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

by Ed West

Politics is often about the singer, not the song; it doesn’t matter what point a person is arguing, if you think they spend their spare time whipping themselves or dressing in their dead mother’s wig, you’re not going to be receptive to their ideas.

Conversely, conservatives are more fearful, one of the key findings of psychological differences in politics. That’s why I’m a conservative, at least. My Guardian-reading neighbours will see a group of teenagers and think how wonderful to have a vibrant youth scene in the neighbourhood; my reaction is ‘oh no, some hoodies’ and to worry they’ll throw rocks at me and shout ‘paedo!’

(I should point out I didn’t read the Mail all the time, or even much. Usually I read quite normal things for a twelve-year-old like Spider-Man, Detective Comics and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.)

I suppose, like de Maistre, I felt less anger towards criminals than the people who allowed them to behave that way, who made excuses for them, ensured they received ‘community punishments’ rather than prison sentences that kept them away from us.

Alternatively it may just be more comforting to believe that the guy who mugged you is a victim of the system pushed to desperation to commit a crime, rather than that he victimised you because you’re weak and he’s strong, and he enjoyed it.

(Years later, Lawrence’s killer Learco Chindamo successfully avoided deportation to his native Philippines using human rights legislation because his family were mostly here. Of course, only low-status Daily Mail readers would think this is a bad thing and I’m sure some lawyer on Twitter can explain why.)

People often dismiss conservatives by snorting that ‘oh you just want to return to the 1950s’, but as Peter Hitchens argued in not so many words, the 1950s were an age of jittery sexual energy and licence – we want to return to the 1900s. The conservative golden age was the Belle Époque era before the First World War when life was just one big Mary Poppins-style adventure, a crime-free paradise with happy housewives carrying elegant umbrellas and Post-Impressionist artists drinking themselves to death with absinthe.

Another huge change was the decline of religion, which altered how we viewed human nature. Previously it had been assumed, as David Hume put it in ‘Of the Independency of Parliament’ (1742) ‘that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest’. Even Bertrand Russell, an atheist, said no one should run a school who didn’t have a deep conviction of original sin.

This changing view of human nature was reflected in the growing popularity of Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage. At primary school I was taught something to this effect about Native Americans, that their society was peaceful and egalitarian, when the reality was something more like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto with noble savages ripping out the hearts of equally noble, but somewhat weaker, savages and kicking their heads like footballs down a pyramid.

Countless studies of pre-agricultural societies indicate that they were almost uniformly extremely violent, and showed a willingness to inflict extraordinary cruelty to those outside of the tribe, most of whom weren’t viewed with any empathy.

The inability to handle freedom is the hallmark of the narrow conservative mind, after all, which is why we like to stop other people enjoying themselves.

It also became far more Left-leaning; Boas’s apprentice Margaret Mead had gone to the South Pacific where she found a pre-agricultural society that didn’t have sexual jealousy and everyone just happily shagged each other without it descending into murderous arguments. Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa is viewed as a sea-change in anthropology, but also a pointer to where uptight Western society could do things differently. She had also been elaborately hoaxed by the natives and no such sexual utopia existed; in fact, Samoa had horrific levels of rape, and adultery had been punishable by death before the Europeans arrived.

The British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner argued that the expansion of higher education from the 1960s led to increased demand for social theory and with it the growth of postmodernism. More people went away for three years to study theory, and so more theory was produced in order to satisfy demand. Since more people are hired so ‘there simply must be the appearance of both profundity and originality. It is all intended to resemble scientific growth. But what if there isn’t any? May this lead to a setting up of artificial obsolescence and rotation of fashion, characteristic of the consumer goods industry?’

Urbanisation also leads to fewer children, which again makes this idea easier to believe, and indeed parents have an overall better estimate of human nature, while educated mothers with more than one child are ‘particularly accurate in their estimates of the genetic contribution to these traits’.

On one occasion our geography teacher, the fiercely passionate and inspiring Mr Davies, pointed at disabled access stickers on a school outing and explained how such things were unknown thirty years ago and how much better things had got. I suspect he was very Leftie, in a Catholic sort of way. (Aren’t all geography teachers in particular very Left-wing?)

PC, from what I understood, was about some well-meaning changes made to the language so as not to offend anyone; it was undoubtedly silly, but the people who got riled by it were obviously numpties.

After all, I used to watch human sacrifice victims having their hearts ripped out to appease the sun god when I was a kid and it never did me any harm.

I suppose the great era of ideological conflict ended in August 1991 when a heavily inebriated Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank in front of Moscow’s White House and brought a surprisingly speedy end to the Soviet Union.

After Buchanan’s famous address journalist Molly Ivins made the cutting remark that it sounded better in the original German; it was a brilliant put-down making a rather unfair point in a memorable and clever way – if you’re a conservative in the Buchanan mould you’re basically a Nazi. And, generally speaking, people don’t want to be compared to Nazis, who even the most ardent Right-winger will admit rather overstepped some moral boundaries.

In Britain there wasn’t really a culture war as such, unless by war you mean one of those nineteenth-century colonial skirmishes where one of our dreadnoughts turned up at an African palace defended by guards with curly swords.

(Predictably, I think the voting age should be twenty-one, except for Our Boys in uniform, obviously; since you wouldn’t allow an eighteen-year-old to take out a mortgage, why would you allow them to decide the fate of the country?)

My candidate was the insanely Right-wing Alan Clark, a historian who lived in a castle in Kent, who was also a notorious womaniser and rogue; he had once had an affair with the wife of a judge and also slept with both their daughters, and even his own wife referred to him as a ‘shit’. In an age when people use all sorts of euphemisms to downplay how Right-wing they are, Clark described himself as a ‘Nazi’, although as with many reactionaries no one was really sure if it was a joke, or a joke masking deadly seriousness.5 He did name his pet Rottweiler after Eva Braun, though, which I suppose the ‘PC brigade’ would get on their high horses about today.

Faced against Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell’s PR machine the Tories seemed hopeless, like cavalry charges against Panzer divisions, old, grey-haired men facing the youthful Blair and his sharp-suited managerial sidekicks.

Why can’t we just go back to the days of Brief Encounter (1945) when everyone was reticent and chose to stay in their passionless marriages to asexual Englishmen, or A Night to Remember (1958), where just because you’re on the sinking Titanic and are going to drown that’s no excuse to start embarrassing everyone around you with emotions?

Rather than these kids growing up too soon, they weren’t growing up fast enough, never learning the concept of deferred gratification or self-control.

And so was born that staple of liberal-Left Britain, the infuriating Thought for the Day slot in which wet religious types express the most inoffensively progressive views imaginable in a desperate attempt to seem relevant to a Godless society, and for an institution they must realise utterly despises them.

Besides, very few conservatives would argue that everything in the sexual revolution was wrong, just as they wouldn’t argue that the French Revolution was all bad. Revolution throws lots of new ideas into the mix and inevitably some turn out to be worth keeping, often because technology and improved living standards mean that some ancient restraints can be eased.

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 ...

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. It wasn’t that Stalin was ‘pro-life’, as such, rather that the Soviets were by then worried about population decline – but then mass murder will have that demographic side effect.

The difficulties of trying to find something even vaguely pornographic on TV before the internet came along is something kids these days really wouldn’t appreciate. We had to stay up watching tedious Channel 4 foreign art films just because there was apparently a lesbian scene halfway through. In fact, even the German porn that arrived in the 1990s with cable, which was then incredibly filthy, is by today’s standards quaintly innocent, almost like a Robin Asquith sex comedy.

Likewise at one point 13 per cent of British teenagers had chlamydia, while there were eighty-three thousand children in care, more than before the Abortion Act, which, it was hoped, would lead to a big fall in the number of unwanted children.

Being prudish is seen as low-status or sometimes unkind, but sexual liberation always has its bezprizorni.

One day we were vaguely discussing politics and a colleague from the West Midlands was stunned when I mentioned that I had voted Conservative at the last election. ‘You’re a Tory? Seriously?’ It was like I had announced I was a Scientologist or went dogging. I had often made outrageous Right-wing comments in the office to get a laugh but presumably he thought it was an act.

IPC media, of which Nuts was a part, had hired some marketing experts who were paid a fortune to organise focus groups and who came back with the revelation that young men liked looking at tits. An amazing, counterintuitive insight.

Until the eighteenth century most societies had a golden age myth about a time long ago when everyone was better off, more innocent or wealthy. The most obvious reason is that for the majority of people life was pretty terrible and so they reasoned there had to have been something better once. People also tend to cherish the memory of their youth, when they were healthier and happier, and so look at the old days fondly, even if they suffered great hardship at the time. That we don’t take golden ages seriously now is partly because we have historical records, including data; I have fond memories of my childhood in the early 1980s, but even then infant mortality was three times what it is now.

In Arabic the period before Islam is called Jahiliyyah, ‘Age of Ignorance’, and Muslim writers naturally played up how backwards and violent this culture was before their ancestors adopted the new religion. Likewise, Christians in Europe emphasised the negative aspects of the polytheistic societies preceding, focusing especially on ‘pagan’ treatment of the faithful, even though Roman oppression of Christians was nothing like as bad as Christian persecution of other Christians. And so, in a similar way, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s is viewed as the start of a new way of thinking, everything before that is a sort of conservative Jahiliyyah.

as Mark Lilla put it: ‘The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind. Where other see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes.’

Industrial poverty has entered the collective consciousness because by Dickens’s time there was now a middle class large enough to care, but the rural poverty that preceded it was far grimmer; it was just too remote for anyone to do anything about, and it was the norm for most of human history.

No one cheered at the outbreak of war, and the New York Times recorded in early August 1914 that there ‘no flag waving, no demonstrations, no music-hall patriotism’. My English grandmother’s memoirs, which conclude as her childhood ended in 1914, recalled that her parents were in tears at the table because the politicians had failed. Their misery was further compounded when her older brother returned home in uniform, having joined up not because he wanted to – he was terrified – but because he felt England was endangered by an aggressive Germany and didn’t want to appear a coward to his friends. He survived, but suffered horrific shellshock.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, and unfortunately it was one of the few sensible things he said.

Sounding like a modern-day actor, full of strident but incoherent views about how the world should work, he had the contradictory idea that the ‘people’ were just, but also that everything should be ruled by a select group of rational individuals such as himself. He called for action by the ‘people’, writing ‘You are many, they are few’. On another occasion he proposed an alliance of ‘enlightened, unprejudiced’ people to resist ‘the coalition of the enemies of liberty’. He would have loved Twitter.

Twitter has obviously made this far, far worse, a hellish vortex where every childhood and adolescent memory is besmirched, where the footballer you idolised as an eight-year-old drones on about Brexit and your favourite novelist from your teens turns into a fourteen-year-old having a meltdown over Trump. Or you find a new favourite comic actor and look him up to see the most recently thing is a retweet of James O’Brien or David Lammy. And you just think – why, God, did you make me this way? Even possibly my favourite comedy of all time, Father Ted, has been ruined by politics, its co-writer Graham Linehan in my opinion becoming, for a while, one of the worst people on the site, and that’s with some fierce competition.

If a play set in the 1950s shows a white-bread husband saying, ‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ he will almost certainly be knobbing the secretary or hanging around men’s toilets while his wife downs gin to drown her existential anguish. (Ibsen’s own views were suitably idiotic: ‘Abolish the concept of the state, establish the principle of free will.’ He argued that ‘the minority is always right’, by which he meant what might today be called a liberal elite.13)

Most theatre is more interested in attacking the old institutions from the Age of Ignorance – the Church, the family and the nation. As composer James MacMillan once put it, we have a ‘cultural regime which adjudicates artists and their work on the basis of how they contribute to the remodelling, indeed the overthrow of society’s core institutions and ethics’.16 What replaces those institutions? The same one that just happens to fund theatre – the state.

Burke criticised the tendency of people to bravely attack dead tyrannies, while exalting modern ones. ‘The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants, who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold, because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters. Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes?’

There aren’t many Right-wing comics partly because conservative ideas are obviously stupid and irrational, on the face of it absurd, but they are also paradoxically logical, while liberal ones are obviously right, but in practice often don’t work.

Today, we have clickbait arguments peddling political sectarianism, or as they have might have said at the time, ‘Watch John Calvin deftroy ye papists in one utterance.’

whenever I open Facebook my heart sinks when I see a good friend linking to a Guardian article by someone or other about how the Tories literally want to shit in poor people’s mouths and the comment ‘YES, HE NAILS IT’. Yes, he ‘nails it’, in the sense that the Revd Ian Paisley used to ‘nail’ Catholicism during his sermons every week, the ability to articulate all your tribe’s worst prejudices against the other and distort what they believe in an amusing way. By that measure he does indeed ‘nail it’.