There is No Coherent ‘Conservative’ Doctrine, so Arguing About how ‘Conservative’ the Leadership Candidates are is Pointless

Here we are again. Politics offers us the amusement of the diversion summarised poetically by King Lear as, ‘Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.’ Truss is out. Kwarteng is out. Hunt is in. Johnson may win: he may lose. Sunak may win: he may lose. Mordaunt may try for something. A compromise may be arranged. But let us be clear about one thing. The name Conservative is no criterion for anything any of them is likely to suggest.

What is ‘conservative’?

It is the name of a party, thus capitalised: Conservative.

What is ‘conservatism’?

There is a phenomenon, which we will call x. This x is the resistance of society to the taxations and coercions of the state.

In order to make sense of this it is worth imagining a scenario involving two characters, State and Society.

State says, ‘Do this!’

Society says, or, more likely, thinks, ‘Why?’, and ‘No!’, and, reluctantly, ‘Let’s get on with it then.’

State is irritable, wants things to be done immediately, wants to create Society in its own image. Society wants to resist this, while making as few concessions to State as are compatible with good order. Society has a longer sense of time than State.

State is a word for king, prince, lord, sovereign, government, constitutional democracy, etc. It is a word for a singular thing. Society is a word for a multitude, the people, us: it singularly summarises something which should never be seen as singular.

What happened was that x, something which was natural, inchoate, atavistic, primitive, inarticulate, and outside politics, was articulated by some clever men in the early nineteenth century, given the name ‘conservatism’, and brought inside politics.

Politics in England is confused. It is confused, for instance, by the distinction of Government and Opposition within Parliament. This is a trick. Originally, Government was State, a singular thing in the centre, and Opposition was Society, the entire world outside it. Opposition was based on x. In the 17th and 18th centuries some honest commentators (and some unscrupulous statesmen) called them Court and Country. But Opposition was always fractured, splintered, various. (Good opposition should never be unified. Government should speak with one voice; Opposition never should.)

Court was the ‘junto’ or ‘cabal’ at the centre: the power centre dominated by King (Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, George I) along with important ministers (Clarendon, Danby, Harley, Sunderland, Walpole, etc). It was usually considered corrupt. And why not? It was corrupt. Country was everyone else. It was usually considered honest, since x is honest, whereas y, the innovations and extractions of the rulers, to which x is the response, are usually matters of force and fraud.

This distinction is at the root of all populisms. Populism is basically the opposition of Country to Court.

Everything became muddled when Bolingbroke, resentful of Walpole’s dominance of Court, attempted to create a Country party. What he wanted to do was brilliant: an open conspiracy. If Walpole was the original corrupt statesman, inside the system, Bolingbroke was the original unscrupulous statesman, outside the system, trying to come in. He wanted to take Society, honest, not corrupt, and use it to cast the Court party to one side, by making Society into the State. He failed. Whigs ruled for another twenty years, until cast aside by George III for the Tories. But the system was oligarchic, whether Whig or Tory, and remained unruffled and unreformed, until the Great Reform Act of 1832: which was an attempt by Whigs to respond to the French Revolution by taking their own ideas seriously, and reform the system in favour of greater inclusion of Society into State.

It was around the same time, in 1826, that Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse joked about the existence of ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ standing against ‘His Majesty’s Government’. The joke was immediately recognised to be the truth of the system. Government and Opposition were no longer Court, within, and Country, without: both were within the same system, standing over against each across the despatch boxes. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a wonderful fiction, which was that politics would be carried out within the House of Commons, and relayed to everyone by newspapers and managed by elections and eventually organised political parties.

Conservatism is a word invented in the 1830s. It originally meant: ‘Those who were against opening up State to Society but now have changed their minds at least to the extent of accepting the opening up: though they still remain committed to holding onto as much of the old order as possible.’

So originally ‘Conservatism’ was compromised, even corrupt. Men had opposed the French Revolution and the Reform Act, but now they accepted them. They had been convinced, not by Truth, but by Time. And ‘conservatism’ became a word for the attempt to recognise the political significance of time.

(The word ‘conservatism’ makes most sense when there is still some memory of the moment when time became politically significant. The further we drift from the 18th Century the less sense it can possibly make.)

Conservatism has always been ambiguous. By the middle of the 20th Century – sufficiently distant from Burke’s Reflections and any angst about the French Revolution – commentators like Michael Oakeshott and Samuel Huntington came along to say calming and shrewd things about conservatism. In fact, they were inventing new justifications for it. It was, said Huntington, a ‘situational’ doctrine. What he meant was that it had no core or essence. Everything would depend on situation. And the reason is obvious enough. One can only conserve what is available for conservation. It was, said Oakeshott, holding on to whatever one has – in the present. It was nothing to do with the past. Now, what both Oakeshott and Huntington did was to take this word, which had originally been about the political significance of time, out of time: or, rather, to emphasise only the present. No more was conservatism about past historic; now, it was only about present continuous.

But, originally, conservatism had been a word about something we had lost, and was now in the past.

Truly, then, ‘conservatism’ should carry with it a memory of the politics of before 1789: but if we are too distant from 1789 then this has almost no meaning at all: and so ‘conservatism’ becomes a present-centred politics, of ‘holding on to whatever we have’. But ‘whatever we have’ can be anything. It is a dark historical irony which means that conservatism can be the politics of conserving anything – including bits of Gladstone’s, Lloyd George’s, Attlee’s and Blair’s legacies, not to mention Lenin’s or Gramsci’s.

Now, I said that x is resistance to be driven by our rulers. It is the natural disposition of Society. It is the natural response of Society to the State.

This natural thing x was named ‘conservatism’ by some intrepid politicians after the French Revolution. And then, very cleverly, it was brought into the State, into Court, into Government and called ‘conservatism’. There was now a Conservative Party. This is, everyone says, the oldest and greatest ruling cabal in all the world: the most ruthless entity, concerned with power, all those clichés. But no one really says what the problem is with the Conservative Party. It is that it took a name which was an appropriate name for Society or Country hostility to State or Court and turned it into a state or court party.

The Conservative Party has been a paradoxical means by which a Court can impose itself on Country. Occasionally, it finds itself obliged to pay attention to Country. For instance, Brexit. Cameron, like everyone else of the Court, was opposed to Brexit. The Country wanted it. Johnson temporised. His instincts were actually more ‘conservative’ in this sense than Cameron’s (in seeing the obligation to pay attention occasionally to Country). But any credit Johnson achieved by Brexit was lost by Covid. Covid was, in effect, the proof, to anyone capable of seeing it, that we are still in the early 18th Century, that there is a Court and a Country: with the difference that Court has spent the last three centuries since Walpole ‘diversifying’ and ‘engaging with outreach’, so to speak, in such a way that it has dragooned half the population – the higher (sic) educated (sic) half – into Court politics: using various means: chief amongst them financial inducement and ideological capture via various politically correct convictions. (Ian Robinson defined ‘political correctness’ unforgettably as ‘the official beliefs of the ruling class’.) Finally, one of Court’s greatest tricks is in, at times, using the word ‘conservative’ – the word for that original x which was our resistance to the Court.

This history is all extremely complicated. Conservatism, obviously, owes something to Bolingbroke, the original unscrupulous statesman, and to Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution. But, as everyone knows, Burke was a Whig: and Burke hated Bolingbroke. The lines are all twisted and fractured. Words offer an apparent continuity. But the continuities embodied and gestured at by the word ‘conservative’ are delusive: they are part of the trick by which former statesman attempted to respond to real situations. These situations are gone and conservatism remains: but in our situation in which everything is so very late, or postmodern, and where the most ‘conservative’ position appears to be agreement with Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism or Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations, all of these newspaper articles about whether Johnson or Sunak or Truss or anyone is ‘conservative’ enough or in fact ‘liberal’ are simply worthless.

We might as well use words like Guelph and Ghibelline to describe our contemporary politics, which would at least have the advantage of being so unfamiliar we would have to think about what they mean. The Conservative Party is, in large part, a conspiracy against thinking about what conservatism means. So there is no point using words like ‘conservatism’ to think about Conservatism.

Dr. James Alexander is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.