Melanie Philips on the confusion of conservatives:
July 26, 2004
Our post-moral confusion
My oh my, what confusion. There’s more political cross-dressing going on than in a convention of drag queens. My attention was caught by a line in Matthew d’Ancona’s diary in this week’s Spectator:
‘John Redwood asks a question founded on the premise that ‘the UK fights too many wars’, and I notice several Tory heads bobbing up and down in the audience. No doubt about it: the Conservatives are completely rethinking their instinctively robust attitude to military intervention.’
Michael Howard ties himself up in knots about no longer supporting the war in Iraq on the terms on which he originally supported it while claiming that he continues to support it as vigorously as he originally did; two Tory MPs are helping Democrat John Kerry’s push for the White House, and the Massachusetts senator is reportedly more popular than President Bush among Tory MPs and supporters. No doubt about it: the Tories can no longer be relied on to be conservatives. They are turning into what Adrian Wooldridge has presciently dubbed ‘Michael Moore conservatives’ (see May 26 post below) — anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-America and anti-truth.
This confusion was very well reflected at the weekend in a column in the Sunday Times by the self-styled conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan. Under the headline ‘Kerry: the right choice for conservatives’, Sullivan argued that conservatives should not support Bush because he was not a conservative at all but a radical liberal. This is because he junked the old style realpolitik of his father and embraced instead nation-building in the Middle East, expanded government in health and education and funnelled money into religious charities at home, and behaved recklessly in Iraq with some disastrous effects. ‘Real’ conservatism, claimed Sullivan, is espoused by Kerry — scrapping the doctrine of preventive attack, strengthening ties with ‘Old Europe’ and giving stability precedence over democracy and human rights.
But does Sullivan actually approve of this Kerry platform? Well no, apparently; and yet he would support Kerry against Bush. He supports Bush on the war, but then he attacks him; and his bottom line is a quite astonishing complacency:
‘On the most fundamental matter, ie the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realise that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. Much of the hard work has now been done. Nobody seriously believes that Bush will start another war. And in some ways Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation building than Bush. At home Bush has done much to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government and he has been almost criminally reckless in his conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing WMDs. He and America will be hard put to regain the moral high ground after Abu Ghraib.’
Sullivan is all over the place on the war: a faint-heart who, while ostensibly still supporting it, has nevertheless succumbed to the absurd and irrational propaganda of the anti-war mob that says because no WMD have been found they never existed, and that Abu Ghraib destroyed America’s claim to moral superiority over terrorist rogue states. But the significance of his remarks extends beyond the immediate issue of the war. They reveal a moral equivalence that is fundamentally illiberal and unconservative. This is hardly surprising, given Sullivan’s well-known views as a passionate crusader for gay rights, and for the liberalisation of soft drugs on the basis that they do no harm to anyone (someone should show him the psychiatric wards full of people suffering from marijuana psychosis and other mental ailments that directly harm not only the drug users themselves but those who come into contact with them and indeed the wider society).
But the key point is that Sullivan defines himself as a conservative. And there are many within the British Conservative party who hold very similar views on both domestic and foreign issues. But these British Tories are not conservatives. Nor are they authentic liberals (not the same as the statist left, although in the US the terms are even more confusingly conflated). They are libertines, people who have gone with the contemporary cultural flow of destroying moral rules and boundaries. And it is these pseudo-conservatives who tend to be on that wing of the party that is having a fit of the vapours about nation-building and preventive action in the Middle East, and love instead the EU and the UN and John Kerry. They prefer the ‘stability’ of tyranny and its world export, genocidal terrorism. They are, in short, appeasers and sometimes even fellow-travellers of wrong-doing, both at home and abroad.
Such people often think of themselves as liberals. But authentic liberalism is very different. For it was at its core a moral project, based on the desire to suppress the bad and promote the good in the belief that a better society could and should be built. What has happened in recent decades is that this moral core which upholds social norms and discriminates against values that threaten them has been replaced by a post-modern creed of the left, which has tried to destroy all external authority and moral norms and the institutions that uphold them, and replace them by an individualist, moral free-for-all —the creed which has led to the moral relativism and denial of truth that lie at the core of the anti-war movement.
Where Sullivan is absolutely right is to call Bush a liberal. For in repudiating the corrupted values of both the post-moral left and the reactionary appeasers of the right, Bush has indeed exhibited the classic liberal desire to build a better society, along with the characteristic liberal optimism that such a project can and must succeed.
And this is surely why Bush is so hated by the left. For this hatred wildly exceeds the normal dislike of a political opponent. It is as visceral and obsessive as it is irrational. At root, this is surely because Bush has got under the skin of the post-moral left in a way no true conservative ever would. And this is because he has stolen their own clothes and revealed them to be morally naked. He has exposed the falseness of their own claim to be liberal. He has revealed them instead to be reactionaries, who want both to preserve the despotic and terrorist status quo abroad and to go with the flow of social and moral collapse at home, instead of fighting all these deformities and building a better society.
The writer Michael Novak comes close to saying this in an article for National Review. Seeking to explain the ‘orgy of hatred’ for Bush indulged by the left, Novak pinpoints the real target of this hatred which is the ‘neo-conservatives’ with whom Bush is bracketed:
‘Then, too, the Left has developed a tic about neoconservatives. These former leftists (for a former leftist is what a neoconservative is, of the first generation anyway) do have a vision of the future, a bright vision to rival that of the Left. They fight the Left, ideology for ideology, policy proposal for policy proposal, class analysis for class analysis. The neoconservatives side with the conservatives on most issues, but with an attitude, and an aim, and a determination. They are, in the life of the intellect, warriors. Their sharpest weapon is the reality check. That is their comparative advantage over the Left. They have been “mugged by” and won over to reality. The Left has lost argument after argument to the neoconservatives for the past 20 years — has proved to be on the wrong side of reality on issue after issue — and hence reserves for the neoconservatives a special loathing. George W. Bush turns out to have been far closer to the neoconservatives (though he is not one) than Ann Richards and Al Gore ever believed possible. True enough, he is no intellectual, and would not want to be one. Still, his mind is quicker, of a more tempered steel, and honed to a more acute practicality than lazy-minded leftists before 2001 ever allowed themselves to imagine. They “misunderestimated” him then, and still do.’
The neo-cons, the ‘liberals mugged by reality’, are still driven by the progressive desire to build a better world. Bush, with his religious imperative, believes the same thing. They both understand that the post-moral left is doing its damnedest to destroy that world instead and has left a trail of harm, misery, accelerating social breakdown and erosion of human dignity in its wake.
It is authentic liberal values, the bedrock of western democracy and morality, which are under relentless attack from both within and from without. Once, conservatives understood that their mission was to defend such values against an enemy who would destroy them. Now, they so little understand who that enemy is that many of them now march under its banner. That is the crisis of modern conservatism, and the threat to our society.
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