American vs. British Conservatism: An Even Match?
Cranston, Maurice
Maurice Cranston AMERICAN VS. BRITISH CONSERVATISM: AN EVEN MATCH? Each variety has its strengths and weaknesses. We have our Constitution and our individualism; they have Mrs. Thatcher and...
...In England, faithful readers of the magazine Encounter might notice political writers who were once on the left—Paul Johnson, for example, or Woodrow Wyatt or Hugh Thomas—having moved to the right, but no one has wanted to call them "neoconservatives" because the dominant, Thatcherite stream of official conservatism has readily assimilated them...
...to recover for conservatism its specific and historic character...
...can hardly be expected to emerge...
...The noted Burke scholar Peter J. Stanlis (writing in the Intercollegiate Review in 1985) has drawn attention to the unity of vision between Frost's poetry and Frost's philosophy in a way that may surprise many readers: surprise them because the progressive American literary establishment has for years been asserting that Frost should only be read as a poet and his "reactionary" prose ignored...
...Thatcher, and is at present the dominant school of thought on the conservative benches in the British House of Commons, if not in the House of Lords...
...This is partly because the center parties have collapsed, and more center supporters may vote next time for Mr...
...Thatcher winning the next election are especially good...
...He was elected in 1834 soon after the party was founded on a manifesto that called for law and order, including the strengthening of the police force, tax reform, and the reconciliation of landed and industrial interests...
...NOW THAT THE COLD WAR IS OVER...
...A fairly recent book by the late Senator John East, The American Conservative Movement (Regnery Gateway, 1986), names as the movement's leading contemporary theorists Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig von Mises, German-educated immigrants, side by side with the American-born Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, and Willmoore Kendall...
...Thatcher with those of Macmillan and Macmillan's protégé, Edward Heath...
...Even when the Labour party was persuaded to advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament, the case had to be presented on pacifist, rather than pro-Communist, grounds...
...Thatcher and Michael Oakeshott...
...Tocqueville was converted from liberalism to conservatism by the evidence of his own social science...
...The newest and most interesting London paper, the Independent, is critical of but not hostile toward Mrs...
...The Labour party has been anxiously explaining that its form of socialism is a mixture of public and private ownership and not a totalitarian system of the kind that has collapsed in Eastern Europe...
...Debates in the House of Commons are now televised, and it is my belief that television favors the opposition, since its spokesmen have not the responsibility of office and can say anything they like to entertain and charm the viewers...
...But unfortunately the almost permanent majority of the Democratic party in Washington has prompted its members to develop the mentality of the one-party state...
...Box 3000, Department NI Denville, NJ 07834-9913 Credit Card orders, call 1-800-543-4860, Dept...
...Bush proves a model conservative President, that will be largely because Mr...
...American conservatism has been spared this influence...
...Nowhere is this synthesis better expressed than in the work of the best American poet of our time: Robert Frost...
...This in turn meant that she had to galvanize her own party, rally the support of the ranks, battle with rival factions, and change her cabinet frequently without regard to personal feelings...
...Disraeli and Macmillan and their followers are, by contrast, paternalistic...
...The "poll tax" to be introduced this year has much to be said for it, but it looks unfair, and the opposition will have no difficulty in making people hate it...
...In a word, she has had to be the politician for twenty-four hours a day...
...Hobbesian conservatism in its present "Thatcherite" formulation passes from its belief that the nation is composed of individuals to the conclusion that the public good is best achieved when everyone's energy is harnessed to what he most enjoys, making life better for himself—working together with others when he wants to, like an oarsman willingly rowing together with his crew, but never forced to act as a member of a team by the dictates of the state...
...If Mr...
...A recent editorial in this magazine predicted that the Bush Administration would be likely to follow a vaguely center-right drift in the absence of the kind of hard thinking that might direct it toward distinctively conservative policies.' This may be the case, but I would argue that the strengths and weaknesses of American and British conservatism are more evenly matched than Mr...
...But both Strauss and Voegelin are significant figures in the recent history of American conservatism, especially in the universities...
...Frost in his writings expresses a certain sensibility that is characteristic of American conservatism, a feeling both for the people and for the individual that is not found elsewhere...
...and American neoconservatives have almost all trodden that same path...
...Thatcher has been unlucky in having inherited from previous governments a bureaucracy that is unable, or unwilling, to work out successful schemes for the reform of education, health services, and local government...
...But whereas American conservatives, including Strauss and Voegelin, point to the concrete agent of the Constitution, Oakeshott invokes something much more elusive, a tradition of behavior that incorporates the practical knowledge of successive generations...
...America First - and Second, and Third Patrick Buchanan All in the Spring issue of NATHTEIONAL INTEREST Plus Rita McWilliams takes a long, devastating look at American reporting of human rights issues in Nicaragua and asks: Who Watched Americas Watch...
...Frost had a deep sense of human fellowship: of men, each defined by his individual freedom, being held together by the mediation of culture, as distinct from "all pigging together," as he put it, under the regimentation of "collectivist love...
...I would not myself count Ludwig von Mises as an American conservative, but rather as a laissez-faire liberal economist who, with Friedrich A. Hayek, has had more influence on Thatcherite policies in London than on anyone in the United States...
...In England, apologists for Communism have been more or less confined to the left of the Labour party and to avowed Marxists even further left...
...British trade unions, for example, remain extremely powerful, and by their strikes they have pushed up inflation in Britain to the highest level in several years...
...It would be fair to ask if there is any British equivalent to American neoconservatism, or that body of thought expounded in such journals as the Public Interest and Commentary by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and others who have the distinction of being liberals who were willing to recognize that the old liberal policies of social engineering and welfarism did not achieve their stated goals of social amelioration, but instead were carrying America toward that tutelary despotism which Tocqueville had warned against in...
...Thatcher is herself called "neoconservative...
...No longer do American citizens, through their elected representatives, decide what to do about such questions as public education, abortion, pornography, or even rent control...
...TAS, October 1989...
...Whether this is true or not, it looks much as if a great many American conservatives dozed off while he was President...
...American conservatives venerate the Constitution, and they are surely right to do so, for it gives them something more than an attachment to the idea of tradition which is all that British conservatives have in common among themselves...
...The most notable foreign influence on American conservatism in our time has been German rather than French, and has come through philosophy, not literature...
...One way and another, I do not think the prospects of Mrs...
...Since the Constitution is the original contract, so to speak, on which the nation as a nation is based, every American must respect it...
...Insofar as such a sophisticated form of political philosophy has any impact on popular political attitudes, the influence of Oakeshott has probably been to reinforce the Thatcherite school of British conservatism—if only because of its individualism, its demandfor a minimal state, and its attachment to freedom—freedom being the thing that the political experience of the English has taught them to understand and appreciate best...
...The Burkean view is that the human race is composed of natural societies or communities...
...Fr he Constitution confers another 1 advantage on American conservatives: it provides a bond of unity among them...
...but it is also because British conservatives, like American conservatives, are often prone to shrink from the unpleasantness of current controversies, to dream nostalgically of the days before urban decay and drugs and uncontrolled crime and hijackings and hostages and hooligans and kids, and then take Voltaire's advice to turn away from the world altogether and cultivate their gardens...
...British conservatives are much less united, although the discipline that prevails in the British Conservative party may prompt foreign observers to think otherwise...
...This may give a false impression of her strength...
...As head of both state and government in a presidential system, he could be, like Charles de Gaulle, above politics...
...139 202AM THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 21 of political thought, explains why in his entry on conservatism in the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (1987...
...Reagan "dozed off' at political meetings...
...Reagan was more fortunate...
...The Thatcher government nonetheless enjoys a friendlier press in England than either the Reagan or Bush Administration has had in America...
...There is another development in America that could not happen in England, and which creates a dilemma for American conservatism, and that is the extent to which the judiciary has taken over the legislative function from the U.S...
...It was often said in newspapers that Mr...
...Kinnock than for Mrs...
...the judges rule, and often their decisions are such that the ordinary citizen cannot even understand let alone authorize, since American judges have taken it upon themselves to redefine the English language so that words like "family," "obscenity," and so forth no longer mean what everybody who speaks English thinks they mean...
...He points out that the wartime success of government control of the economy encouraged postwar British conservatives to perpetuate planning the control of consumer demand, full employment, and the welfare state and thus to accept "a drift towards collectivism which, by the mid-1970s, had become so powerful that it seemed to many to have left conservatism without any coherent identity...
...Occasionally, indeed, especially in continental Europe, Mrs...
...And although several industries have been privatized, there is a growth of industrial and commercial monopolies that is undermining competition...
...Oakeshott is insistent that the duties of the state should be confined to its only authentic function, the promulgation and enforcement of law...
...Adherents of the British Labour party have also had to admit that recent events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have confirmed the conservative thesis that nationalized economies do not work and that a free market is a necessary instrument of free politics...
...Although the American press always called him "a conservative," Mr...
...T here, again, is a marked contrast 1 with the kind of conservatism that has gained ground in British universities in recent years...
...The British TV chains are fairly impartial, and among important London newspapers only the Observer, the Guardian, and the Daily Mirror are more favorable to Labour than to the government...
...Reagan handed on to him an America in pretty good shape, which was not the case when he himself took it over from Jimmy Carter...
...Opponents of Mrs...
...In this respect, Mr...
...Her economic policies have not had the success of those of the White House in America, although she achieved much in her first few years in office to reinvigorate British industry and commerce...
...partly because he did none of the things that Mrs...
...One reason why British conservatives have had less to say about Communism is that British liberals have never been apologists for it to the extent that American liberals have...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...
...Thatcher having been the first leader in Western Europe to recognize that Mr...
...Reagan contrived to run the government in his own way—again very like De Gaulle—with an authority derived directly from the people, without much mediation from party politicians...
...Thatcher has done and does to keep British conservatives awake...
...The first obvious advantage of British conservatism is having a parliamentary party that has had a majority in the legislature more often than a minority since World War II, while the Republican party in America, insofar as it can be considered a conservative party, has had a majority in the House of Representatives for less than five of the past fifty years...
...The rest of the press is fairly enthusiastically behind her...
...Both British Thatcherite conservatism and American neoconservatism, O'Sullivan suggests, mark an attempt to reverse this process...
...Thatcher may also invoke the precedent of Lord Salisbury, prime minister for fourteen years between 1885 and 1902, who was as impatient with Disraeli's innovations as is Mrs...
...C onservatism, it is often said, is not the same thing in America as it is in England, not so vigorous, so well-organized, or so well-equipped intellectually to answer the challenge of radicalism...
...the few American writers who felt it, such as Ezra Pound, have simply gone abroad and gone fascist...
...But of course Mrs...
...Far from being accused, with American conservatives, of being obsolete by their opponents, the British conservatives are admitted to have been ahead of their rivals in understanding the international situation, Mrs...
...Constitution is a liberal document in the classical sense of "liberal" and a product of the Reason of the Enlightenment, but its confirmation by experience, its success in preserving stable government down several successive generations, has given it the authority of time...
...The Hobbesian view has inspired the conservative policies of Mrs...
...If Macmillan could claim to be the heir of Disraeli, prime minister between 1868 and 1880, Mrs...
...British conservatives have not had to battle with the vast edifice of liberal nonsense that in America presented the pre-Gorbachev Soviet regimes as peace-loving, popular, and caring experiments in guided democracy...
...The British literary right has always been influenced by the French literary right with its nostalgia for royalty and chivalry and the authoritarian Church...
...The embarrassment for the American conservative is that this is all done within the system of the American Constitution, even though in defiance of that Constitution's principlesof separating the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers...
...The deepest division is between those British conservatives who derive their basic philosophy—their conception of the human condition—from Edmund Burke, and those who take it from Thomas Hobbes...
...Like Hume, Oakeshott claims that in the absence of all rational certainty, political problems should be attended to in the light of experience...
...Thatcher's aim is to recover something lost rather than introduce something new, she is true to the central ideals of conservative philosophy...
...Although both Disraeli and Macmillan were middle20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 class men (despite the fact that they rose to be Earls), they tried to reinforce their "One Nation" conservatism by an appeal to the aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige, the duty of the lord to look after the poor, which probably explains the greater support that paternalistic conservatism has today in the House of Lords than in the House of Commons...
...The Burkean view has inspired the conservative politics of Disraeli and Harold Macmillan and those who share their "One Nation" creed...
...Gorbachev was aboutto revolutionize the Soviet system...
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...Frost in his writings expresses a certain sensibility that is characteristic of American conservatism, a feeling both for the people and for the individual that is not found elsewhere...
...Thatcher could fairly claim to be preserving the heritage of the British Conservative party's first prime minister, Sir Robert Peel...
...Beyond Chaos: What the West Must Do Zbigniew Brzezinski The Ghost in the Pentagon Fred C. Ik16 Gorbachev's Global Doughnut Charles Fairbanks, Jr...
...They were perhaps no more enthusiastic about majority rule than any other continental professor, but they both provided new reasons for their students to venerate the American Constitution, to uphold religion and morality and virtue, and, what was more original, to look to the political philosophy of the ancient world for all the wisdom that is needed in modernity...
...Thatcher have to concentrate on policies where her government is on the defensive: domestic affairs and the economy...
...but the conservative cherishes it especially because it ensures the permanent rule of law and preserves Americans against those dangers—whether of anarchy or despotism--to which other nations are prone...
...1,rrell's analysis suggests, and also that it is necessary to see just what the differences are between the two conservatisms both as movements and as systems of political thought...
...The peculiar suggestion of American liberals that Gorbachev has somehow vindicated their sympathy for the Stalin-Brezhnev regime by repudiating that regime is not one that is heard in British progressive circles...
...custom and habit being better guides to action than ideologies or the blueprints of social engineers...
...conceiving of the nation as a kind of family writ large, they press the more prosperous members of the family to look after their needy brethren, even demanding by the time Macmillan reached office in 1957 sacrifices of the better-off that are hardly distinguishable from socialism...
...Since Mrs...
...The Hobbesian view is that the human race is composed of individuals, self-protective and often competitive...
...Compare Frost with British literary men thought of as "conservative' Chesterton, Belloc, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Eliot (and Eliot would wish to be considered British)—and one finds in all of them no love for democracy but a profound mistrust of democracy, and no great enthusiasm for personal liberty either...
...To be in opposition for a time is not a bad thing for a political party, since it enables its members to think and speak freely without the constraints of office...
...the nineteenth century...
...Congress...
...Noel O'Sullivan, a leading British historian I do not observe such a split between Burkeans and Hobbesians in American conservatism, which has been able to combine Burke's philosophy of natural society with a distinctively American belief in personal liberty and individualism...
...Fr here is one area, however, where T American conservatives suspect British conservatives of slackness, and that is the matter of opposition to Communism...
...For although her government has introduced a substantial measure of economic freedom, the economy is still "mixed," and the mix is not a wholly satisfactory one...
...Here the most influential figure is Michael Oakeshott, whose conservatism is much like that of David Hume, based on skepticism rather than belief in religion or natural law or the classics or anything else...
...I do not observe such a split between Burkeans and Hobbesians in American conservatism, which has been able to combine Burke's philosophy of natural society with a distinctively American belief in personal liberty and individualism...
...which means that their politics has progressively relapsed toward power-brokering, intrigue, and, far too often, corruption, veiled by pronouncements of empty radical rhetoric...
...At such a level of debate, coherent conservative policies "'Bush and the Conservatives," by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...He responded to various crises and opportunities with a kind of intuitive skill that owed little to conservative political theory...
...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
...Thatcher has herself been an innovator, and she could not have achieved her objective of re-establishing economic freedom and releasing the entrepreneurial energies of citizens without dismantling the collectivist system constructed by thirty-five years of consensus politics between Macmillanite Conservatives and the Labour party...
...Bush has much to conserve...
...It is evidence, I suppose, of the extent to which democracy has come to be deeply ingrained in American political culture...
...Assuredly the U.S...
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Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
