very long academic journal article) is both long and covers 1500 years of history -- and since both history and long articles tend not to be read, I think I had better summarize quickly what it says. It says: There has always been in Anglo-Saxon politics a major opposition between those who want to extend central government power and those who want to preserve individual liberties; Conservatives have been for the most part the chief repository for the individual liberties cause; Conservatism is a cautious psychological syndrome rather than a philosophy; That syndrome does naturally and strongly lead to both a respect for tradition and a policy preference for individual liberties. If you disagree with any of that, you had better keep reading
The historical origins and modern psychology of Anglo-Saxon conservatism
By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
"Law, language, literature-these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all a love of personal freedom . these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.
-- Winston Churchill's view of what characterizes people of British descent both at home and abroad
Preface: The 19th century
What I present below is an attempt to use history to define conservatism. And at the very least, I think you have to know something of the late 19th century to understand what has happened since then. So I am going to start this monograph somewhat in the middle of things rather than in the beginning or at the end. I do so because seeds sown in the 19th century have borne much fruit since. It was after all the era that produced Karl Marx, the most influential misanthrope of all times. But Marx was such an intellectual midget and such a depicable character (even his own father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought that Karl was not much of a human being) that it is no wonder his legacy has been so malign and, in the end, irrelevant. (If that summary of Marx seems too negative, a browse through the archives of my Marx blog should put any doubts at rest).
And insofar as Marxian politics were European, they lie outside the scope of what I attempt here. The conservative instinct does of course lead to different political policies in different times and places so I confine myself almost entirely to conservatism as it has developed in the English-speaking world. To a considerable extent, European conservatism is another beast altogether. As every conservative knows, however, simple, hard and fast rules serve us poorly in discussing human affairs so I am going to break my own rule immediately by looking briefly at a great European conservative. And a major reason why I mention him is because, like most great conservatives, he was also a major agent of change! The old Leftist slur that conservatives are simply opponents of all change has never been remotely true and it was certainly not true in the case of Otto von Bismarck. And who was it who said very publicly in the middle of the 19th century: "The past is buried...no human power can bring it back to life." It could have been any Leftist but it was in fact one of Europe's fiercest and most effective advocates of monarchy -- Otto von Bismarck. If that seems paradoxical, keep reading (and also see here).
So, by contrast with Marx, the two greatest political figures of the late 19th century, Disraeli and Bismarck, were both great monarchists and devotees of their national traditions generally, and both achieved an enormous amount for humanity, peace and civility. Bismarck is normally pictured wearing his Prussian Pickelhaube (spiked helmet) -- though he was only in the reserves of the Prussian military in his glory years -- and that does tend to mislead people into thinking of him as a brutal militarist -- but that is the sort of ignorance you have to expect of people who have been fed the highly selective pap that passes for school history lessons these days. In fact, for all his fearsome image, tough rhetoric and undoubted military achievements, Bismarck gave Europe a long era of peace and rapidly increasing prosperity.
After his great victory over Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, one might have expected Bismarck to go on to a Bonapartesque quest to dominate all Europe, but he did nothing of the sort. A power-mad Leftist would almost certainly have done so but Bismarck was in European terms very much a conservative and, like American conservatives, his interest was in the welfare of his own country rather than in foreign adventures. The entire military campaign in France had not in fact been aimed at conquest at all. Bismarck simply used the war to unite all the German territories North of Austria under the Prussian crown. So when the war was over, all but a small German-speaking slice of French territory was evacuated and Bismarck concentrated on creating the nation that we now know as Germany -- not by force but by diplomacy -- albeit by diplomacy of a rather dubious sort at times. Very largely because of the great prestige accruing from the military victory that he had just engineered, he was rapidly successful. And a united Germany of course soon became the economic powerhouse that it has been ever since. But note this: from 1871 on, Europe had no major wars until 1914 -- a 43 year period of peace -- pretty unusual for Europe up until that time. And that long peace was largely Bismarck's doing. The united Germany's formidable military was a much a hindrance as a help because it made the rest of the world fearful and could well have encouraged a grand alliance against Germany. But by a series of ever-shifting and totally Byzantine diplomatic manoeuvres, alliances and treaties, Bismarck kept everybody off-balance and both Germany and the rest of Europe were left free to prosper peacefully and to develop the full fruits of the industrial revolution -- which they did mightily (though not without hiccups, of course). So Bismarck was instrumental in the great leap forward in prosperity that took place in the whole of Europe in the 19th century. Where Marxism and socialism breed at best stagnation, the cautious and pragmatic Bismarck created (or at least enabled) unheard-of rises in the standard of living in the whole of Western Europe.
Despite his success at ensuring international peace, Bismarck was not as successful at ensuring peace on the home front. As in most of Europe, the newly-created industrial working class was in a fairly ongoing ferment -- a ferment in which Marx played a small part. So there were some serious rebellions, uprisings and disturbances in Germany. As in foreign affairs, however, Bismarck's ever-shifting policies and alliances managed to keep the peace overall. Regrettably, however, it was a fragile peace and violent socialism still lurked just beneath the surface. So after Bismarck was gone it broke out again -- as the powerful Communist and Nazi movements of the post-1918 period.
Sir John Tenniel's famous 1890 cartoon on the centrality of Bismarck to continued order in Europe was both insightful and prophetic.
Dropping the pilot
Across the Channel, however, there was a more successful form of conservatism. Bismarck's great English contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, certainly presided over a great increase in British prosperity but, in addition, he was far more successful at containing domestic unrest. Like Bismarck he saw the need for worker-welfare legislation as a means of buying social peace and both men were notable welfare innovators -- THE welfare innovators, it might be said. So what was the secret of Disraeli's success? Fundamentally, it was sentimentality. Although he was always vocal about his own Jewishness, Disraeli had a sort of love-affair with the English people that was only surpassed in more recent times by the love-affair that Ronald Reagan had with the American people. And the results Disraeli got were arguably as transformative as the results Reagan got. Disraeli had a great love and respect for English traditions and preached the virtues of Englishness incessantly. And he included in his embrace the ordinary English working people -- whom he saw as "angels in marble" -- people with great and good potential. He actually trusted the working-class -- an almost unheard-of idea among all the governing classes in Europe at that time. So he sponsored legislation that gave the workers the vote on a greatly increased scale. And they rewarded his trust by being far less susceptible to the political and social agitation that plagued their contemporaries in Europe. They developed a lasting trust in their national institutions that did far more for lasting peace and civility than anything else could have done.
At one of the great international political conferences of the time (Berlin Congress of 1878), Germany was represented by Bismarck and Britain by Disraeli. To Britain's considerable benefit, Disraeli ran rings around all of them -- causing Bismarck to make his famous admiring remark: "Der alte Jude. Das is der Mann" ("The old Jew. THAT is the man"). Coming from Bismarck, that was a compliment indeed. Disraeli himself attributed the greater social peace of 19th century England to Englishness but to a considerable extent it was also his own personal achievement.
I am always a bit amused at how well Disraeli's propaganda has lasted. Although the idea was NOT original to him, it is mainly Disraeli whom we have to thank for rebranding the British Tories in the 19th century as the "Conservatives". And the reason Disraeli did that is a very modern and rather clever one. Disraeli and the Tories did indeed want to conserve SOME things from traditional British ways and customs but, under Disraeli's leadership, the Tories ALSO became a great party of reform. As already mentioned, it was Disraeli who introduced some of Britain's first worker protection laws and who extended the vote to many working class people who had never had it before. So Disraeli chose a name that was certainly accurate in one respect but which also disguised another major part of his agenda -- which was CHANGE! He named his party in a way that deflected attention from its belief in the need for change in certain areas -- in order to confuse his opponents and reassure his allies. Communists do something similar when they label their governments as "Democratic".
So why did Disraeli lead the Tories so far down the road of reform? Basically because he saw that the pressure to give the vote to the workers would in the end be irresistible. There had long been agitation for it and that agitation was getting ever more energetic. So what he wanted to do was to avoid another French Revolution. He wanted the transition to majority rule to be peaceful, orderly, non-destructive and non-tyrannical. He succeeded brilliantly. He succeeded in moving the Tories away from being a party of the rich to being a party for all Englishmen and he rightly saw that working class Englishmen could be relied on for patriotism and good sense just as well as more prosperous Englishmen could be. And that is true to this day.
So while it is true that Disraeli wanted to conserve what was best from the past, conserving anything was for him primarily a means to an end. And if that end needed reform to achieve it, that was fine too. So what was he aiming at achieving by his reforms? What WAS the end he was aiming at? Unlike Leftists, he was not aiming at equalizing everybody or creating the worker-led tyranny that his contemporary, Karl Marx, was advocating. He was aiming at the opposite of that. He wanted to preserve civility and avoid tyranny. He wanted people to be free to get on with their lives in their own accustomed way without interference from other people or from the State. He was part of that great tradition in English politics that values individual liberty and suspects the State. And that tradition goes back a long way in England -- right back to the time when Britannia became England about 1500 years ago. The advocates of the individual versus the collectivity have not always been called conservatives but in England they have always been there -- as I will set out at length in the rest of this article.
Leftists, of course, have always been happy to misrepresent conservatism as resistance to ALL change -- something that all conservative thinkers that I know of explicitly reject -- including both Edmund Burke and Disraeli (as we shall see) -- but even conservative intellectuals these days are still sometimes misled by Disraeli's old propaganda trick (see e.g. here or here) and assume that the PRIME aim of conservatives is to conserve -- but in so doing they simply show their ignorance of history. There are only SOME things that conservatives want to conserve and those things that conservatives do want to conserve they want to conserve for a reason, not as an end in itself. And the end they seek is safety and liberty for the individual to live his own life in his own way with minimal interference from others and from the State. They realize that the State and society generally are sometimes needed to secure that freedom but do not lose sight of the fact that freedom for the individual is the end of political policy, not an optional extra. And present day politics are much like the politics of Disraeli's day. Conservatives don't want to conserve our disastrous educational and social welfare systems, they want to reform them. And they want to reform them by empowering the individual -- just as conservatives have always done.
The most loved and most influential conservative leader of the 20th century knew what conservatism was about, of course. He said: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism..... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom". And if Ronald Reagan did not know what conservatism was all about, who would?
Although the term "conservatism" first acquired a political use in the 19th century, that does not of course mean that thinking now generally called conservative arose for the first time in that era. Political labels come and go and ideas that are at one time associated with one political party can at a later time come to be associated with another party. It is my basic thesis in this article, however, that there has long been an important polarity in politics that has survived the comings and goings of political parties and I aim to trace that polarity through history at some length. As a matter of historical interest, however, I set out below a potted history of the term "conservatism", which I owe to Martin Hutchinson, author of Great Conservatives:
"The etymology of Conservatism is straightforward. The term was first used as a description of a political party in a 50 page article, probably by John Wilson Croker, in the January 1830 Quarterly Review, a publication that generally supported the great Tory governments of 1783-1830, then in their last months of power before losing definitively to the Whigs in November of that year. The "Conservative" party was indeed the party that sought to preserve what was already there; in this case the specific constitution and policies of those Tory governments, which were by that time embattled.
After the series of Tory disasters in 1830-32, the term "Conservative" was picked up by Sir Robert Peel, leader of the Tory remnants, and was used to do three things. First, it was used to reassure traditionalist voters that the party was opposed to further destructive change. Second, it was used to give the party a "new image" that might appeal to moderates. Third, by stigmatizing them as not "Conservatives" but "reactionaries" it was used to de-legitimize the remnants of the Tory right, such as the Duke of Wellington and more distantly the aged Lord Eldon, who were a threat to Peel's dominance.
By the time Disraeli became leader of the Conservative Party in 1868, the term had been in use for nearly two generations. It had been set aside after the 1846 split over the Corn Laws, when the party divided into "Peelites" and "Protectionists" but had been brought back into full use by Disraeli's predecessor as leader, the 14th Earl of Derby, after Peel died in 1850 and the party abandoned protectionism in 1852".
But it was Disraeli who was by far the most eloquent advocate of the virtues of conservatism and it was he who is generally credited with bringing the term into common use as the name of his party. How much of Disraeli's often-expressed sentimental attachment to almost everything traditionally English was propaganda and how much was sincerely felt, we can really only speculate but that his deeds served the preservation of English liberty and civility well there can be no doubt. There were none of the big 19th century upheavals in England that there were in Europe. Calling on the accumulated wisdom of English traditions to both guide and limit reform was certainly a practical, popular and political success.
This is not the place for a full discussion of the many huge social and economic changes that took place in the 19th. century, so I have contented myself with a quick mention of just Disraeli and Bismarck. Those two do not remotely, however, exhaust the list of interesting conservatives from that time. There were in fact many conservatives of the time who acted in ways that upset stereotypes popular today. A good place to start exploration of that would probably be any history of the life and works of Richard Oastler. He was a notable predecessor of Disraeli in worker-welfare agitation and legislation yet was also, like Disraeli, a high Tory. By modern standards he would be the most hopeless reactionary yet he was also a passionate and effective advocate for the welfare of the workers. History is very good at overturning simple theories! And I think it should already be clear that the concept of conservatism as opposition to change is one of the silliest of all theories.
I might note at this stage that this article is not intended as a simple chronology (there are already plenty of political histories that do that) but rather as the development of an argument, so for the purposes of that argument I will skip back and forth through history to some extent. For that reason I will not say any more about Disraeli and the 19th century at this stage but we will meet him on several occasions below. See for example here and here. I might also mention that this article is intended as a survey of the facts rather than as a statement of my personal beliefs. For anybody who is interested in what my personal views on political matters might be, there is a brief summary of that here.
Military Dictators?
In the late 20th century, it was a common rhetorical ploy of the more "revolutionary" Left in the "Western" world simply to ignore democracy as an alternative to Communism. Instead they would excuse the brutalities of Communism by pointing to the brutalities of the then numerous military dictatorships of Southern Europe and Latin America and pretend that such regimes were the only alternative to Communism. These regimes were led by generals who might in various ways be seen as conservative (though Peron was undisputably Leftist) so do they tell us anything about conservatism?
Historically, most of the world has been ruled by military men and their successors (Sargon II of Assyria, Alexander of Macedon, Caesar, Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne, Frederick II of Prussia etc.) so it seems unlikely but perhaps the main point to note here is that the Hispanic dictatorships of the 20th century were very often created as a response to a perceived threat of a Communist takeover. This is particularly clear in the case of Spain, Chile and Argentina. They were an attempt to fight fire with fire. In Argentina of the 60s and 70s, for instance, Leftist "urban guerillas" were very active -- blowing up anyone they disapproved of. The nice, mild, moderate Anglo-Saxon response to such depredations would have been to endure the deaths and disruptions concerned and use police methods to trace the perpetrators and bring them to trial. Much of the world is more fiery than that, however, and the Argentine generals certainly were. They became impatient with the slow-grinding wheels of democracy and its apparent impotence in the face of the Leftist revolutionaries. They therefore seized power and instituted a reign of terror against the Leftist revolutionaries that was as bloody, arbitrary and indiscriminate as what the Leftists had inflicted. In a word, they used military methods to deal with the Leftist attackers. So the nature of these regimes was only incidentally conservative. What they were was essentially military. We have to range further than the Hispanic generals, therefore, if we are to find out what is quintessentially conservative.
It might be noted, however, that, centuries earlier, the parliamentary leaders of England -- led by Fairfax, Cromwell etc. -- did something similar to the Hispanic generals of the 20th century. Faced by an attempt on the part of the Stuart tyrant to abrogate their traditional rights, powers and liberties, they resorted to military means to overthrow the threat. There is no reason to argue that democracy cannot or must not use military means to defend itself or that Leftists or anyone else must be granted exclusive rights to the use of force and violence.
It might also be noted that the Hispanic generals were operating within a very different tradition. The abiding hero of Latin America is Simon Bolivar, the great liberator. But the ideas about government put forward by Bolivar were very authoritarian -- ideas about how the masses need to be "educated" and generally dominated by a self-chosen elite -- ideas that put Bolivar in the company of men like Mussolini and Lenin -- ideas that are totally outside the democratic traditions of Anglo-Saxon conservatism. Excerpt:
"Education was also touched upon by Simon Bolivar, especially in his Essay on Public Education, as a tool for governments to re-educate their citizens to the responsibilities and duties of participation in public life. Bolivar also commented on the weaknesses and limits of liberal democracy when writing to explain the necesity of a strong, republican form of government.... Spanish American people required that their new states be organized in such a way as to maintain order by checking the popular forces until they could be trained in the civic virtues. Bolivarism emphasizes the common good over the individual"
The Hispanic generals were doing very little more than putting Bolivarism into practice and Bolivarism was certainly not conservatism.
Historic Origins
It is a common claim that conservatism, as we now know it in the English-speaking world, originated with the Anglo/Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke (of whom more anon) at the time of the French revolution. What Burke (1790) himself said is the opposite of that, however. He saw what he was defending as stretching far back into English history -- and an updated version of that type of thinking is presented here.
My submission is that the modern-day conservatism of the English-speaking world is a survival into modern times of an ancient human tradition that the English inherited from their Germanic ancestors -- the invaders (Angles and Saxons) from coastal Germany who overran Romano-Celtic Britannia around 1500 years ago and made it into England. They brought with them a very decentralized, consultative, largely tribal system of government that was very different from the Oriental despotisms that had ruled the civilized world for most of human history up to that time. And they liked their decentralized, consultative system very much. So much so that the system just kept on keeping on in England, century after century, despite many vicissitudes. Only the 20th century really shook it. So conservatism in English-origin countries is simply Anglo-Saxon traditional values.
The curious thing, of course, is that similar values were also observable in ancient Greece and Rome and may even have been what underlay the city-states of the original human civilization in Mesopotamia. The affinity of the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic people for democracy is certainly very reminiscent of ancient Greek democracy and the early Roman republic and, in turn, the city-states that characterized ancient Greece and Rome are very reminiscent of ancient Mesopotamia. What appears to have happened is that the human race has a great tendency towards centralization of government -- seen vividly in the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, in the bureaucratic states of pre-modern China, in various Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Moghul and Ottoman empires, in the Kings of Mediaeval Europe and in the vast swathe of communist bureaucracies in the 20th century. And this centralizing tendency almost always seems to triumph over an even earlier tendency towards respect for the individual and a form of government that is directly responsive in some way to the popular will. And it is that very early tradition that only the Anglo-Saxons -- and their close relatives in Scandinavia and the Netherlands -- have carried forward into the modern world. Only among the Anglo-Saxons and their close relatives did the power of centralism never quite succeed in squashing human dreams for responsive, respectful and representative government. And it is this dream that conservatives of the English-speaking world carry forward today.
My thesis here is, of course, not exactly original. Montesquieu, De Tocqueville and even Thomas Jefferson all saw English exceptionalism and independence of spirit as tracing back to German roots and all harked back to Tacitus for their view of the early German character. If I was mischievous, I suppose I could have called this article "Jefferson Revisited", or some such. The work of Macfarlane (1978 & 2000) is however probably the best modern reference on the topic.
But let us look at what Tacitus said about the early Germans that he knew around 2000 years ago. Excerpts:
They choose their kings by birth, their generals for merit. These kings have not unlimited or arbitrary power, and the generals do more by example than by authority.
About minor matters the chiefs deliberate, about the more important the whole tribe. Yet even when the final decision rests with the people, the affair is always thoroughly discussed by the chiefs. They assemble, except in the case of a sudden emergency, on certain fixed days, either at new or at full moon; for this they consider the most auspicious season for the transaction of business. Instead of reckoning by days as we do, they reckon by nights, and in this manner fix both their ordinary and their legal appointments. Night they regard as bringing on day. Their freedom has this disadvantage, that they do not meet simultaneously or as they are bidden, but two or three days are wasted in the delays of assembling. When the multitude think proper, they sit down armed. Silence is proclaimed by the priests, who have on these occasions the right of keeping order. Then the king or the chief, according to age, birth, distinction in war, or eloquence, is heard, more because he has influence to persuade than because he has power to command. If his sentiments displease them, they reject them with murmurs; if they are satisfied, they brandish their spears.
In truth neither from the Samnites, nor from the Carthaginians, nor from both Spains, nor from all the nations of Gaul, have we received more frequent checks and alarms; nor even from the Parthians: for, more vigorous and invincible is the liberty of the Germans than the monarchy of the Arsacides.
Our modern-day parliamentary procedures are a little more sophisticated but the basic values and principles seem to me not to have changed at all. As Razib (See here and here) points out, in the 2002 Index of Freedom, all the top countries seem to have a connection to the Anglosphere or are Germanic. Indian institutions and political customs have of course been enormously influenced by Britain. Razib, incidentally, is of Bengali Muslim origins so has some claim to a disinterested (though far from uninterested) approach to these matters.
As already noted, it could also be said that the decentralized nature of the early German communities was no different from the decentralization in Greece before the Athenian and Macedonian Empires, the decentralization in Italy before the ascendancy of the Roman Republic or indeed the decentralization of the original Mesopotamian civilization. The important point, here, however is the much longer survival of that form of organization among Germans -- and it is certainly to their German ancestors that the English must trace it.
A common objection to the sort of account given here is that it is too reliant on Tacitus and that Tacitus was using his picture of the Germans to propagandize for a return to old Roman ideals. Tacitus was a very senior Roman politician in the early imperial period and both saw close up and deplored the corruption and arbitrary power of that period. Tacitus is however a convenient reference rather than a sole one (Caesar, for instance, also distinguishes between the Gauls and the Germans and even "Beowulf" characterizes Germanic Kings primarily as being "givers of rings" -- scarcely tyrannical) and the similarity and common Indo-European origin of Roman republican, Greek democratic and German tribal systems are not in any case in dispute. Tacitus was right to see important similarities.
It would be too large a digression here, however, to debate the merits of Tacitus as a historian, though he was certainly a dedicated one and a brilliant and highly civilized man to boot. Like all historians of the ancient world, he saw what he wrote as didactic. He COULD have had the almost total disregard for truth and evidence that seems to characterize 21st Century Leftist historians but he is not usually accused of that. Unless we are "postmodernist" enough to discard him altogether, then, what we have at a minimum from him is an assertion that the powerful Germans of his day were like the Romans of the republican period -- and that is certainly very confirmatory of what is said here, given the great fractionation of power that was characteristic of the Roman republic. And those similarities persisted even longer than Tacitus could have envisaged. The similarities between (say) the Hanseatic League and the city-states of Northern Italy during the Renaissance on the one hand (both of which were primarily Germanic) and Greece at the time of Pericles and the early Italic communities (from which the Roman hegemony originally emerged) on the other hand are obvious.
And moving far beyond Tacitus, who cannot see the similarity between the legions who marched behind the signum SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus or "the Senate and the People of Rome") and the Cromwellian New Model Army that marched in the name and cause of the English Parliament? And is the beheading of the Stuart tyrant much different from the popular expulsion of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus? The Romans too once had what the Germanic peoples retained. We don't need Tacitus to tell us that.
A picture is said to be better than 1,000 words so this link to a BBC educational site should help fix in our minds the fact that the English are historically the Western branch of the Germanic people -- and that the basics of what is German should also therefore be the basics of what is English. Though 1500 years of history can create a lot of differences, of course. The words in the yellow text-box are particularly relevant to my stress on the historical importance of political decentralization among the Germanic peoples.
There is now even some evidence that the German influence on Britain may have had a much earlier wave as well. When the grave of the so-called "King of Stonehenge" (dating from about 2300 BC) was opened, he was found to be of Southern German origin:
"Different ratios of oxygen isotopes form on teeth in different parts of the world and the ratio found on these teeth prove they were from somebody from the Alps region," said Tony Trueman from Wessex Archeology.
Germans in more recent times
Just where the English get their traditional dislike of unrestrained central power from is not the main point or even an essential point of the present account. Nonetheless, tracing that dislike to the ultimately German descent of most of the English population might seem colossally perverse in view of Germany's recent experience. Was not Hitler a German and was he not almost the ultimate despot and centralizer of power in his own hands?
A very easy way out of this dilemma might be to say that 1500 years of history can make a lot of difference in the evolution of a people. The English could well have retained their traditions of 1500 years ago while the incessant brutalizing wars of Europe could have caused modern-day Germans to have lost their traditions of 1500 years ago. And maybe that is the whole of the answer. I consider other answers here, however. In particular, I contend that the idea of the Hitler episode as being typical of Germans and German history is little more than a hangover of wartime propaganda.
Before I leave the topic, however, I might mention that there is a good argument to say that most of the tribes we generically refer to as the Anglo-Saxons came from a different branch of the early Germans than do most of the Germans of today. So some differences between them and the Germans of today are on that account to be expected. They would appear to have originally been the Baltic-coast branch of the Germans and in fact in some ways have more in common with the people from the other (Northern) side of the Baltic (the Norse) than with other Germans. Germans and the Norse are both of course Teutons but a splitting of the Teutons into just Germans and the Norse is undoubtedly too crude. The Anglo-Saxons (or at least the tribes among them who were in the end most influential) could well be seen as an intermediate group between the Norse and the more Southerly Germans. The chief evidence we have for this idea lies in language. There are many words in modern English which came via Anglo-Saxon but which have no good German equivalents -- but which do have close equivalents in coastal Teutonic languages. "Take" is a good example of such a word. It has close equivalents in Norse languages, in Dutch and, of course, in Frisian but the modern German equivalent -- "nehmen" -- is obviously completely unrelated. And this closer association of the Anglo-Saxons with the Norse rather than with other Germans in no way weakens what has been said so far about the consultative nature of early German government. The world's oldest parliament is in fact Norse -- the Althing of Iceland, established in 930 A.D.
At any event, in 1066, William of Normandy disrupted the traditional decentralized and competitive power structure of Germanic England to some degree but by the time of King John and Magna Carta it was back with a vengeance. And the ascendancy of Simon de Montfort not long after that also displayed the traditional English belief in the limited nature of central government power.
Tudor England
No account of Englishness can however be complete without mention of England's great and transformative Tudor period. The period started out well with the cautious Henry VII giving England much-needed stability but his son, Henry VIII (1491 -- 1547), gradually evolved into a powerful and ruthless despot and so is undoubtedly in some ways a blot on the history of English liberty. But it must be noted that even in his reign there were still in England great and powerful regional Lords and many less powerful but numerous local notables representing local interests that the King had to take great care with. Even Tudor central government power was highly contingent, far from absolute and much dependant on the popularity of the ruler among ordinary English people. And Henry was undoubtedly popular. But Henry's great deed for England was to let off the leash once and for all that great religious expression of individualism -- Protestantism -- something that had been popular among the ordinary English people since Wycliffe (1330 -- 1384).
It is however in the reign of Henry's brilliant daughter -- Elizabeth I (1533 -- 1603) -- that we see best what has long distinguished the English from others. She herself is famous for her tolerance of individual differences as expressed in her well-known statement that she did not wish to make a "window into men's souls" and, even whilst still young, she reproached that great bureaucrat and religious tyrant, King Philip II of Spain, by asking him: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?" (Quoted on p. 38 of That Great Lucifer: A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin [Bungay, Suffolk: Reprint Society, 1960])
Perhaps most revealing of all about the English difference at that time, however, is this account (pp. 102-104 Op. cit.) of the conquest of Trinidad by Elizabeth's most enduring favourite -- the enormously popular Sir Walter Ralegh:
The Dragon's Mouth and the Serpent's Mouth are the two ominously named long channels for entry to the island; and deep in the maw of the Dragon's Mouth was the new Spanish settlement of San Joseph, now Port of Spain, under the Governor Antonio de Berreo. He had provided the immediate practical reason for Ralegh's haste, not merely to better his lost fortunes, but also to catch up in the fresh spurt of the race between England and Spain.
Berreo had begun a search for the golden city of El Dorado, whose fame had been so firmly believed and attested by the Indians that few Europeans thought of it as fabulous. It was believed to be far up in the mainland hidden among what The Times, in 1959, called 'the virtually unexplored jungles of the Amazon Basin and the Orinoco ... and the still ill-defined frontiers of Columbia, Venezuela, Brazil and the Guineas.... The unknown reaches of the Orinoco are a glimpse of the beginning of human time.'
The Spaniard Berreo's initial attempt for the Golden City had been disastrously cut short; but he was still determined to find it. Ralegh was determined to find it first. He had sent out a reconnaisance party late in the previous year under his 'most honest and valiant' Captain, Jacob Whiddon. It had never reached the mainland, for some of them were hospitably invited ashore at Trinidad by Berreo, and then murdered in cold blood. As England and Spain were still openly at war, he doubtless felt his treachery a justifiable hint to the English that they were not welcome. Ralegh at once followed his unlucky forerunners. Undeterred by the fact that he had now only one other ship to support his own, he made a surprise attack on San Joseph, and took Berreo prisoner; with the characteristically laconic comment, 'Which had I not done, I should have savoured very much of the Ass.'
But there was no ill feeling or unpleasantness between them: Ralegh treated his prisoner as an honoured guest and wrote charming compliments of him which show his extraordinary power of detachment, in view of Berreo's treatment of Captain Whiddon-and even more inhuman treatment of others, as Ralegh quickly discovered. Yet he describes the suave and cultivated murderer that he had captured as 'a Gent, well descended ... very valiant and liberal ... of great assuredness and of a great heart'; and how he himself entertained him 'according to his estate and worth in all things I could, according to the small means I had'.
They had long and amicable talks as they feasted together on the luscious mangoes and glossy crimson and yellow globes of the juicy fruits that contain the treasured little kernel of the pistachio nut; and the nubbly, crusty little oysters, 'very salt and well-tasted', wrote Ralegh, who described their being plucked off the low-dangling mangrove branches at low tide-just as they are today -- and so was accused later of telling Travellers' Tales-for whoever heard of oysters growing on trees? Berreo told his travellers' tales of the green hell of jungle, monsters, and savages along the Orinoco; and with warm, even passionate feeling, for 'he was stricken with great melancholy and sadness' as he begged his delightful host for his own sake not to risk his life in that horrible wilderness where he himself had so lamentably failed.
And Ralegh, with a tact equally friendly, refrained from assuring his guest that at least he would not assist his own failure by tying up five or six Indian chiefs together and leaving them to rot in a den underground. For this was one of the unpleasant discoveries he had made about his pleasant companion; and he had at once set free the wretched caciques whom he had found 'almost dead with famine and wasted with torments'. Berreo had burned many alive and had caused some torn to pieces by dogs, a livelier form of sport, depicted in early prints of the Spaniards in South America. He might have recognized his mistake, if not his crime, for his cruelty had caused the Indians on the mainland to revolt against him, force him to evacuate Guiana, and so leave it clear of Spanish rule for Ralegh to advance upon it.
Ralegh was quick to improve upon Berreo's methods; and even on those of Christopher Columbus ninety-six years before, the first European Discoverer of the island, who had won a reputation for 'sweetness and benignity' unparalleled by his later countrymen. But his business instincts had been a bit sharp for the natives, who still grumbled over their greatgrandfathers' slow disillusionment after Columbus had struck a good bargain for himself by trading a large number of brass chamber-pots to them as an interesting novelty, whose value had quickly worn off as news, and left the recipients doubtful as to their use. They might indeed have earned their cost and keep as cooking-pots with their additional convenience of a handle, but their intended use as a 'convenience', in a world so warm and wide and indecent, was, so Columbus tells us, 'but coldly met'. His sweetness and benignity to the natives also sounds rather cold and negative; for the chief instance given of it is that he refused to allow his crew, even when hungry, to kill and eat them.
Ralegh's appeal to the Indians was more positive and personal. He gathered all he could of the tribes together, and told them that he had been sent by his Cacique to set them free from the Spaniards, for he was 'the servant of a Queen who was the great Cacique of the North, and a virgin, who had more caciques under her than there were trees in the island'. The metaphor is the earliest instance of his quickness to understand the native mind. Already he saw how impossible it was for them to take in anything of actual numbers; time and space, as well as people, could not be measured, only suggested by some vivid pictorial image.
The wise old Chief Topiawari whom he met later on the Orinoco, and who became Ralegh's true friend, could only explain hard facts by such imagery, which Ralegh delighted to note down for their natural poetry...
So we see with crystal clarity there the English difference: A respect for others, for the individual and for individual liberty that is the very basis of democracy. And that example is not an isolated instance. Reading further on in the same history (p. 123) we find Ralegh's account of the conquest of Cadiz -- undertaken in alliance with a Flemish fleet:
"English sailors were being piped over their ship's side, and on board the enemy's. Like rats the St Philip's crew began to bolt from her on every side. They had run her aground, and fire had broken out. At the peal of a trumpet, the English cut the anchor ropes of all the four great Apostolic galleons; they began to heel over on the mudbank, and from the St Philip there came 'tumbling into the sea heaps of soldiers, so thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack ... some drowned and some sticking in the mud.... The spectacle was very lamentable, for many drowned themselves; many, half burnt, leapt into the water; very many hanging by the ropes' ends by the ships sides, under the water even to the lips; many swimming with grievous wounds, stricken under water and put out of their pain; and withal so huge a fire and such tearing of ordnance in the great Philip and the rest, when the fire came to them as, if any man had a desire to see Hell itself, it was there most lively figured. Ourselves spared the lives of all, after the victory; but the Flemings, who did little or nothing in the fight, used merciless slaughter, till they were by myself, and afterward by my Lord Admiral, beaten off."
Sir Richard Grenville's Revenge was thus revenged, as Ralegh had sworn; but his own account shows little enjoyment in it. Horror and pity seem his strongest feelings at the 'very lamentable spectacle'; and it was his long-boats from the Warspite that were the first to be rowed through the flames and blinding black smoke from the kegs of powder exploding on the ruined galleons, to try and rescue such Spaniards as were yet alive.
Can anyone of English origin not feel pride in that account? English civility and respect for others is very distinctive and goes back a very long way. One is rather reminded of the harrowing stories by Bacque about the way the French starved to death thousands of German prisoners of war immediately after WW2. British forces of course observed the Geneva convention.
Left and Right in Tudor times?
I have already argued at length elsewhere to the effect that a Leftist personality underlies the rhetoric of the Leftist ideologue. I think all history shows that Leftists are basically unhappy people with big ego needs -- needs that make them crave attention, praise and -- ultimately -- power. And along with that goes a hatred of any success, recognition, happiness or power in others. And the Leftist aims to exercise power by taking away the liberties and regulating the lives of ordinary people. But if such a Leftist personality does exist, it should have been around for a long time -- far longer than we have had the term "Leftist" for it. I believe that evidence of such personalities does abound in history and we do see it in the Elizabethan era. Note the following excerpts from a discussion of two of the most powerful politicians in the reign of Elizabeth I -- Sir Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth's Prime Minister -- Robert Cecil:
Cecil's shrinking heart probably allowed him to receive only the unpleasing news of how much he was in Ralegh's debt. 'He worked with a cold fervour for the things of this world,' writes C. V. Wedgwood, 'but he did not love the world at all ... it seemed to him no more than a painful, unrewarding purgatory.'
Ralegh loved the world, and his work in it.
Robert Cecil was Secretary of State as well as Leader of the House of Commons, and made earnest efforts to regulate the private lives of citizens into a neat and tidy pattern. His paternal policy was one that has often since led to disaster. He tried to enforce economy by law; it was 'most necessary' to insist on coarser bread, and thinner beer, and fewer ale-houses, and 'opening hours' for them; they must be closed at least one day a week (as in the modern 'Six Day Licence') and then, so he argued, people would grow more food. Sheep-grazing was also wrong, and must be replaced by crops of hemp and corn; though as he added, 'in these last few wet years', their deaths might as reasonably be blamed on the weather. Cecil's piety failed to convince some of the M.P.s that men should be 'compelled by penalties', as one complained, to grow the regulation amounts of wheat and hemp, etc.
Francis Bacon's outstanding intellect came to Cecil's help with heavily embroidered eloquence. This would be a 'law tending to God's honour'....
By contrast with Bacon's incomprehensible rhetoric, Ralegh's forthright attack on the bill is startling. His pungent rejoinders made short work of the Government's high-flown theories. The practical knowledge he had gained as a child on his father's farm had shown him at first hand how absurd it was to try to legislate for land without experience of it. And there was something at stake more important to him even than the land -- and that was individual liberty. 'I do not like this constraining of men to manure or use their ground at our wills; let every man use it to that which it is most fit for, and use his own discretion.' Let Parliament set corn and hemp at liberty, 'and leave every man free, which is the desire of a true Englishman'.
He won over the whole House. They shouted 'Away with the bill!' and persistently rejected it, though the Government pushed it twice to a division.
Ralegh, that 'liberal-minded independent',' also [opposed] the bills to enforce a right religion. There was one against the Sect of Brownists, whom he had agreed gravely were 'worthy to be rooted out of any commonwealth'. But just how, demanded the uncompromising realist, were they to set about rooting them out? ('I am sorry for it, I believe there be ten or twelve thousand of them in England.') If by banishment, who was to pay their transport, and to where? And who was to maintain their wives and families? And did the House really know what exactly the Brownists were, even after a Committee had been locked in by Cecil to study a book of their Articles of Belief? They should be judged, Ralegh insisted, only by their acts, not by their opinions. Like his Queen, he would not admit to anyone the right to set up 'window to peer into men's souls'.
His loathing of such spiritual tyranny helped to cut out the cruellest measures of repression. It was expressed again, in terms of sheer hard common sense, against the new bill to make church attendance compulsory, and the church-wardens act as informers to the J.P.s. With the brisk logic of mathematics, Ralegh pointed out that if there were only two offenders in each parish, their sum total, together with the church-wardens, would add four hundred and eighty persons to every quartersessions, and 'what great multitudes-what quarrelling and danger may happen, besides giving authority to a mean churchwarden'.
In matters more vital it was Ralegh's voice more than any that persistently championed the poor. He attacked with open scorn the meanness of rich men who called it good policy to squeeze the pockets of the poor and oppress their liberties.
He championed the humble housewife as keenly as he did his sovereign lady, and more dangerously for himself. Robert Cecil spoke in patriotic praise of the news that 'some poor people were selling their pots and pans to pay the subsidy.... Neither pots nor pans, nor dish nor spoon should be spared', he announced unctuously. He was sure it would have an excellent effect on the King of Spain when he heard 'how willing we are to sell all in defence of God's religion', etc. His listeners applauded this noble sentiment. It has a hollow echo coming from a man who had made a large fortune, as Master of the Wards
His complacent eagerness to sacrifice the household goods of poor folk was backed by Bacon. The poor ought to be taxed as heavily as the rich: because, as he quoted in Latin, it was a right and 'sweet course to pull together in an equal yoke'.
This smug hypocrisy brought Ralegh to his feet. 'Call you this an equal yoke, when a poor man pays as much as a rich? His estate may be no better than he is assessed at, while our estates are entered as 30 or 40 pounds in the Queen's books -- not the hundredth part of our wealth!' His outrageous frankness over this unfair advantage given to his own class, shocked his opponents. His final blow demolished them: 'It is neither sweet nor equal.'
(Quoted from p. 136 - 138 of That Great Lucifer: A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin [Bungay, Suffolk: Reprint Society, 1960])
So we see that, even back then, it was the conservative defender of individual liberty (Ralegh) who was -- as conservatives have always claimed -- the true champion and helper of the poor. While the power-mad control freaks such as the scheming Cecil and the intellectual Bacon had no real concern for the poor at all. Nothing has changed.
And in another very modern touch, Queen Elizabeth ended her reign by announcing a big tax cut (by abolishing government-granted monopolies) -- to much popular acclaim (p. 158). Big tax-cutters such as Thatcher and Reagan thus have a most respected and successful predecessor in English history.
The Stuarts
But the Tudors did not last forever and when the Stuarts, with their doctrine of "the divine right of Kings", ignored treasured English liberties and tried to turn the English monarchy into something more like a centralized Oriental despotism, off came the head of the Stuart King.
And note that the attitude of the Scottish Stuarts towards the relationship between the individual and the State differed from traditional English views from the very outset. Note this report of an incident on the initial journey to London of James I:
He ordered a pickpocket to be hanged straight away without trial. The prudish English were too dainty for 'Jedburgh justice', which hanged Border robbers out of hand. They muttered tiresome objections about their Common Law, and Sir John Harington, that privileged wag, proclaimed loudly: 'If the new King hangs a man before he is tried, will he then try a man before he has offended?'
(Quoted from p. 172 of That Great Lucifer: A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin [Bungay, Suffolk: Reprint Society, 1960])
A Conservative Revolution
"Conservatism and tradition rather than innovation is the keynote of the attitude of most of the principal opponents of royal policies in the 1630s and 1640s. The fact that the same is not true of all of them is, of course, important, but not the least significant of the effects of this was to confirm and heighten the conservatism of the majority. From their point of view it was the Crown - influenced by its evil advisers -- which was the innovator"
Robert Ashton on p. 17 of "The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649". (2nd. Ed.; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989
The English parliamentarians who were responsible for beheading King Charles I in 1649 were perfectly articulate about why. They felt that Charles had attempted to destroy the ancient English governmental system or "constitution" and that he had tried to take away important rights and individual liberties that the English had always enjoyed -- liberty from the arbitrary power of Kings, a right to representation in important decisions and a system of counterbalanced and competing powers rather than an all-powerful central government. It is to them that we can look for the first systematic statements of conservative ideals -- ideals that persevere to this day. And they were both conservatives (wishing to conserve traditional rights and arrangements) and revolutionaries!
So right back in the 17th century we had the apparent paradox of "conservatives" (the parliamentary leaders -- later to be referred to as "Whigs") being prepared to undertake most radical change (deposing monarchy) in order to restore treasured traditional rights and liberties and to rein in overweening governmental power. So Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were not at all breakaways from the conservatism of the past. They had very early and even more determined predecessors. Nobody who knew history should have been surprised by the Reagan/Thatcher "revolution".
And it was in deliberate tribute to the parliamentarians of Cromwell's day and their immediate successors that two of the most influential conservative theorists prior to Reagan and Thatcher both described themselves as "Old Whigs" -- Burke (1790) and Hayek (1944). Hayek described Whig ideals as "the only set of ideals that has consistently opposed all arbitrary power" (Hayek, 1960).
Edmund Burke and attitude to change
And it is the conservative nature of the English revolution that critics of Edmund Burke tend to overlook. Burke's (1790) fundamental criticism of the French revolution was to contrast it with what he saw as the slow, evolutionary and organic development of the English "constitution" or governmental system. He correctly foresaw that the opposite French procedure of wanting to reinvent everything overnight must lead to a vicious tyranny. Perhaps the major objection to Burke, however, is that he was making it all up. England itself had had its own revolution not much more than 100 years before (Cromwell dissolved the "Rump" parliament in 1653 and the Bastille fell in 1789) so where was the gradual evolution in that?
The important point in answer is that the English revolution, far from aiming to reinvent everything, aimed simply to restore historic and traditional liberties against the encroachment of a non-English (Scottish) tyrant. There are revolutions and there are revolutions -- as any American ought to know. What the revolution stands for and aims at matters. Cromwell himself became a mild tyrant for a short while of course but he was merely one part of the English revolution (and certainly not its initiator) and when he died traditional English governmental arrangements were soon restored.
But the English tradition, as Burke rightly saw, has never seen liberty as the sole good. Total liberty would mean total chaos, so England has always balanced liberty against the need for order and it saw government as having a crucial role both in preserving that order and in guaranteeing liberty. So conservatism is not and never has been libertarianism or anarchism. And is precisely because the balance between liberty and order is difficult to strike that Burke and other conservatives have always seen a need to hasten slowly with social change. There are always many who want to suppress the liberties of the people and any new order can easily leave liberty out in the cold -- as happened in 18th century France and as happened so often in the 20th century.
And, in case anyone is unaware of it, Burke supported the American revolution as much as he opposed the French one. Why? As Kelley Ross summarizes it: "The difference, as it happened, between the two revolutions was that the American Revolution was based on the demand for rights that had been already recognized in English law, while the French revolution had turned into an exercise in rationalistic and a priori legislation of rights that had never existed in France." Burke too was a supporter of conservative revolution.
So to say that Burke and those like him reflexively oppose ALL change is nothing more than lying Leftist propaganda. It is often noted (e.g. by Owen Harries) that Burke said: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." As Harries goes on to say, "so the issue was not reform versus no reform; it was between the view that reform was a simple matter that could be engaged in sweepingly and the view that it required prudence and was best approached incrementally". So conservatives have NEVER opposed change per se and it is little more than a calumny to say that they do. A careful and cautious approach to change certainly characterizes conservatives but opposition to change does not.
And, in case it needs stating, Burke saw the useful role of government as being very limited. As he said: "It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good". (See Burke, 1907).
Kelley Ross criticizes both Burke and the sort of "Germanic origin" argument advanced here from a "Frisian" philosophical standpoint. The critique seems to depend however on an acceptance of the old Humean is/ought disjunction -- a view which assigns a rather mystical status to "ought" statements. Since I regard "ought" statements as simply a variety of "is" (empirical) statements, I don't think such objections need detain us. See also here for more on that.
I will return to Burke's thinking on these matters a little later below.
Dicey on English and continental law
In case others do not find history as interesting and instructive as I do, I think I should at this stage skip forward to late 20th century politics (though, like Macarthur, I shall return) but before I do so, I think I should hand over to A.V. Dicey to tell us about traditional English respect for individual liberty and the concomitant restrictions on the power of the State. Dicey wrote in the late 19th century long before the deliberate deceptions and distortions of political correctness and is of course one of Britain's greatest legal historians. The quote is from The Law Of The Constitution, Third Edition, 1889, pp. 176-179:
"Modern Englishmen may at first feel some surprise that the "rule of law" (in the sense in which we are now using the term) should be considered as in any way a peculiarity of English institutions, since, at the present day, it may seem to be not so much the property of any one nation as a trait common to every civilized and orderly state. Yet, even if we confine our observation to the existing condition of Europe, we shall soon be convinced that the " rule of law" even in this narrow sense is peculiar to England, or to those countries which, like the United States of America, have inherited English traditions. In every continental community the executive exercises far wider discretionary authority in the matter of arrest, of temporary imprisonment, of expulsion from the territory, and the like, than is either legally claimed or in fact exerted by the government in England; and recent events in Switzerland, which by the way strikingly confirm De Tocqueville's judgment of the national character, remind us that wherever there is discretion there is room for arbitrariness, and that in a republic no less than under a monarchy discretionary authority on the part of the government means insecurity for legal freedom on the part of subjects.
If however we confined our observation to the Europe of the year 1889, we might well say that in most European countries the rule of law is now nearly as well established as in England, and that private individuals at any rate who do not meddle in politics have little to fear, as long as they keep the law, either from the Government or from any one else; and we might therefore feel some difficulty in understanding how it ever happened that to foreigners the absence of arbitrary power on the part of the Crown, of the executive, and of every other authority in England, has always seemed a striking feature, we might almost my the essential characteristic, of the English constitution.
Our perplexity is entirely removed by carrying back our minds to the time when the English constitution began to be criticised and admired by foreign thinkers. During the eighteenth century many of the continental governments were far from oppressive, but there was no continental country where men were secure from arbitrary power. The singularity of England was not so much the goodness or the leniency as the legality of the English system of government. When Voltaire came to England -- and Voltaire represented the feeling of his age -- his predominant sentiment clearly was that he had passed out of the realm of despotism to a land where the laws might be harsh, but where men were ruled by law and not by caprice. He had good reason to know the difference.
In 1717 Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for a poem which he had not written, of which he did not know the author, and with the sentiment of which he did not agree. What adds to the oddity, in English eyes, of the whole transaction is that the Regent treated the affair as a sort of joke, and, so to speak, "chaffed" the supposed author of the satire "I have seen" on being about to pay a visit to a prison which he "had not seen". In 1725 Voltaire, then the literary hero of his country, was lured off from the table of a Duke, was thrashed by lackeys in the presence of their noble master, was unable to obtain either legal or honourable redress; and because he complained of this outrage, paid a second visit to the Bastille. This indeed was the last time in which he was lodged within the walls of a French gaol, but his whole life was a series of contests with arbitrary power, and nothing but his fame, his deftness, his infinite resource, and ultimately his wealth, saved him from penalties far more severe than temporary imprisonment. Moreover, the price at which Voltaire saved his property and his life was, after all, exile from France. Whoever wants to see how exceptional a phenomenon was that supremacy of law which existed in England during the eighteenth century should read such a book as Morley's Life of Diderot. The effort, lasting for twenty-two years, to get the Encyclopedie published was a struggle on the part of all the distinguished literary men in France to obtain utterance for their thoughts. It is hard to say whether the difficulties or the success of the content bear the strongest witness to the wayward arbitrariness of the French government.
Royal lawlessness was not peculiar to specially detestable monarchs such as Louis the Fifteenth. It was inherent in the French system of administration. An idea prevails that Louis the Sixteenth at least was not an arbitrary, as he assuredly was not a cruel ruler. But it in an error to suppose that up to 1789 anything like the supremacy of law existed under the French monarchy. The folly, the grievances and the mystery of the Chevalier D' Eon made as much noise little more than a century ago as the imposture of the Claimant in our own day. The memory of these things is not in itself worth reviving. What does deserve to be kept in remembrance is that in 1778, in the days of Johnson, of Adam Smith, of Gibbon, of Cowper, of Burke and of Mansfield, during the continuance of the American war and within eleven years of the assembling of the States General, a brave officer and a distinguished diplomatist could for some offence still unknown, without trial and without conviction, be condemned to undergo a penance and disgrace which could hardly be rivalled by the fanciful caprice of the torments inflicted by Oriental despotism. Nor let it be imagined that during the latter part of the eighteenth century the government of France was more arbitrary than that of other countries. To entertain such a supposition is to misconceive utterly the condition of the continent. In France, law and public opinion went for a great deal more than in Spain, the petty States of Italy, or the principalities of Germany.
20th Century politics
And it is not only conservative theorists and historians such as Burke and Dicey who see overweening government power as the bete noir. Even practical conservative politicians do. Note this excellent statement of the conservative mission from one of America's most notable conservative politicians in the second half of the 20th century:
"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican president will do with the help of a Republican Congress.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to restore a clear understanding of the tyranny of man over man in the world at large. It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the illusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don't rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression - and this is hogwash.
And who said that? It is from the acceptance speech by Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention which nominated him as its candidate for President. Some people with short memories trace GOP conservatism only as far back as Ronald Reagan but Goldwater for one shows that Reagan was in fact building on a long tradition of GOP conservatism. Another good Goldwater quote:
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden... And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' interests, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
So, for over three centuries, the central values of conservatism -- at least in the English-speaking world -- have remained the same. Just to reinforce the point, note this summary from a speechwriter for one Richard Milhous Nixon:
Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states' rights, human rights, small government, and a strong national defense, and leave it to the "party of Maddox, Mahoney, and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice."
The words of another well-known American conservative, Patrick Buchanan. Mahoney and Wallace were of course Southern Democrats. And Nixon subsequently swept the polls for the Republicans with a 49 State landslide. His conservative policies were popular even if his subsequent Machiavellianism was not.
And Nixon in fact was a rather good example of how conservatives are NOT automatically in favour of the status quo but DO promote individual liberty where they think they reasonably can --- as Gary North points out. He notes that Nixon abolished conscription and instituted an all volunteer army DESPITE conscription being a long established policy, one that had been in place since FDR. And Nixon did it during a war and against considerable opposition from the military! If conservatives are supposed to support the status quo, nobody told Nixon.
And another old warrior of American conservatism, W.F. Buckley says: "The conservative instinctively rejects collectivization": A pretty useful short definition.
And the most distinguished 20th century Australian conservative surely deserves at least a brief mention. Sir Robert Menzies was Australia's longest serving Prime Minister (in the 1950s and 60s) and is noted for how few his "initiatives" were over all that time -- a truly heroic achievement for any politician, given the temptations to meddle and the pressures to "do something" that come at governments from all sides. Here is one excerpt from his thinking:
"We are told today that the parliamentary system is antiquated, that it is slow, inefficient, illogical, emotional. In the presence of each charge, it may admit to some degree of guilt. But with all its faults, it retains a great virtue, alas! in these days, a rare virtue. Its virtue is that it is the one system yet devised which ensures the liberty of the subject by promoting the rule of law which subjects themselves make, and to which everyone, Prime Minister or tramp, must render allegiance. We British people still believe that men are born free, and that the function of government is to limit that freedom only by the consent of the governed."
Once again we see the emphasis on the primacy of individual freedom. And another instance of government inactivity being both beneficial and difficult to do is the case of colonial Hong Kong -- as we read here.
The Gipper
An account of the nature of conservatism can hardly give enough attention to the most loved conservative of the 20th century -- and arguably the most loved conservative of all time: Ronald Reagan. Fortunately, The Gipper (as he was affectionately known from one of his heroic roles when he was a movie actor) makes the task easy. No real-life politician could have been clearer, more consistent or more emphatic about what he stood for than the Great Communicator. Very little more is needed than simply quoting him. Let's start with just two small excerpts from the many cutting points he made in his famous 1964 speech in support of Barry Goldwater:
"And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves....
Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of it, shouldn't we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing? But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater, the program grows greater...."
And from a 1975 interview:
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals-if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
Now, I can't say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals...
So, I think the government has legitimate functions. But I also think our greatest threat today comes from government's involvement in things that are not government's proper province. And in those things government has a magnificent record of failure.
Q: Are there any particular books or authors or economists that have been influential in terms of your intellectual development?
REAGAN: Oh, it would be hard for me to pinpoint anything in that category. I'm an inveterate reader. Bastiat and von Mises, and Hayek and Hazlitt-I'm one for the classical economists...."
And from his 1984 speech accepting the Republican Presidential nomination:
Isn't our choice really not one of left or right, but of up or down? Down through the welfare state to statism, to more and more government largesse accompanied always by more government authority, less individual liberty and, ultimately, totalitarianism, always advanced as for our own good. The alternative is the dream conceived by our Founding Fathers, up to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society. We don't celebrate dependence day on the Fourth of July. We celebrate Independence Day.
Individual liberty versus government authority was from the beginning clearly the conservative message to the great conservative communicator. And he had the same message in his farewell speech as President. He makes it clear there that there is just ONE thing he stood for above all: Individual liberty. Some excerpts:
"And in all of that time I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation - from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.... Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which "We the people" tell the government what it is allowed to do. "We the people" are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years.... I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.... We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection".
It is sometimes held that Reagan transformed American conservatism but we see that Reagan himself says that he simply reasserted America's founding values -- values that the early Americans inherited from their English past.
And an integral part of those values was trust in the wisdom of the ordinary people as a whole -- something Reagan was famous for. He constantly said that the great achievements of his era were not his but those of the American people as a whole. Trust in ordinary people and a belief in giving them large liberties are integrally related. And that trust has been rather remarkably vindicated in recent research summarized in a book on the wisdom of crowds and reviewed here. The book shows that, time and time again, the wisdom of ordinary people beats that of any elite or any individual. Excerpt:
"James Surowiecki is fascinated by prediction markets. In his opinion, they demonstrate that crowds are often wise. He rejects the widespread view that groups of ordinary people are usually wrong--and that we do better to ignore them and follow experts instead. Even when individuals blunder, he believes, groups can excel: "Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." This is so even when "most of the people within the group are not especially well-informed or rational.""
Conservatives from Burke through Disraeli and Hayek to Reagan have of course always trusted the people as a whole to come up with better decisions than elites do. Burke looked to the wisdom of the people of both the past and present combined; Disraeli saw the ordinary people of England as "angels in marble" and Hayek saw the information available to the population as a whole as infinitely superior to any other information source.
And we all know that, despite great political difficulties and the inevitable compromises that practical politics require, Reagan managed to translate his words into deeds time and time again. So just one small example of that may suffice. As Thomas Sowell put it:
"During the gasoline shortage that began in 1979, motorists were often waiting in long lines of cars at filling stations -- sometimes for hours -- in hopes of reaching the pump before the gas ran out. The ways that Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan proposed to deal with this situation speaks volumes about the difference between the left and the right.
Senator Kennedy said: "We must adopt a system of gasoline rationing without delay," in "a way that demands a fair sacrifice from all Americans."
Ronald Reagan said that we must get rid of price controls on petroleum, so that there won't be a shortage in the first place. One of his first acts after becoming president was to end federal price controls. Lines at filling stations disappeared. Despite angry outcries from liberals that gas prices would skyrocket as Big Oil "gouged" the public, in reality prices came down within months and continued falling for years".
Critiques of Reagan:
British blogger Oliver Kamm is a moderate Leftist who supported the Iraq war -- much like his Prime Minister. In his postings of 7th & 8th June, 2004, he has an interesting survey of the Leftist claim that Ronald Reagan turned into a peacenik in the latter part of his Presidency. The claim is not as ridiculous as it seems. Reagan definitely did have the very idealistic aim of de-nuclearizing the world. And he went close to achieving it. He and Gorbachev at Reykjavik actually agreed to scrap all nuclear weapons on both sides. It was only Reagan's refusal to scrap his missile defence program that scuppered the agreement. And it may also be noted that Reagan was no warmonger. The overseas military operations he initiated were tiny compared to what his three successors as President have done and tiny compared to the great but fumbled intervention in Vietnam. Reagan's concentration was on building up American strength at home rather than on intervening abroad.
Like various others in that small subsection of the Left which takes a genuine interest in reality, Kamm takes all this as evidence that Reagan was as much a Leftist as a Rightist: "Reagan's political skills encompassed being able to convince American conservatives that he was one of them; yet he was not. Indeed on the nuclear issue - the one above all on which European protestors converged to denounce him - he was far the most left-wing President ever to hold office". There is a minimum of five things wrong with that claim:
1). Against furious Leftist opposition, Reagan already had well underway by the time of Reyjavik a huge buildup of American CONVENTIONAL forces -- so that deterrence by conventional strength was at least potentially available to replace nuclear deterrence. And by the time any anti-nuclear agreement became effective there would of course also be time even for Western Europe to begin pulling its weight in conventional defence -- a prospect which Europe, particularly Mrs Thatcher, resisted vigorously, of course.
2). The claim also shows very little knowledge of conservatism, and of American conservatism in particular. Reagan's "America first" strategy is in fact a good example of the isolationism that ruled among American conservatives right up until Sept. 11, 2001. American conservatives have always wanted to let the rest of the world to go to hell in its own way and it was DEMOCRAT presidents that got America into both world wars, Korea and Vietnam. America normally has to be under serious threat of some kind for American conservatives to take any notice of the rest of the world at all. Even the 1898 ouster of the pathetic Spanish presence in Cuba had to be preceded by a Spanish "attack" on the battleship Maine. So it was only Saddam's serious threat to oil supplies that got George Bush Senior into the first Gulf war and even then he pulled out as soon as the threat was removed. It was only when 9/11 showed beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt that America was under serious and lasting threat from implacable Islamic hatred that George Bush II began his interventions in the Islamic world.
3). The claim that Reagan's antinuclear stance made him a Leftist also appears to stem from the common Leftist conceit that only the Left are "antiwar" or "antinuclear". So if Reagan was antinuclear he must have been a Leftist. That is a total misrepresentation of conservatism and really is the most offensive arrogance and aspersion on conservatives. No person in his right mind, Left or Right, wants war, particularly a nuclear war. The only difference between Leftists and Rightists over the issue was the means adopted to avoid war. Conservatives had the guts to believe that there was some alternative to surrendering to tyranny and undertook the arduous task of deterring war through strength -- which in the end brought about the marvellous achievement for all humanity of destroying the threat of nuclear world-war and destroying the world's most threatening tyranny as well. The only idea that Leftists had in the matter was surrender -- or "unilateral disarmament", as they called it. They probably rather fancied themselves as Soviet Commissars in a Communist State anyway.
4). Reagan's refusal at Reyjavik to abandon missile defence is a perfect example of conservatism. Whatever else it may be, conservatism from Burke onwards has been cautious and Reagan's desire to have a defence in case nuclear disarmament did not completely succeed was clearly caution -- and caution that he rigorously insisted on above all else. There was a far cry from the unilateral disarmament nonsense that the peaceniks of the Left were always preaching at that time. As always, of course, Reagan himself summed it up best in his well-known maxim: "Trust but verify". There was idealism there indeed: Very high ideals. But it was never allowed to overcome good conservative caution.
5). In the end, however, Kamm does arrive at an essential insight: "My own interpretation of this idiosyncratic record is that, having established his anti-Communist credentials, Reagan's 'soft diplomacy' approach worked well at exactly the time it was needed. It was puzzling, but effective, and probably no one else could have done it". In other words, Reagan was no rigid ideologue. Ideals are not ideology. Ideology and grand theories are for Leftists. Conservatives are pragmatic and flexible. Conservatives have ideals but in pursuing those ideals they go by what works. And our Ron showed that flexibility and pragmatism to brilliant effect.
Mikhail Gorbachev himself noted Reagan's principled pragmatism. He commented in a 2004 New York Times article: "Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation" (See also here).
It is interesting that Kesler's survey of American conservatism in the 20th century also identifies American conservatives generally as being overwhelmingly and repeatedly pragmatic and little concerned with or unified by broad theoretical systems -- though Kesler, as a believer in natural-law morality, deplores that. Excerpts:
"it is possible to have conservatives without having a unified conservative movement. Indeed, this was the situation in America before the mid-1950s. If it is not quite the plight of conservatives today, it may soon be again... Meyer's fusionism thus missed many of the hard questions about morality and politics.... The overwhelming practical imperative was to resist liberalism at home and defeat Communism abroad, and it would have been wrong to try to insist on other principles or conditions for such a necessary alliance... More and more, conservatism lacks a common message or focus, and the education it offers citizens and politicians is splintered into myriad discussions of specific policies."
The word "pragmatic" however, is a rather broad term and it could be held to imply a total lack of principles. I think that Reagan himself is the best demonstration that that is not so. His was the most principled pragmatism one could imagine. Everything he did was calculated to get the best possible deal for the individual. His goals and principles could not have been clearer or more firmly-founded. And who would deny that getting both the USA and the USSR to scrap all nuclear weapons would have been a tremendous victory for the individual? As a true conservative, Reagan had guiding values but he was very flexible about the means of attaining them. Conservatives go by what works but they go by what works in the service of the individual and individual liberties.
Another point I explore below is that the association between love of individual liberty and pragmatism is no accident. The two attitudes are in fact related.
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Another lame put-down of Reagan that sometimes comes from the Left (e.g. Yglesias) says that Reagan in fact showed the impossibility of the conservative agenda by failing to cut the overall size of government: "Reagan was supposed to be the man who saved conservatism, but instead he seems to have buried it". What that failure to cut in fact shows, of course is that Reagan couldn't do everything by himself. He had to get what he could from Congress. He got an amazing amount in some ways and very little in others. No matter which party is nominally in control of Congress, it is an essentially corrupt body that thrives on the art of the deal -- and the loser in every deal is the taxpayer. It is only Congress that can cut back the size of government and there is no sign that it will. And, like Reagan, George W. Bush also had bigger (foreign) fish to fry rather than wasting time on trying to make Congress do something that is against its fundamental nature. U.S. Congressmen are very good at keeping their jobs and they largely do it by robbing Peter (the taxpayer) to pay Paul (their supporter groups) and that is not going to change any time soon. As Reagan himself pointed out in 1964, long before he came to power:
"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth".
Reagan and Salisbury
A more substantial criticism of Reagan is that he was really too radical to be a true conservative. He was really a libertarian masquerading as a conservative. And as we have seen, Reagan was not at all shy of the libertarian label. And Reagan does of course stand in stark contrast to the pussyfooting that has always been too common among conservative politicians. Conservative moderation and search for compromise can too often lead to an appparent complete lack of principles. But the principles are there nonetheless and Reagan was in fact not at all outside the tradition of other great conservative leaders. Long before the word "libertarian" was invented, one of the most articulate spokesmen of such views was in fact Lord Salisbury -- one of Imperial Britain's most distinguished Conservative Prime Ministers, who held office in the closing years of the 19th century. To take just one tiny excerpt of what could be said about Salisbury:
"By a free country," he told the Kingston and District Working Men's Conservative Association in June 1883, "I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like." His attitude towards freedom of contract was fundamentalist: "When it is a question of what men should commercially gain or lose by a bargain, Parliament had better let grown-up men settle with each other their own bargains," he pronounced in Edinburgh in November 1882, adding that although the Whitehall civil servant generally believed "he himself is the best person to decide", he was usually wrong, and over-centralisation of power was inimical to liberty. "You can no more act against the operation of great economic laws than you can act against the laws of the weather", was his laissez-faire philosophy, believing that "all Parliament can really do is to free the energies and support the efforts of an intelligent and industrious people".
I think that speaks for itself. More here
A little-known wartime episode
And, in his respect for individual liberties, Salisbury was not without American counterparts prior to Reagan. Democrat hero FDR imprisoned almost all people of Japanese descent living in the USA after the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Empire of Japan. This totally Fascistic contempt for individual liberties is well-known and fortunately still attracts some controversy. But there was little opposition to it at the time. "Progressive" thinking was very dominant in American politics in the first half of the 20th. century. One State governor salvages some self-respect for America over it, however: Colorado governor Carr:
"On Feb. 19, 1942, then-Gov. Carr was fuming. He yelled at his staff even though they were not the object of his scorn, but since he did not have direct access to the White House and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they'd have to do. Clutching Executive Order 9066 in his hand, he paced and shouted, "What kind of a man would put this out?"Governor Carr was a Republican.
The president's order allowed for the de facto declaration of martial law on the West Coast with one not-so-veiled purpose: to remove anyone of Japanese descent. It was soon after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed thousands of Americans. The Japanese were called "yellow devils" on the front page of papers like The Denver Post. People clamored for them to be locked up, sent to work camps, or - in the words of one Colorado farmer - "just killed." No one distinguished between non-citizen and citizen. No one talked about constitutional rights. No one except for Ralph Carr.
"Now, that's wrong," Carr told his staff. "Some of these Japanese are citizens of the United States. They're American citizens." And yet, nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them American citizens, would spend the war years in internment camps, including Camp Amache, located near Granada in southeast Colorado. Barbed wire lined their boundaries and military police guarded their exits.
Carr would share his message with Colorado. He said we must protect the Constitution's principles for "every man or we shall not have it to protect any man." Further, he said, if we imprison American citizens without evidence or trial, what's to say six months from now, we wouldn't follow them into that same prison without evidence or trial? The Constitution, he said, starts with, " 'We the people of the United States.' It doesn't say, 'We the people, who are descendants of the English or the Scandinavians or the French.'"
George W. Bush: Conservatism as balance
"It is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work -- work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it." -- Ronald ReaganThe above Reagan quote would seem to summarize the thinking of President George W. Bush rather well.
Bush is in my view primarily a Christian gentleman rather than a conservative but there are nonetheless some ways in which he is conservative. And there is of course a convergence in thinking between conservatism and at least some streams of Christianity which leads conservatism and Christianity to similar conclusions. We see something of that in the way George Bush explains his foreign policy stance:
"The other debate is whether or not it is a hopeless venture to encourage the spread of liberty. Most of you all around this table are much better historians than I am. And people have said, you know, this is Wilsonian, it's hopelessly idealistic. One, it is idealistic, to this extent: It's idealistic to believe people long to be free. And nothing will change my belief. I come at it many different ways. Really not primarily from a political science perspective, frankly; it's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist.So Bush explains his classically conservative love of individual liberty in Christian terms (though wishing to expand liberty abroad by force of arms is of course another matter that both Christians and conservatives would -- and do -- argue over). So we might say that Bush is conservative BECAUSE of his particular Christian beliefs. Such a linking is of course a common one -- particularly in the USA. That there are Leftist versions of Christianity (as in "liberation theology") must however also be noted. When Bush came to power in the year 2000, however, it was domestic rather than foreign policy issues that were salient so it is at those issues that we must primarily look to find conservative continuities.
Virtually anybody who has had any contact with any government agency knows how inefficient, rigid and unresponsive such agencies are. So selling government power is a hard sell. Normally, therefore, Leftists can justify their love of government power only by claiming that government powers are needed for "compassionate" ends -- to provide charity or protection to those in dire need of it. So in modern political discourse "compassion" has come to be identified with government activism -- even if the effects of government activism are often far from compassionate in any comprehensive evaluation. The idea that large-scale compassionate results can be achieved by non-government or minimal government means is generally a complex one so the much more simplistic "get the government to pass a law" has wide appeal and wins lots of votes.
So when in his initial Presidential campaign George W. Bush claimed to be a "compassionate conservative", it was clear that he was claiming to be sympathetic to government provision of welfare. And he was true to his word by undertaking a major expansion of government welfare (the prescription drug benefit for the elderly) when he came into office. Another way in which he was clearly "compassionate" was one not widely expected: His championship of a sweeping amnesty for illegal immigrants. That put him offside with most American conservatives (big business excepted) but was well explicable by his priorities being basically Christian. And it did tend to show that his compassion was always genuine rather than politically expedient (given the unpopularity of his wishes in the matter). His adoption of some big government remedies for perceived problems was then consistent with him putting Christian compassion first.
But how can he be pro-government and also a conservative? Are not conservatives the advocates of minimal government? In answering that, it is important to note WHY conservatives tend to be anti-government: Because they see government power as restrictive of individual liberties. From Disraeli and Bismarck on (see below), however, there have always been some conservatives who have held that there are ways in which government power can EXTEND individual liberties -- in Disraeli's case by freeing workers from oppressive conditions in the working place and in Bismarck's case by freeing the sick and old from the penury that sometimes accompanies age and sickness. And there is no conservative PRINCIPLE infringed by such views. Unlike anarchists on the Left and extreme libertarians on the Right, conservatives have always accepted the need for SOME government power. Just how much is the issue. Conservatives have always undertaken the hard yards of making complex rather than simplistic decisions. They make the fine distinctions that are needed to achieve a balance between "too much" and "not enough". They are nervous of slippery slopes but in the end often decide that they can enter such slippery slopes without falling down them. And George Bush is clearly one of those.
Conservatives who do see extensions of government activity as justified, however, can offer very little PHILOSOPHICAL distinctiveness between themselves and Leftists. The devil, as always, is in the details. So George Bush is a good exemplar of the important fact that conservatives seek a balance rather than adopting extreme ideological positions. That said, however, it is clear that the balance he arrived at is a rather extreme position on the broad spectrum of conservative thinking. He moved as far to the political centre as he could without sacrificing basic conservative values. So at this point we need to look briefly at how Bush actually described his thinking. Two brief quotes:
From February, 2004: "The American people will decide between two visions of government: a government that encourages ownership and opportunity and responsibility, or a government that takes your money and makes your choices,"
So he could hardly have been clearer there that it was not government per se that he opposed but rather the type of government -- tyrannical government versus government that was respectful of the individual. Who could deny the importance of such a difference? Another quote:
"We believe in open societies ordered by moral conviction. We believe in private markets humanized by compassionate government. We believe in economies that reward effort, communities that protect the weak and the duty of nations to respect the dignity and the rights of all.... We value our own civil rights, so we stand for the human rights of others. We affirm the God-given dignity of every person"
So in good conservative tradition, Bush did gave pride of place to the rights, liberties and dignity of the individual in defining what he stood for there (in speaking to a distinguished British audience at Whitehall Palace in London on November 19th, 2003). The full text of the speech here or here spells out that committment.
But his 2005 inauguration address shows best how Bush belongs in the conservative tradition. It is literally suffused with the theme of how basic and important individual liberty is. A few excerpts:
"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth....
The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause....
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.
So the long conservative preoccupation with individual liberty is as central as ever. Critics can and do dismiss advocacy of liberty by rightly observing that there is no such thing as absolute liberty. Liberty of one kind implies constraint of another kind. My liberty to enjoy my life constrains your liberty to murder me, for instance. Such dilemmas can generate much windy discussion among theorists but for conservatives theories are unimpressive. They look instead to tradition and experience to decide just which freedoms are practicable, beneficial and widely desired and supported. They decide what mix of freedoms to support by reference to the laboratory of history. And in the full version of the speech excerpted above President Bush does just that -- turning to American traditions and history to both define and justify the sort of freedom he is advocating.
We see again however that conservatism is NOT libertarianism or anarchism. President Bush has spelt out very clearly that he, like all conservatives before him, DOES see a role for government, but a carefully specified one. The 2003 speech quoted in fact exemplifies how conservatives seek a balance between the role of government on the one hand and a great respect for the individual and individual rights and freedoms on the other hand. It's not simple, it never has been, and conservatives know that striking that balance will always be a difficult problem with no cut-and-dried or permanent solutions -- which is why conservatives have always scorned the dogmatic slogans and simplistic recipes of the Left. To conservatives the individual is what matters and the State is merely a necessary instrument. To the Leftist only grand plans, theories, power and collectivities matter and steamrollering the individual is no problem at all -- as Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and the great legion of Leftist mass-murderers worldwide attest.
And, as mentioned, that conception of conservatism shows in Bush's policies too. Many conservatives were totally appalled at the way he expanded the size of the U.S. government -- first with post 9/11 security measures and then with the prescription drug benefit for seniors. Where did the Reagan cutback mentality that launched America's long economic boom go?
A much-noted NYT article by David Brooks (also reproduced here) has part of the answer to that, however. One excerpt:
"Last week the GOP behaved as a majority party in full. The Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance. They used their control of the federal budget to create a new entitlement, to woo new allies and service a key constituency group, the elderly.... Minority parties are pure but defeated; governing parties are impure but victorious. The Republicans are now in the habit of winning, and are on permanent offense on all fronts. They offer tax cuts to stimulate the economy and please business. They nominate conservative judges to advance conservative social reform and satisfy religious conservatives."
And as Fred Barnes said:
"The essence of Mr. Bush's big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he's willing to broaden programs and increase spending.... When I coined the phrase "big government conservative" years ago, I had certain traits in mind. Mr. Bush has all of them. First, he's realistic. He understands why Mr. Reagan failed to reduce the size of the federal government and why Newt Gingrich and the GOP revolutionaries failed as well. The reason: People like big government so long as it's not a huge drag on the economy. So Mr. Bush abandoned the all-but-hopeless fight that Mr. Reagan and conservatives on Capitol Hill had waged to jettison the Department of Education. Instead, he's opted to infuse the department with conservative goals.... A second trait is a programmatic bent. Big government conservatives prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive."
But the Brooks/Barnes points do need to be supplemented again by an awareness that, from Edmund Burke onwards, conservatives have ALWAYS seen some role for government. And protecting the country from outside enemies is absolutely one of those proper roles of government. Outside the anarcho-capitalist camp, even most libertarians would agree with that one. So George W. Bush's post 9/11 security buildup is a very proper conservative thing to do, even if -- as one expects from a government activity -- its execution is hamfisted.
And, despite America's traditional political policy of isolationism, the Afghanistan/Iraq interventions fits in well with the psychology of conservatism -- discussed at more length a little later in this paper. Whatever else one may say about conservatives they have always been strongly motivated by caution -- most notably by caution about sweeping change to society's existing arrangements -- but caution above all. And given the terrible disasters that Islamic terrorists are now known to be capable of inflicting on America, it is surely the height of caution to go to the breeding ground of the terrorists and try to root out both the terrorists and those who aid and abet them. Prevention is better than cure.
And, as Brooks pointed out, the prescription drug benefit is well targeted too. Older people are one of the major conservative groupings in society. Age and experience has taught them caution. So if a political party leaves it to its opposition to woo away its own support base, it is moronic indeed. That they are the realists is another historic claim of conservatives and the political reality is that if the GOP had not supported the prescription drug push, it would have just have sent a big slice of elderly GOP voters off to vote for the Democrats instead. It may be worth noting that Australia's conservative government was at the same time in the midst of expanding its Medicare expenditures too.
So, much as many conservatives regret the Bush-era expansion of government, it may be the price one had to pay for George W. Bush's more active and realistic approach to protecting American security against the Islamic threat. With the difficult threat from abroad to cope with, Bush had no political capital left with which to take on the big-spending ways of Congress. His only option was to make the existing system work for him rather than against him. If Al Gore had been in charge, the U.S. would probably still have got the prescription drug benefit but with United Nations resolutions being the only measures taken to counter the Islamic threat.
And Bush's mention in his speech of moral convictions contrasts sharply, of course, with the "postmodern" Leftist mockery of all morality, tradition and guiding values. I am reminded in that connection of one of Stalin's famous sayings when someone mentioned the Vatican's opposition to him. As a good Leftist, Stalin's answer was of course in terms of power rather than in terms of any principles or morality. He said: "And how many divisions does the Pope have?". The Pope of course had no army at all, only Christian morality and values. But who had the last laugh? Stalin's Soviet creation ended up, as Ronald Reagan predicted, on the ash heap of history and it was a Polish Pope and his Catholic flock in Poland who were instrumental in finally pushing over that tottering and rotten edifice. And the authority of the Pope and the life of his church still continue worldwide. Morality trumped brute force. The Leftist contempt for moral values serves no-one well -- not even Leftists themselves. I treat the Leftist approach to morality at greater length elsewhere
The Leftist approach (or non-approach) to morality did of course handicap them considerably in the 2004 U.S. election campaign. Exit polls (which do of course need to be treated with caution) showed moral issues as a big concern for large numbers of voters and Bush was very clear in aligning himself with a Christian view of morality -- something that gave him an obvious advantage in as deeply a Christian country as the United States. Bush's formulation of his views on abortion (from one of the 2004 Presidential debates) is very instructive:
" I think it's important to promote a culture of life. I think a hospitable society is a society where every being counts and every person matters. I believe the ideal world is one in which every child is protected in law and welcomed to life.
I understand there's great differences on this issue of abortion. But I believe reasonable people can come together and put good law in place that will help reduce the number of abortions.
Take, for example, the ban on partial-birth abortion. It's a brutal practice. People from both political parties came together in the halls on Congress and voted overwhelmingly to ban that practice. Made a lot of sense. My opponent out - in that he's out of the mainstream, voted against that law.
What I'm saying is that as we promote life and promote a culture of life, surely there are ways we can work together to reduce the number of abortions. Continue to promote adoption laws - that's a great alternative to abortion. Continue to fund and promote maternity group homes. I will continue to promote abstinence programs".
Despite much Leftist frothing at the mouth over the "extremism" of Bush's moral and religious views, what we note above is in fact a surprisingly libertarian approach to the abortion conundrum. He starts out rooting his opposition to abortion in that great intersection between Protestant/Christian and conservative/libertarian views: Respect for the individual and the rights and liberties of the individual. And precisely because he sees that principle as axiomatic, he does not go on to advocate a dogmatic policy of coercion or total prohibition but rather a policy of seeking voluntary ways of just REDUCING the number of abortions -- very much the sort of policy that I myself have advocated. So Bush was preaching a synthesis that was both classically conservative and yet also very supportive of Christian values -- with their view of all human life as the work and gift of God. It's the sort of synthesis that might have served a clever politician of the Left well in a religious country but it was the "dumb" George Bush who actually put it forward and won much kudos among Christians in doing so.
Bush, then, was undoubtedly a good conservative in his thinking but his judgment of what he needed to do to gain and retain power meant that his actual policies were often only slightly to the Right of centre.
Those who claim that the Bush policies were a large divergence from Reagan conservatism have a fairly good rebuttal here, however. Excerpts:
"We forget that the current charges of "theocracy" were thoroughly rehearsed in the Reagan years, when Reagan's open support for the beliefs of evangelicals was passionately decried, and his affirmation of the veracity of the Bible was used against him (notably in the 1984 campaign) to suggest that he would recklessly seek to bring on Armageddon.And:
Nor is Bush's insistence on the universal appeal of free institutions out of line with a sensibility that since the American Revolution has envisioned the United States as a carrier of universal values and a beacon to the rest of the world. Hart decries this "Wilsonian" aspect of Bush's presidency as a form of Jacobinism, promising the forced conversion of the world to American values and practices. But what has Bush said that is not a restatement of what Ronald Reagan said so often and with such conviction? Consider Reagan's address to the British parliament on June 8, 1982, a self-conscious echo of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 36 years earlier:
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. . . . The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means. This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.
If Bush has abandoned conservatism in saying such things and acting upon them, then what are we to make of Reagan?
Was Pope John Paul II a conservative?
The American political Left have always of course raged at the conservatism of the late Holy Father -- because of his opposition to abortion, female equality in all things, and homosexuality, three of their great causes. But the same people also see George W. Bush as only a small step removed from Hitler so that judgment is not necessarily reliable. Of slightly more interest is that some conservatives also saw him as disturbingly to the Left. The far-Right (e.g. Auster) faulted him for his ecumenism and his insufficient emphasis on tribe, nation and national traditions while the libertarian Right faulted him for his criticisms of capitalism -- as seen in (say) his encyclical Centesimus Annus.
The truth is, of course, that like the famous encyclical it commemorates (Rerum novarum), Centesimus Annus is a thoroughly c