US POLITICS: They're the Tories Now
And they're likely to be for some time to come
For a certain kind of Tory, the sort who find the hairs on the back of his (and it's always his) neck rising in the presence of Viscount Cranborne, the contemporary Conservative Party is to be regarded with distaste. Polluted as it is by deviationist error, including but not exclusively so: Liberalism, Manchesterism, non-conformism, populism and management consultancy. In short everything he's likely to mutter under his Homburg, 'horribly American'. The irony is that America today is now the last place Toryism unadulterated is still to be found.
As our bewaistcoated friend would doubtless agree, the way to test this assertion is to consider the high politics of the United States. Who and what are its politicians? For all its pretensions to being a capitalist society, far more aspirants to high office in the US have personal histories of state service than do their British contemporaries. British Conservatives, before politics, have normally worked in the capitalist economy. In contrast, American politicians are quintessentially old-style Tory in their background, twice over. Firstly before becoming political actors they frequently have worked for the state, either directly or through the military. Then before that, there's family. American politics is uniquely in a modern democracy a matter of blood. A preponderant number of 'conservative' American politicians - again, unlike British hacks - come from families with a tradition of political service.
Take just the four ‘finalists’ for the presidency in 2000 (the nation’s most democratic office): Democrats Bill Bradley and Al Gore; and, Republicans George W. Bush and John McCain. A military dynast, Mr McCain comes from a line of five successive admirals. His own prospects of that rank being retarded after the then navy pilot was shot down over Vietnam and obliged to spend the rest of the war in a metal cage. Mr Bush is a third generation politician, educated at Andover and Yale. Mr Gore, a second generation politician, educated at St Alban’s and Harvard, and Vietnam service, after a fashion. Mr Bradley a man of his own creation - and Princeton, a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford and Vietnam era service in the airforce helped too. The background of the average American politician is thus as far divorced from that of his British opposite number as it's possible to be. The former will most probably be from a provincial elite, received a blue chip education, have served the state in some pre-party political form, and already enjoyed a family tradition of political activity. The latter will have attended some meetings of the old National Association of Conservative Graduates, and written a letter to The Times denouncing the prospect of 'Brussels telling our soldiers what to do'.
The closed American model, in contrast to our own open, competitive and accessible system, might seem simply the conservative habit towards self-replicating elites seen the world over (as Ronald Syme put it, 'In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade'). So why should the American right qualify for the sacerdotal appellation Tory over the claims of any other? The reason lies in understanding why, until comparatively recently there hasn't really been a genuine Conservatism of any sort in the US, and now there is.
Although republicanism, revolution and rebellion are all obviously unconservative, the reason why the American revolution still militates against Conservatism has been the attitude of American 'conservative' thinkers towards it. For they have proclaimed it a founding of conservative virtue. In other words - and there are shades of Marxist hero-worship here - they believe the events of 1776 to be a man-made miracle where providentially huge intellects stumbled upon, or even worse, designed a political structure in accordance with all the eternal verities. Thus the grossly unconservative ‘history lesson’ is, the proclamation of truth. Truth moreover on the basis of what men did.
The few American intellectual critics (as we have seen, and as you would expect, the practical politicians are much numerously Tory than the thinkers) of ‘foundationalism’ - most of all, Russell Kirk - are damned for advocating an unAmerican Conservatism. Witheringly, Charles Kesler explains:
Hence Kirk's 'traditionalism', the belief in the abstract principle that all abstract principles are nonsense; that justice is to be discovered at history's margins, not in nature's intentions; and that reason, at least moral and political reason, is always properly a child of its times. For traditionalists, revolution with a capital R, based on appeals to nature or to abstract truths like human freedom and equality, is the greatest of political evils.
So much right wing American thought - rightly called neo-con - falls short because of its antipathy to history. Revealing its advocates' usually Marxist origins. The rejection of history is understandable enough given that if they knew any, the all too contingent history of their beloved revolution would be the first thing they learnt. That it was in fact
not a Whiggishly, ideologically unambiguous march to a preordained end.
Indeed every which way the American constitution is unconservative and of course unTory: it was formed from violent revolution; it's rationalist; and it's indubitably man-made. It's also the perverse means by which American Toryism, and therefore an American Conservatism have finally come into being. What conservatism there is in the American body politic has little or nothing to do with the ideas floating around at the time of the revolution or shortly thereafter, but the fact that the institutions (and nation) then created have accrued sufficient historical baggage for
them to be a repository of conservative faith and action. By virtue of long-life the American system itself has engendered aboriginal conservatism of sorts in the shape of American neo-Toryism i.e. the semi-mystical defence of the constitution as holy writ, deriving its authority over the present and the living from damn near prescription, and practice legitimised by precedents from time immemorial.
More or less simultaneously a rival variant of actual Conservatism has grown up in the US. Given the current legitimacy, and social participation of, American Catholics in US politics, a sort of pre-war clerical fascism has attained a certain degree of support too. Toryism however is the dominant tone of the Republican Party. Religion in general though illuminates yet another difference between the Toryism of the American right and the apostasy of the British. The former differ from their atheist, or still worse Methodist, British equivalents in that they still believe in the convocation between politics and Christianity.
This religious compact, fused with unthinking belief in constitutional arrangements for their own sake rather than on the basis of rational calculation, patriotic determination to maintain American military and imperial strength, and, inescapably, personnel derived from a discrete caste identified by blood and money make America the modern home of Toryism. Toryism was supplanted here when this, last century of our fall, saw the substitution of Oxbridge educated meritocrats for the squirearchical, warrior caste. Bill Clinton was the first Oxonian President, and defeated a military hero cum political blueblood in becoming so. Might he also not be the surest pointer yet to ‘Britain-beyond-the-seas' coming and parallel decline, with Dubya being a last, beautiful Churchillian flowering of Tory induced national greatness?
John Rugby, September 14, 2002 11:20 PM