Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

by Ed West

Left-wing identity politics is so embedded that according to one employee at Google ‘the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with “boos” during company-wide weekly meetings’, one of many reported examples where ‘white males’ were subject to abuse.

the Left has also developed a moral monopoly, so that those outside of the faith are under an unspoken obligation to prove their moral worth before their views can be considered, just as non-believers in highly religious societies have an air of suspicion hanging over their every word. Because of this, one of the de facto expectations for conservatives in public life is that they must denounce those to the Right of them, and so the boundary of what is acceptable shifts Leftward, bit by bit, and ideas that would have been mundane and mainstream one decade become shocking the next (or ‘controversial’, as the media use as shorthand for ‘beyond the pale’). In contrast, there are no social sanctions against proposing even extreme Left-wing ideas because those advocating them are not seen as ethically questionable for doing so – at worst misguided. In fact, there is active competition to come up with ever wilder radical ideas, a trend that has sped up with the ‘Great Awokening’ of the 2010s, the acceleration of identity politics brought about by competing victimhood narratives on social media.

There is strong evidence of job discrimination against conservatives in certain professions, most especially academia, where one-third of social psychologists admit that they overlook qualified Right-wingers when hiring.

A study by three academics at the University of Virginia looked into how people stereotype their opponents, with both conservatives and liberals asked how they thought a ‘typical’ member of the opposing tribe would answer a question. The results were ‘clear and consistent’, they found: ‘Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal’.”3 In particular they thought that conservatives would disagree with statements such as ‘One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal’ or ‘Justice is the most important requirement for a society’, when in fact they did agree.

liberals are far more likely to believe this, with 76 per cent thinking that ‘society works best when people recognize that humans can be changed in positive ways’ while just 23 per cent believe it works best when ‘people recognize the unavoidable flaws of human nature’. The figure for conservatives is in contrast balanced almost at 50–50.7

This was the first real religious–political movement in England, and British conservatism emerged partly in opposition to it. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, considered the leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, was in particular critical of religious ‘enthusiasm’, as this form of Puritan politics was termed. As historian Jerry Z. Muller put it: ‘Conservatism arose in good part out of the need to defend existing institutions from the threat posed by “enthusiasm”, that is, religious inspiration which seeks to overturn the social order. The critique of religious enthusiasm, which was central to Hume’s conservatism, was later extended . . . into a critique of political radicalism.’

Locke is credited with the concept of empiricism, that human beliefs come from experience and our senses rather than divine action. He is best known, however, for arguing for pluralism in politics, a novel idea when it was previously believed that a nation could not function without religious uniformity. Although a sectarian civil war in France and a semi-sectarian one in England might suggest this pessimism to be correct, Locke argued that conflict came from attempts to force uniformity on people and that peace could only be established by allowing them to choose their own church. Religion, indeed, should step back from politics, because otherwise there would be permanent, ceaseless fighting – and so came the birth of pluralism and liberalism.

Even Locke’s tolerance did not extend to Catholics, who by following a foreign sovereign in the form of the Pope could not be loyal to the realm; likewise atheists, who, it was largely believed, couldn’t take part in the contractual nature of society because they could not be held to oaths. Locke did later question whether nonbelievers might be allowed some toleration,

Burke had supported the American colonists in the build-up to the final split with the mother country, for what the New Englanders and Virginians were fighting for was continuity and constitutional government; their rebellion against the British government, as with their forefathers’ fight against King Charles I, was viewed as essentially conservative. However, when a new, far more radical revolution shook the world a decade later Burke’s place in the conservative pantheon of pessimism became assured.

Burke said, ‘a society without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’.5 Conservatives also see themselves as the conservers of civilisation against barbarism – which is after all the most ‘orthodox’ state of all.

Conservatives believe in ‘historical consequentialism’, that is they judge institutions by their record, not the motive of their founders.

It doesn’t matter that most people are good because it only takes a few bad guys to ruin everything, or as the Russian proverb goes, an idiot can throw a rock into a well that a hundred clever men cannot shift.

weakening the norms that cause people to be better behaved will inevitably mean that laws come to replace manners.

‘the smaller the movement of adjustment, in relation to the initial error, the closer will the chance of improvement approach one half’.

Finally, there is anti-humanitarianism, the natural conservative distrust of the overtly caring, the mawkish and schmaltzy, and the language of therapy and self-growth. Muller wrote: ‘Time and again conservative analysts argue that humanitarian motivation, combined with abstraction from reality, lead reformers to policies that promote behaviour which is destructive of the institutions upon which human flourishing depends.’ And humanitarianism, most of all, is what characterises our age.

Mussolini had been a socialist and obsessively and tediously anti-clerical, before the experience of the First World War converted him to the idea of extreme nationalism, and captured in his mind the need for the heroic ideal. The Polish-Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell argued in The Birth of Fascist Ideology that fascism was a revolutionary movement, emerging from the radical Left but ‘which became fused with “blood and soil nationalism”’.

‘national socialism’ is as contradictory as national Christianity – love thy neighbour, as long as he’s not a foreigner. (There are national churches, of course, but, like socialism, the principles of Christianity are universal.)

I also happened to see It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s 1946 tale of community life in a small American town. It was set in a society where people trust their neighbours and, when things get thin and frightening, they know their loved ones will support them and that life is worth living. I absolutely loved it.

One study of the Inuit found that 40 per cent of girls were put to death at birth, while of 15 hunter-gatherer societies studied, 11 had homicide rates higher than the most violent nations today, and 14 were worse than the US in 2016, the exception being a group called the Batek who lived in Malaysia and whose survival strategy was to run away from rival tribes (which seems eminently sensible).

Theodore Dalrymple once recalled that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity . . . A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.1

‘Diversity’ has come to mean almost the opposite of what it once did, its former definition roughly being ‘inequality’, that is the variation between people in terms of ability, intellect and other qualities.

in philosophy there is the ‘principle of charity’, an old rule that means interpreting other people’s statements in the most reasonable and inoffensive way, and not to make second guesses about people’s real intentions. Christian-run colleges have often made this an important starting point because it makes the smooth running of society much easier and without it debating turns poisonous. In contrast, PC is the ‘principle of injury’, a key theme being to interpret conservative opponents’ views in the worst possible light, and to look for ulterior motives.

Britain was quite late catching on with this whole ‘sex’ business, the Russians having got there forty-five years earlier in 1918. Among the first communist decrees were ‘On the abolition of marriage’ and ‘On civil partnership, children and ownership’, removing the differences between legitimate and illegitimate children, downgrading marriage and encouraging sexual freedom. There were ‘anti-shame’ demonstrations involving a mixture of exhibitionists and people whose main focus was intense hatred of Christian traditionalists. Young men loved it, obviously, and within a short space of time the country had three hundred thousand bezprizorni, homeless children abandoned by parents and forced to live in Russian state institutions – which, you’ll be surprised to learn, weren’t huge fun.16 Eventually, however, the Soviets decided to turn the clock back, sexual shame returned, homosexuality was recriminalised in 1934 and abortion banned again two years later.

Sexual freedom also fed the sense of a growing divide between the successful and the rest. Sexual liberalisation, like economic liberalisation, frees some people to realise their dreams but leaves others envious and miserable. Average men could now enjoy more sexual variety, while also feeling still inadequate, since more successful men had enjoyed a far bigger share; for women it meant the beauty arms race going nuclear.

We all learned about the 1870 Education Act at school, but there had been vast improvements in literacy rates long before that, mostly due to cheap private schools, and by 1851 two-thirds of primary-school-age children were attending school in England and Wales, entirely voluntarily.8 Similarly a voluntary welfare state had long been in existence before Labour came along; by 1901 friendly societies had 5.47 million members, over half of adult men, and provided benefits for 40 per cent of adult males. Clement Attlee’s government didn’t create the British welfare state, it nationalised it.

since women were (and are) more religious than men, Frenchmen in particular worried they would use their vote to reverse secularisation and instal a Catholic king,

Edmund Burke’s great book on the French Revolution had far less influence on the wider worldview in the coming decades than those of Walter Scott, whose Waverley novels romanticising the past and medieval values of chivalry helped disseminate conservative ideas to a wider audience.

Back in the days when the Church paid for great works of art, artists gave glory to God; now that it is paid for by the taxpayer, they sing the hymns of the state – equality, fairness and social justice.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.

Liberals tend to be less religious and, once large sections of the population abandon Christianity, liberalism becomes their default setting.

And yet into the void left by religion something else takes its place, and so 30 per cent of very liberal Americans find a ‘great deal’ of meaning in political causes, compared to just 9 per cent of conservatives.2 Religion simply becomes replaced by ideology,

According to one meta-analysis of fifty-one experimental studies using eighteen thousand volunteers, liberals and conservatives ‘were biased to very similar degrees’.11 Both groups had the same ‘tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one’s political beliefs or allegiances’.

It is this belief in final, inevitable victory that gives progressivism its energy, and its determination to convert everyone.27 Like any religion, it cannot stand heretics or apostates, which is why liberals are far more hostile to white Christian conservatives than authoritarian Muslims, who are merely infidels.

progressivism as Christianity 2.0, with ‘privilege’ a form of original sin and vulnerable groups the new sacred. The old and new faiths have much in common: even the progressive tendency to repeat what children say as if they’re great fonts of wisdom comes from the Bible, and the Gospel of Matthew. ‘And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?’

People who do not believe in an all-powerful creator are more likely to believe that the state can move mountains. From Robespierre onwards people have believed that the state can perform any God-like function, something Jonah Goldberg called statolatry – worship of the state. Perhaps a belief in a supernatural deity acts as some form of vaccine for this idea; Scruton speculated that people who believed in paradise in the next world were perhaps less likely to go along with schemes to create it here, and maybe there’s some truth in it.

In his 2006 book Who Really Cares, Arthur Brooks looked at the figures and concluded that households headed by a conservative give 30 per cent more dollars to charity than those headed by a liberal, this despite liberal families earning on average 6 per cent more. Again, conservative generosity is mostly down to religion, which also explains why Americans give so much more than Europeans.

According to Pew, liberals block people they disagree with on Twitter more than conservatives do.11 Right-wing Twitter users are also more likely to follow political pundits from the other side, and over a third of people following the top Left-wing political pundits were on the Right, compared to a quarter vice versa.12 A 2016 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that Democrats were more likely to have ‘blocked, unfriended or stopped following someone they disagreed with on social networking sites’.

a YouGov survey also showed that Conservatives and Republicans were more relaxed about a child marrying a supporter of the opposite party than the other way around.16 In fact, more Labour voters objected to a daughter marrying a UKIP voter than an actual criminal, a level of sectarianism reminiscent of the old Irish joke about a woman who goes to England and telling her mother she’s become a prostitute. (‘Phew, for a moment there I thought you said Protestant.) During the 2016 US presidential election Pew found Democrats more likely to say a friend voting for the other candidate would put a strain on their friendship.

found out their marriage status ‘was a greater influence on vote choice than any other variable’. For every 1 percentage point rise in marriage, Bush gained 0.2 per cent more votes, and in areas with very large numbers of married people it increased by up to 5.5 per cent. Marriage was such a strong variable that it overwhelmed all others, Hawley concluded, calling it ‘eye-popping’. It also completely countered the ‘education effect’ whereby more schooling tends to make people more liberal, since once marriage was taken into account ‘education ceased to have any statistical significance in predicting votes’.

Barack Obama’s election campaign ad ‘Life of Julia’. It was designed to illustrate how women’s lives would be better under Obama than his rival Romney, but it also showed a woman whose closest and most important relationship was with the government.

Roman men, raised in the tough and unforgiving culture of their forefathers, could not understand the appeal of this strange new cult from the eastern Mediterranean with its obsessive focus on forgiveness and peace, and worshipping some sort of dead criminal. Indeed, they feared this subculture in which ‘women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large’, and which opposed infanticide, divorce and male homosexuality, making it appealing to females.

I tested this by asking each of my children if they’d rather have one sweet and their siblings had two, or none of them got any sweets; all chose the latter option, something any psychologist could have predicted, since it’s found to be very common until children reach maturity.

The Cameronian acceptance of social liberalism is also untenable because social liberalism cannot stay still. Progressive politics must, by its very nature, move towards more radical positions partly because people on the Left are in competition to outdo each other and so will push it further as part of the status competition – this is why social media hatefests are usually directed at other people on the Left. Many Tories would like to accept that, on social issues, liberals have won so that they could focus on economics instead, but progressivism is always changing, indeed perhaps accelerating. There are no surrender papers we can simply sign and get on with our lives.

Envy-avoiding is good, and people with money should be ashamed to show it off, since ‘Resentment is the equilibrating device that keeps the society of strangers in balance, by punishing those who offend the laws of solidarity and rewarding, through its absence, those who contribute to the common good.’10 Many conservatives dislike confiscatory taxes but we still feel uncomfortable with people displaying grotesque levels of wealth, and the fact there is no stigma to it. During the Blair years this got much worse, the whole obsession with bling and footballers who thought they were in hip-hop videos. One IT girl, I seem to remember, spent a million pounds on a bath tub, and yet none of these rich idiots attracted the sort of public hostility that occasional high-profile tabloid scroungers did; you certainly never heard much from big-C conservatives on this issue. It was hard not to be a bit disgusted by the amount of money on display, but at least the taxes were rolling in, and people in the City seemed to know what they were doing.

From the eighteenth century onwards liberalism was defined as a willingness to accept other people’s ideas and beliefs, as well as an openness to new ideas. That tradition is dying, I think it’s fair to say. The reason, as the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu argued, was that a society would lose its liberty, even if it had separation of powers and a system of government set up, if the same ideas became uniform throughout its institutions, and subject to the ‘tyranny of opinion’.

A 2019 study of the most and least politically intolerant counties in America found almost all to be Democrat, with Boston, Massachusetts, the most prejudiced and unforgiving to people with different views;15

The trans-rights issue would have just seemed baffling even to a liberal at the start of the century; indeed even in 2003 Jon Stewart was making fun of ‘chicks-with-dicks’, a joke that would be genuinely career-ending by 2016. In the US at the turn of the century the Democrats had an immigration programme that in terms of policy if not language was very similar to Donald Trump’s 2016 policy, widely compared to Nazi Germany by America’s hysterical, gibbering columnists.

‘American women are 15 percent less likely to reach a managerial position in the workplace than are men – but in Sweden women are 48 percent less likely, in Norway 52 percent, in Finland 56 percent, and in Denmark 63 percent.’

sexual freedom in many ways makes men more typically masculine and women more feminine. On top of gay or transgender people coming out, others will join weightlifting subcultures or spend fortunes on beauty products.

some warned in the nineteenth century that declining faith in Europe would unleash the unrestrained ‘blond beast’ and it’s hard to argue they were wrong. Indeed, there is also strong evidence from Germany of a link between declining religious attendance and rising populism.17 The decline of churches ‘and also other community institutions – leaves a gap which populist politics is well placed to fill’.18 But I’m sure it will turn out fine this time.