What is 'National Conservatism'?

Liberal families are all alike; every conservative family is conservative in its own way

There’s a passage in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas where Thomas Frank quotes a conservative Missouri farmer as saying: ‘Most Red State Americans can’t deconstruct postmodern literature, give proper orders to a nanny, pick out a cabernet with aftertones of licorice, or quote prices from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue.’ 

But they can ‘wire our own houses, make beautiful and delicious creations with our two hands, talk casually and comfortably about God, repair a small engine, recognise a good maple sugar tree, tell you the histories of our towns and the hopes of our neighbours, shoot a gun and run a chainsaw without fear, calculate the bearing load of a roof, grow our own asparagus.’ 

I suppose this may be the difference between British and American conservatives, but I can’t do any of those things, from either list..

Conservatism varies from place to place, and the people who articulate it are likely to have very different visions of what they’re trying to conserve. Liberalism is universal, aimed at guiding society under a set of principles, and so it tends to be quite alike around the world. Progressivism — which, for want of a better word, is how I describe the modern Left’s worldview — has a similar post-Protestant way of thinking in which everyone must be offered salvation (human rights).

Conservatism, in contrast, is aimed at defending specific and particular traditions or institutions. Liberal families are all alike; every conservative family is conservative in its own way. British conservatism is not the same as the American or Italian or Dutch variety, and that’s fine. 

Robert Shrimsley, writing in the FT this week, made the case that US-style culture wars won’t work in Britain, in reference to next week’s National Conservatism conference in Westminster, at which I am a speaker. 

I wouldn’t disagree about the differences between the two countries’ political cultures; I love America but its relevance to our country is limited, despite the slavish devotion so many have to imitating its politics. In many ways we have far more in common with France, a country which may prove even more influential on Britain in the coming years. But there is a good reason why such movements now tend to be more global.

I was recently interviewed about what national conservatism meant and my honest answer is that I think ‘it’s like conservatism, but national’. 

I wouldn’t classify myself as a nationalist, partly because the label feels alien in a country which has never needed it. Indeed I would happily identify as a cosmopolitan, but my idea of cosmopolitanism is organic and voluntary, based on ties and friendships that cross boundaries based on common interests – clubs, hobbies and work. But it also means respecting other peoples’ homes and traditions – which is why American conservatives have their vision for the country, and we have ours.

The United States always had liberalism as its guiding creed, while in France and England conservatism emerged as a defence of the institutions of crown and church. The term ‘conservative’ was first used in 1818 in a journal called Le Conservateur, which stated that it ‘upholds religion, the King, liberty, the Charter and respectable people’ - les honnetes gens. But as a philosophy it varies from country to country, and often contains tensions.

Among the reasonable criticisms of National Conservatism – the ones that don’t just state that it’s for bad people – is that its support for the free market, nationalism and religion are incoherent.

In the New Statesman, Adrian Pabst wrote that ‘The irony is that the NatCon appeal to limited government is consistent with an overbearing state because of its unqualified support for private property and economic injustice. In common with the centre right and the insurgent populist right, the NatCons are wedded to the secular power of the market-state. Since the market exceeds the boundaries of the nation state, it turns out that national conservatism is more like international liberalism.’

It is certainly true that economic liberalism tends to lead to more social liberalism – one reason that young people on the continent are less woke than their British or American contemporaries – but that is in part related to trust. Economic freedom tends to breed a more trusting population, in certain conditions, and high trust leads to liberalism – and then liberal policies tend to erode that trust. The circle of life.

But one of the benefits of being on the Right is that you can have lots of differences of opinion because it’s not credal; you don’t have to sign up to any commandments. I imagine that I’m far more sympathetic to Blue Labourism than most people at NatCon, and my ideal society would be somewhere like Denmark – an egalitarian and modest country with lots of bike lanes – although the wider NatCon movement is uncomfortable about inequality.

Pabst is also critical of the mixture of Christianity and nationalism, writing that ‘to instrumentalise religious faith as a justification for nationalism or the free market defies belief. The Bible neither views the nation state as part of the created order nor does it treat nations as ethnically and politically bounded.’

British conservatism historically arose as an argument against religion in politics. The Puritans believed in the ‘Elect’, an oligarchy of Godly people destined for salvation. Although not egalitarian, this Calvinist idea was subversive, because it meant that people could be the equals of their social superiors just for being more righteous. Religion should inform our political decisions, Puritans believed, because politics must be used to reshape society to make it more Godly

This was the first real political-religious movement in England, and it alarmed the Anglican establishment. Other radical Protestant sects went even further, and the Quakers, in particular, had a huge influence on modern-day progressivism.

British conservatism originated as an argument against this Puritan ‘enthusiasm’ in politics, and a defence of the established Church. Toryism  became associated with Anglicanism, while also marked by a hostility to overt religious enthusiasm.

At the same time it also came to absorb small-l liberal ideas about the freedom of the individual, a conditional support for laissez-faire economics, if tempered by paternalism. It was more in favour of market liberalism than its French equivalent, for example, while less so than American conservatives.

Yet conservatism tends to evolve, and concepts like National Conservatism are obviously a response to underlying problems with a mainstream Right that is, in many ways, adrift. It is also a reflection of the fact that we live in a world in which the major divide is not over redistribution anymore but the balance between the national and global. 

Although it is a philosophy based on local peculiarities, there are some obviously ‘universal’ conservative beliefs, which might be summed up by the idea that ‘humans are flawed, fallible creatures; reason is powerful, but prone to error; and tradition and prejudice are often good guides to social policy.’ With conservatives preferring the near to the distant, in Michael Oakeshott’s famous quote, some sort of small-n nationalism is an obvious component. 

This support for the nation-state was articulated by Edmund Burke in his rhetorical battles with the internationalist Thomas Paine. ‘Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality,’ Burke wrote: ‘It consists, in a great measure, in the ancient order into which we are born.’ Paine instead wrote that ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,’ admittedly a slogan that looks much better on a T-shirt.

According to Burke’s biographer Yuval Levin, he believed that: ‘The nation is the means by which order is made and kept, and by which order is made beautiful. A nation builds upon its past accomplishments through prescription by looking to its common history and finding in this history both sources of pride and principles for reform and improvement. Family affections become community affections and, finally, national ties. Every individual thus finds himself enmeshed in multiple communities – his geographic neighbours, his fellow workers or merchants or nobles – and all of these point up toward the nation, and only from the nation and through it toward mankind as a whole.’

Conservatives believe in ‘historical consequentialism’, that is they judge institutions by their record, not the motive of their founders. Nation-states arose with warlords whose heirs helped create an often semi-fictional national identity to justify their dynasty. Yet just because these homelands have invented traditions, that does not make them meaningless, since they have come to create a shared story among a group of people.

The emotions people attach to nations are real, and the communal benefits of that attachment tangible. The countries with the strongest and oldest sense of national identity tend to be the nicest places to live. If something works, don’t throw it away.

As conservatives, we believe that people are prone to tribalism. That humans are capable of great empathy, but it cannot be infinitely projected. Systems that expect people to share resources with complete strangers from around the globe, rather than friends and family, neighbours, compatriots and fellow believers, are utopian. 

Whether the Bible does or does not justify nationalism is not something a Burkean conservative would stress out about, being a question far more in the Godly Calvinist tradition. If a tradition and system works, we don’t need to search scripture to justify it.

British conservatism is a secular philosophy, but it tends to favour religion as serving a useful social function, raising social capital and providing community support and moral guidance. If religion is a vital component of morality, then it also plays an important role in preserving our freedom, because an immoral people will become a tyrannised people.

We also believe that in the absence of organised religion, its function will be taken up by something else, often a dangerous form of political millenarianism. That is indeed what has happened with the sharp decline of American Christianity.

Of course there is a Christian influence on National Conservatism, and that’s inevitable. What we call the culture war is not some confabulated drama thought up by spin doctors, it’s the ultimate divide in a society between Christians and their fellow travellers, and the new believers. You might not be interested in the culture war but the culture war is interested in you, and there is no way of escaping it any more than a 4^th century Roman could escape the conflict between paganism and Christianity.

It is mostly the new believers who are pushing for ever greater globalisation and more extreme social positions, and it is often those sympathetic to the old religion, or at least repulsed by the new, who wish to defend the idea of the nation. That is the nature of political alliances.

I come from a long line of deracinated decadent metropolitans. Some of my English ancestors were atheists as far back as the late Victorian era. I’m a cultural relativist, a cosmopolitan and on good days I might even describe myself as a classical liberal (I’m certainly more liberal than many progressives.)

But I’m sceptical of certain aspects of globalisation – free movement except between countries of equal wealth, some elements of supra-national government, the transfer of power from democratic politicians to distant NGOs and judges. I don’t think all cultures ought to be the same, and I tend to think the spread of global English also means the spread of idiocy and ideological dysfunction (he says, on a platform in which he makes money writing in English to a global audience).

And I also think that many of our institutions, following the trends of the United States, are now dominated by a new sort of ‘enthusiasm’ that is turning our world upside down, a global ideology that requires its opponents to – ironically – think more globally to oppose it. We certainly don’t want to import America’s culture wars – I’d be quite happy to block all political ideas coming from that country – but we don’t really have a choice. 

Anyway, I’m off to repair a small engine, shoot a gun and run a chainsaw. See ‘y’all’ in Westminster.