I have refrained for the most part in making comments about the present state of the world, or of things that may have direct application and value to the issues of political practice today. But seeing that today is a Sunday, and that I ought to revel in some mischief of my own making, I will allow myself certain observations today that I will not make in an ordinary course of action, and even then only because of my interest in the relation of forms of economic organisation within broader political movements. The question that we are then faced with, today, is the economic means of conservative politics, in the USA more than anywhere else.

Conservatism in the United States has been a bedfellow with Libertarianism for far too long. It is a destructive affair, one that has corrupted the essence of conservatism and denigrated the res publica into some perverse form of association with no significant value.The fusionist approach (cf. George Nash) to conservatism with a broad conservative coalition containing inherently incompatible elements is now coming to an end, and in its place we see another sort of coalition coming up that leaves no place for the conservatism of Tawney and Disraeli. More telling is the understanding that few American conservatives have managed to become statesmen in their own right, and that the icons of the conservative movement have been so far beholden to laissez faire, laissez passer politics for far too long such that libertarianism is permanently wedded to conservatism in the American imagination. But, faced with the rise of a brutish and pernicious populism in the flanks of the Republican Party, the American conservative is forced to reconsider the importance of laissez faire economic approaches; he endorses it when popular whilst playing to the neoliberal, Lockean consensus when expedient — higher stimulus spending but also accompanied by tax cuts. The American Republican is not an ardent follower of laissez faire politics: he sticks to it when necessary but happily turns to Keynes as and when necessity and expediency makes demands of him. The turn to Keynesian approaches to political economy is often matched only by the rise of populism that threatens to tear the fabric of the American imagination apart. (Though it must be stated that populism and anarchism are both problematic occurrences on the right and the left that pose inherent tendencies to demagoguery and despotism).

Yet, I have managed to digress. I initially intended to write about the manner in which conservatism — distinct from American Republicanism or English Conservatism — is inherently incompatible with both populism and laissez faire politics, because it is, for the lack of a better word, a paternalistic ideology. The conservative ought to think of the state not as some form of ‘umpire’ which seeks to arbitrate between certain forms of private claims upon the commons or of activities which may have knock-on effects outside the range in which they are initially exercised, as an exercise in contracts and commerce; but rather as the manifestation of a substantive association that permits man to achieve the highest possible good, human flourishing. The state is not a random collection of individuals brought together by the vagaries of fate and the mists of time, but an organic body politic that sees value in the means and ends which are espoused in the fabric of its being, and that are set apart from other associative forms in the sovereignty it exercises in accordance with the importance of its aim. To understand the state as some form of de minimus association is to reduce it to an inconvenient power-grab that cannot be even an effective umpire, for the rules of play are itself reduced to such insignificance as to render obedience to them a trivial matter that can be flouted at ease. But it is the misfortune of conservative movements in recent years that they have accepted, without question and with much gusto, the role of small government, anti-‘welfare’ cynics who see no value in the role of the government, and take the mantra of individual responsibility beyond its reasonable limits.

With it has come the acceptance of the thrills and prosperity that has been brought about by capitalism. It cannot be denied that markets are important; that they transform some degree of vice into virtue by channelling self-interest and greed into the creation of such things as may benefit all. But the extent to which conservatism has embraced free markets, crony capitalism, and rent seeking is troublesome: it is more than happy to allow men to starve and families and households broken apart by subjecting men to the powerful forces of the market without thinking of the consequences of the anomie, the normlessness, that it brings about. Economic prosperity is the cocaine of the right: it has managed to give such a thrill, however perverse and short lived it might be, that the addiction is seemingly beyond cure. Prevention, possible as it was, was much better than cure, but even the cure as it comes today — the rise of the populist, xenophobic, and decidedly bullish right — is killing the patient. The toxic mix — Trumpism in the USA, Orbanism in Hungary, Modism in India — removes from conservatism the inherent focus on disposition as a means of rooting its philosophical bearings in the self (‘know thyself’ being the maxim of more philosophers than one ought to count), rendering conservatism reactionary and without roots and moral standing. The populist right — even in its embrace of economic populism — is inherently incompatible with conservatism as we aim to understand it. It is a corruption of the ethos of conservatism: if democracy were the corrupt form of a constitutional polity, the populist right is the corrupted and tyrannical form of genuine, meaningful conservatism that does not require epithets to be specified (take note of the consonance ‘compassionate conservatism’ that has been the hallmark of discourse in certain sectors, but is anything but compassionate insofar as it is the same Lockean, neoliberal ideology that has been rebranded over and over again by some stale political consultant who has probably never read anything of substance in the philosophy of politics).

We must, then, recite the mantra of conservatism over and over again, but only to meditate upon its spirit: an aversion to unnecessary change, a love for fluid hierarchy, rigid openness, and a res publica which has as its aim the summum bonum and is ruled not by the arbitrary and capricious whims of the many, but of what is right. These principles are inherently incompatible with a laissez faire approach to politics: to be conservative is to be instinctually and thoughtfully disgusted by Mandeville’s doggerel of Publick Virtue, Private Vice. One can support the role of markets in securing freedom whilst decrying the extent to which the economy, once subordinated and distanced from the pursuit of more essential, humanistic ends, has now become the entirety of our lives, the measure of our success, and the ends to which man has rededicated himself. The question of economic justice is the question of justice: it is not subordinate, but an important part of the whole. And no form of justice, no res publica which works for the summum bonum, is compatible with the privations and miseries of an underclass that rots away in indignation and mortal danger, exposed to the pandemic without even an inkling of security. If the dignity of each man is to be preserved, he cannot be subject to such risks; he cannot be turned into a corporate pawn in a game of chess that he has no meaning in. The solution proposed by the recent economic interventions in the market is disguised as temporary, and yet it supports businesses, not men; it supports bond purchases and corporate debt more than it supports men and women who may be in need of support. Miserly conduct toward the many is mated to excessive and obscene generosity for the few who do not seem to require it at all. It is not a solution that is compatible with the principles of our conservatism: it is decidedly opportunistic, expedient, and most imprudent in the wasteful expenditures of public money.

In the temporary nature of relief we see right-wing dogma repeated over and over again: let the market work, markets are self-regulating and will correct themselves. But we know that those orthodoxies have never been true, that the ‘market’ is not some persona ficta having an expressed allegiance to the summum bonum, that self-regulating markets are but a vicious myth that covers for the rise of monopolistic, rent-seeking behaviour that is a net loss, a travesty of justice. The immunisation offered is the inconsiderate of the patient; it inoculates the patient against the wrong disease and pulls wool over his eyes and charms him into a lulling sleep without consideration of the moral travesties it conjures. It assumes the government to be but one form of activity that is no more distinctive and essential than any other, that the government act like the parent who seeks to avoid care for his child until the child is so lacking in discipline and virtue that necessity demands of it what could have easily been done all along in small doses. Laissez faire approaches vacillate between a deficiency of governance and care, and an impious excess of it that causes more harm than good. It is, and can never be, the form of virtuous government that the conservative must demand as his inalienable right.

Slowly, the right has realised that it is anything but right in its approach to economic organisation. While it has, in the past, defended the idea of private property as a means of securing a degree of freedom, it has forgotten those very many who labour without any. The right has stuck to the letter of its dogma but forgotten the spirit of its orthodoxy, which once was — as recently as a century-and-a-half ago — more cognisant of the spirit with which it looked to serve the masses, with a sense of noblesse oblige. The demands and duties warranted by one’s position in the social and economic hierarchy (not always the same) were enforced from the bottom up: landowners were feudal owners who provided subsistence insurance as much as a field to plough for the farmer; that employers were dutibound to tide over their employees in times of need; that largesse was not necessarily reciprocated but still formed an essential part of one’s obligation to others. The vaunted freedoms that have now been turned into monsters originally formed a more social form of the jural co-relative; rights and duties formed two distinct parts of the whole, and a disproportionate focus on the former produces a licentious, vicious peoples, whilst the undue lionisation of the latter beyond reasonable bounds leads to the loss of freedom in ways that can only be described as a despotic tyranny.

This brings us to a key concept that has been subject to a degree of perversity by thinkers of a certain contractarian bend: that of choice. They say that — as Locke does — that choice does not mean that one is free to choose all options given to him. If one is forced to make a choice between privation and oppressive employment, one still has a choice unless actual violence is involved in the act. This is a wholly unsatisfactory and manifestly immoral definition of choice. One can only make substantive choices if one has the means to make such a choice. It is the role of the government to provide the means of making minimal choices: one ought to be free to not subject oneself to the vagaries of a mortally dangerous pandemic to work and simultaneously not face privation. The same goes for those in the twilight of their lives who are faced with redundancies, a collapse of payments of all sorts from retirement plans gone bust, and other such misfortunes which have arisen in no small part because we let the market run amok. That the right does not believe that it is the role of the employer to treat the employee as something more than a means of production is dismal; the right implicitly recognises man as Homo Economicus, as a beast in the body of man, not human in any way, but only in shape and form. They must empower man to become human.

The marriage of right wing politics and laissez faire thought must due a brutish death, as must its calculated overtures to the aspiring tyrants who seek populism as the source of their approbation, and exploit the masses’ need for something to look forward to for electoral gain and political power. The conservative cannot sacrifice the ends to means — no ends justify immoral means — and must not cheapen and degrade the importance of the civitas, of the civic association that it seeks to participate in. Politics is an activity on par with the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, but in its practice, it has been degraded to the domain of thugs and lowlifes who seek power for power’s sake, for the satisfaction of pride and megalomania. It is this that must stop, for if it does not, the right will morph into another perverse form that seeks to endow the state with the qualities of some of the progeny that Hobbes spawned. If conservatism does not reform, we are condemned to the state of nature, of the bellum omnium contra omnes.

What must be done? The answer is straightforward, but hard to implement. It is that man must be taught that the entirety of his life is not the pursuit of funds, that each job is more than a mere task performed. The people must stay sovereign, as I have expressed in my post on Rousseau, but must be ruled by the few, who are not sovereign but responsible to the letter and the spirit of the law, and enter the arena of political power only to advance the summum bonum, not minimise the definition of the common good and transform it into what is in effect an agency of the summum malum. Juridical equality must be accompanied with significant distinctions of rank and status made possible not through the oligarchic recognition of wealth but the recognition of virtue and wisdom. And finally, the economic sphere must be sent back to the place where it came from: subordinate to position occupied by other human activities. The contamination of the sterile, unjustly equalising sphere of money must be kept as far away from the sphere of the political, wholly subordinated to the ends demanded by political activity and thought. Such a system of organisation of society is wholly compatible with essential freedoms as deemed fit: the freedom of press and speech in the highest degree.

This must be complemented by a return to real education: a rigorous and well-rounded education scheme having its focus the knowledge of the studia humanitatis, with some essential components of science, technology, and other subjects as required unless elected. Man is a moral being before an economic being or a scientist or a mathematician or an economist or an art historian. This education must affirm the value of the truth, of objective means, of reason but not of rationality, and must recognise man’s humanity. It must be dedicated to the pursuit of a commonplace culture that is expansive and rich, vitalised at every step by the willing participation of individuals and groups. The state must not affirm the modernist dogma that pervades most institutional sites of culture, but return to the arms of reason and see the importance of trying to understand the essence of man as he is and has always been.

What we see today with the rise of technology is nothing new: it is merely a rinse-and-repeat of the Industrial Revolution. The conservative is cynical of change and does not fear what he sees once he peels back the layers of the onion: it is clarity he seeks, not delusion. In the rent-seeking behaviour of crony capitalism and the rise of the financial industry as the two focal points of greed and lust for money, we see the religious repetition of dogmatic knowledge of the world around us: that the fastest way to make money is from more money (which is ostensibly sterile), and that markets do nothing to prevent the rise of monopolies and oligarchies because markets that regulate themselves are but convenient myths that we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, once we have examined the destruction that has been wrought upon this world. If Earth was given to Man as his positive dominion, with it he inherited the duty of care: the exploitation of our natural resources without examination of their ecological effects on the rural landscape and on life in general cannot be countenanced. But, for too long, conservatives have left the pastoral to the satanic mills of the economy, and sung like an anthem the words, ‘Let it be, Let it be!’

It is, then, the domain of the disenchanted conservative to plead the case that I have: that the government must take responsibility and exercise trusteeship over all economic and social concerns, that economic activity be reduced to a subordinate position so that man has the opportunity to flourish, and that everyone be provided with the opportunity to acquire a bare minimum such that they do not fear the choices they must make if they are threatened to with privation, especially in a nation that can afford it. This is not technocratic government, but a humanist’s res publica. This does not mean that one ought to waste money on endless bureaucracy, on governmental waste: an efficient delivery of that which is necessary will, in my estimation, cost significantly less than our present system, which is oriented to some form of corporate welfare. Such a society can be an open society — it can embrace the outside world as its own — whilst recognising the importance of assimilation. It is not xenophobic; there is nothing on this that would lead one to believe that a certain ethnic or religious minority is any better or worse than another. It is egalitarian insofar as it considers all men to be equal under the law, but allows for essential distinctions of rank and honour. It thrives not on the basis of right, but on the grounds of duty. It integrates into the national character the need for a dispositional conservatism and reinvigorates the commonplace culture by returning it to its faithful roots from which it had strayed. It is not a contract, but a covenant; not a means, but an end; not a part, but the whole. It retains individuality but imbues in the general spirit a sense of community and belonging that makes the aesthetic, emotional, and moral ties between fellow men substantial and integral to society. It saves the res publica from the dustbin, where it has been perniciously placed, and accords to it its rightful place in the sun.