POLITICS: Compulsory Tolerance
What we’re up against
Right, you know what you have to do. In the latter half of next year, when the sting of last summer has finally been washed away, you’ll get your choice if you’re a paid up member of the Tory party. And this time it will be as The Times so shriekingly insisted it would be in 2001: Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo, versus AN Other. Tolerance or bigotry. Liberalism or prejudice. Truth, freedom, reason and justice, or, David Davis. You decide. Now let’s ignore completely whether Mr Michael Portillo embodies, as a result of his famous ‘journey’, any of those aforementioned good things, and consider simply, since when did those things become such covetable virtues for Tories to posess? Or rather, when and why did ‘liberal’ become a Conservative term of endearment? For 'liberal' inescapably is the word or concept or feeling or state of being through which all these lovely qualities are refracted. Every article you read, or BBC analysis you hear, no matter how they parse social-tolerant-inclusive, boils down to just one thing: will the presently unelectable Tory party step back toward popular appeal by becoming more liberal? This is what is known as the media narrative, and woe betide any politician foolish enough to ignore it.
‘Liberal’ itself still hasn’t officially been written into the conservative catechism, but it’s undeniably the holiest logos in the language in which politics is currently conducted. It’s only of course just got back there to the top. For much of the twentieth century other words and phrases, like equality, full employment or fairness all had a shout. But none has had the staying power of liberal. Indeed, to argue against it, or anything pertaining thereto, is in a way to argue against argument itself. Which is never a happy act in a democracy. Yet, as should be distantly familiar to Mr Portillo:
Few politicians, except the greatest, are free to choose the slogans in which they speak: most have to be content with slogans that come to hand. To use slogans that happen to be current is not necessarily bad . . . Nor, so long as political objectives are achieved, do politicians need to recognise their slogans when they use them. To know that a slogan is being used, and use it as though it were something more, requires a fine combination of political instincts.
Maurice Cowling’s great work,
Mill and Liberalism, from which the quotation comes, is the sustained twentieth century assault on liberalism qua liberalism. Far from meekly accepting that to sit down to dinner with Roy Jenkins, Tories have to prove themselves white men, this work attacks the very nature of the standard Conservatives are supposed to meet. Unfortunately you haven’t read it. Though as I say, we can trust that, a long time ago, when things were very different, Michael Portillo did read the magnum opus of his history tutor at Peterhouse. Are its teachings put into practice by the once-and-future Portillo leadership bid? No. Not even slightly. Indeed every sin identified by
Mill is being commited; in fact, it’s traditional vices in a modern context, as John Prescott so nearly said of someone else. Indeed, the solitary comfort that the quondom candidature of Michael Portillo offers is that it conclusively confirms every bromide that has ever seeped out of Fen Court, for so long home to Mr Cowling.
The media narrative, with which you will be familiar, comes, in this instance, under the general heading of ‘compulsory tolerance’. This being the end to which every parable in the chronicle of Michael Portillo ineleuctably leads. One such is, ‘The Authoritarians and the Social Liberals’. You boo the first, you hug the latter. The first lot, you discovered once the 2001 general election was over, have lately been running the Tory party. And running it into the ground - we know that, because now we know the result. Authoritarianism = unelectability. Hence . . . well, that’s the Portillo leadership manifesto and we can read that all over again come 2003. But back to the authoritarians, who hid in public view before the election, and were thankfully outed by the BBC afterwards. Possibly to spare them further humiliation, who they actually are, and what they actually did to earn the label is left vague. The important thing is, we know that they are the bad guys.
Last summer, Mr Geoffrey Wheatcroft took aim at them in the pages of The Spectator - there wasn’t any need to detail what exactly their authoritarianism amounted to, or to name names - and compounded their wickedness by reminding us that these self-same people are also the dreaded, monomaniac eurosceptics (see, general election-defeat explanations passim). ERO selects this as an example solely because Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a Tory, albeit a clever one, and therefore his submission to the liberal schema is all the sadder. His conclusion you see was that the Tories should be ‘the party of liberty’, if only we had done that, then no kick in the gob by Johnny voter. An interesting conclusion given that the party, Labour, apparently irredeemably wedded to authoritarianism won such a thumping majority. If we’re to listen to the people, the people like a good slap in the face. That though detracts from the neat little story we’ve written ourselves.
Fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling wrote that
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Britain today too is a country where the dominant discourse, by its very nature, precludes conservatism as a legitimate option. As a trivial example, when a book in support of Ammnesty International was puffed by the much lamented Sue MacGregor on
Today, what would the response to any complaint as to bias have been? Only incomprehension. It is not possible for a liberal to understand the basis on which it could be made, for at the core of liberalism since Mill is the sin-free individual. That is to say, the liberal knows there’s sin, or whatever it’s called, a-plenty out there, but he, or of course, she, cannot conceive of their own sin. Their motivation is their own absolution.
So when, for example, ‘tolerance’ is the demand, the consequence is conformity with the new regnant morality. A strain of conservative prefers to believe that no morality exists amongst the governing ‘liberal elite’, that all is rotted by relativism. However quite the reverse is true: morality and standards are at the heart of new elite. ‘Free speech’ means freedom only to say tolerant things, and on and on it goes. These very definite standards are enforced, even to the point of statute law regulating speech and thought. Into this walks Michael Portillo. His ‘journey’ means now he’s praised as wildly as previously he was abused. Whereas before he was an odd-looking, squeaky voiced, guache fanatic, now he’s gorgeous, charismatic and good on TV. In truth, he’s much the same performer he always was (ie, lousy: still to this day he is incapable of public speaking without his voice breaking on every fifth or sixth word), but it serves the purpose of, and is indeed the only thing explicable to, the media to say ‘Michael’s been on a journey. The journey his party needs to go on’. From vote-scaring extremism, to electoral nirvana, in three easy television documentaries.
It goes without saying that the inflexible dogma that underlies ‘compulsory tolerance’ is yet another attack on, and an attempt to formulate a substitution for, Christianity. Cowling put it better when, of precisely the liberalism that now explicitly animates so many in the Conservative party, he observed, ‘Mill’s object was not to free men, but to convert them, and convert them to a peculiarly exclusive, peculiarly insinuating moral doctrine’. Or again
to argue with Mill, in Mill’s terms, is to concede defeat. Rational does not have to mean conclusions reached by critical self-examination. Prejudice may reasonably be used to mean commitments about which argument has been declined, but to decline argument is not in itself irrational. Bigotry and prejudice are not necessarily the best descriptions of opinions which Comtean determinism has stigmatized as historically outdated.
Portillo’s apostasy from Peterhouse is not why Maurice Cowling proves so usefully destructive of the premises on which these particular leadership campaigns rest. One could almost imagine that these bids, run the way they have been, justified on the grounds they are, are secretly an ironic demonstration that Tories don’t control the language in which they have to fight, and until they do, they won’t win – or leastways, they will never win anything meaningfully Tory.
ERO’s editorial comment
ERO, August 20, 2002 11:08 AM