This is John Gray on John Gray-ish form (i.e. well worth reading) telling us Why the Left Keeps Losing.
There is a lot of good stuff in the piece, but for this post I just want to talk about this bit:
"A Blue Labour takeover along the lines of that mounted by Blair cannot occur when the mass membership recruited by Corbyn is made up overwhelmingly of progressives. Even if a takeover was feasible it is doubtful whether voters would support a programme of moral conservatism, which Blue Labour also proposes. The resistance to progressivism in social matters is focused chiefly on law and order and immigration. There is no detectable enthusiasm for the restoration of traditional family structures or sexual mores. Working-class voters want security and respect, not a wholly different form of life."
This is completely true. And it is an important point for the future of the Left - and the future of the Right. More below.
Your respectable, educated, urban Conservative voter will describe himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. Indeed, he may, like The Economist, describe right wing economic views as "classical liberalism". (I say "he" because, let's face it, this is the sort of thing young men say.) We know about such people and we don't need to worry about them (at least not today).
Today we are concerned with the far more numerous occupants of the opposite quadrant of the well-known two-dimension political space diagram, i.e. the people who combine left-wing economic views with right-wing social ones. These are the people that Theresa May and Boris Johnson both attempted to convert to the Conservative Party's cause, the latter with more success than the former.
The point I want to make is that it is important to be aware that there is an important distinction between cultural conservatism and social conservatism. (Gray uses the phrase "moral conservatism" for what I - and Post-Liberal Pete - refer to as "social conservatism". I will explain my preference below.)
Let's start by talking about religion.
It is a striking fact that people with strong religious beliefs and/or backgrounds are hugely over-represented at the top of British politics. Of our last 5 Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Theresa May are both well-known for their overt religious observance, and if you have read a profile of Gordon Brown that does not include the phrase "son of the manse" then you are indeed fortunate. That amount of religiosity in upbringing (40% of PMs since 1997 have had a church minister for a father!) and adult practice is out of all proportion to the wider British population. You should not ignore it.
Note that the religion of our political leaders is not merely for form's sake: I give you the conception of Leo Blair, Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism after leaving office and Tim Farron's struggles to talk about homosexuality as striking examples of incidents explicable only by reference to serious attempts to follow religious beliefs come what may. Think also of Rebecca Long-Bailey and this attempt to scupper her by publicising her beliefs on abortion, e.g., her statement that "it is currently legal to terminate a pregnancy up to full-term on the grounds of disability while the upper limit is 24 weeks if there is no disability. I personally do not agree with this position and agree with the words of the Disability Rights Commission that “the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally”". What a toxic woman-hater she must be to say that!
People with strong religious beliefs are also, I think, over-represented among people who have tried to think about how to get the economically left-wing/socially right-wing vote, i.e. people who think about 'Blue Labour' or 'Red Tories'. Blue Labour itself was founded by Lord Glasman, whom I understand regularly attends synagogue, while Phillip Blond, who wrote Red Tory, was or is a theologian. Again, these people are not representative of British society as a whole.
Strong and serious religious belief often comes with social conservatism. What I mean by "social conservatism" is sympathy for traditional views on how society should be ordered: think of traditional views on abortion, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, public drunkenness, divorce, gambling etc etc. Many religious people do not hold traditional views on these topics, but they are at least familiar with them and will understand why other people do hold them: they understand them 'from the inside', so to speak. As a result they will know, for example, that opposition to abortion may be motivated by a genuine and sincere desire to protect vulnerable human beings and not merely a hatred of women or some such liberal caricature: it might be that Long-Bailey really does care about the dignity of disabled people.
Of course, many non-religious people also hold traditional views on some or all of these topics, but I suspect that in the absence of a developed account of what human beings and human relationships are for (an account that tends to need a deity), they will be hard pushed to explain why. Take, for example, traditional views on bestiality (views which are still widely held outside religious circles) or on the maximum number of people in a marriage: in which direction do you predict non-religious beliefs on these topics moving? Just try to think why a non-religious person should keep to the old views on these matters if everyone else were to change their mind: love is love, isn't it?
This kind of social conservatism is not the same thing as cultural conservatism. Cultural conservatism is an attachment to that which exists and is beloved in the country. This means, for present purposes: patriotism and a concern for law and order (right-wing?), but also a love of the NHS (left-wing?), the British sense of humour, eating cheap but tasty pork products, a tolerance of exposed male and female flesh in hardly differing degrees (is that right-wing or left-wing?), drinking tea (nothing to do with left-wing or right-wing?), etc, etc. It includes a fair degree of tolerance of sexual promiscuity (both gay and straight) and public drunkenness: indeed, part of its opposition to Islamic observance comes from these features.
Cultural conservatism is not devoid of morality (and hence I would not wish to use the phrase "moral conservatism" to describe social conservativism), but its morality is different from that of social conservatives. Ask yourself this: how do you feel about paedophiles in prison being beaten up by other prisoners? The social conservative is against it; the cultural conservative feels that the paedo was asking for it, at least to some extent.
If you want a cultural example of the difference between social and cultural conservatism then I give you Gavin and Stacey: this is a programme that has no concern for socially conservative mores. It is intended to show people living in realistic modern environments, doing broadly plausible things - and to celebrate them. It says: this is how you are and this is what you do - and that's all right.
By contrast, here is A Gay Man's Advice to Ghetto Christians. This is Rod Dreher taking the view that Christians will soon be a rather despised minority in a nominally free country and looking to the equivalent experience of gay men in the past for help. This is not the sort of thing a social conservative would do: for all that they are perfectly happy with the family-friendly heteronormative homosexuality we see around us today, they are perhaps less happy with the campness, subterfuge and underground codes of yesteryear. But Dreher is no knee-jerk social conservative or homophobe (I have previously linked to a New Yorker article that compares his life story to the typical story of a gay man) and his moral conservatism makes him willing to learn from people culturally quite different from himself.
So that's the landscape we are talking about. Where are the people?
The plain fact is that there are a lot more cultural conservatives than social ones: Gavin and Stacey is a bigger deal than Rod Dreher. Look at America: when people point out that Trump is not at all (socially) conservative and yet he gets lots of (culturally) conservative votes, they are not pointing out the paradox they think they have spotted - they just don't know what 'conservative' means. And the same is true of people spotting that Boris Johnson has had a couple of wives and who knows how many children. Cultural conservatism might be roughly approximated by imagining how things were a generation ago - say 25/30 years - and thinking that that was fine. Well, how were things in the 1990s? Full of things that social conservatives didn't like either. People who are annoyed about "wokeness" don't want to go back to the 1950s - they just want to go back to a few years ago when they knew where they were.
If the Labour Party wants to win the next election, it needs to win over cultural conservatives. To put it in a nutshell, it needs a leader who could plausibly be imagined singing "Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo-dah, doo-dah" after a few drinks: every cultural conservative knows it that is not an offensive song and merrily hopes that the Germans love singing their equivalent version - but can you imagine the leader of the Labour Party understanding that at a visceral level? If so, then you have a vote-winner on your hands.
But instead of having cultural conservatives, the Labour Party has got social conservatives. Catholics are a good example: internationalist (often as a matter of instinct and/or for family reasons), concerned about poverty, concerned about the environment, concerned about family life, opposed to abortion and divorce, suspicious of wars and nuclear weapons, not overly keen on capitalism, viscerally disgusted by Nigel Farage - and so on. (Think also of Muslims: the phrase "conservative Muslim" does not summon up the image of a typical Conservative voter, and now you know why.) In some times and places the views of these sorts of people fit into cultural conservatism - but increasingly they do not. So it happens that many of these people find themselves on the left nowadays - and indeed some of these views fit nicely into secular left-liberalism. But then the Left, unable to understand what it is that conservatives really think, can come to suppose that it has found some "conservatives" because it has found some people with what it thinks of as old-fashioned views. It would be wrong about this: the conservatism that social conservatives bring to the Left is the wrong kind of conservatism for the Labour Party's electoral purposes.
Which brings us back to Tony Blair. He was more of a social conservative than a cultural one, but he was culturally conservative enough. The Labour Party should be looking for another Blair: but it should not look at what Blair himself thought was important, but rather the reassurance he provided to people who are quite different from the leadership of the Labour Party but abundant in the country.
But let's not forget the social conservatives. As I say, they have had a good run at the top of politics in recent decades, but their place there is becoming increasingly untenable. With the Left adopting a strong moral code that is antipathetic to their own, and the Right increasingly apathetic about their concerns (Gray: "There is no detectable enthusiasm for the restoration of traditional family structures or sexual mores. Working-class voters want security and respect, not a wholly different form of life."), social conservatives are becoming politically homeless. This will not be the case forever, for reasons I hope to explore in a future post, but I would ask you to look out for the small but noticeable story during the next decade of various kinds of small-c conservatives finding themselves at odds with the major political parties.
UPDATE: And see Post-Liberal Pete here for some more stuff, consistent with I say above.
There is a lot of good stuff in the piece, but for this post I just want to talk about this bit:
This is completely true. And it is an important point for the future of the Left - and the future of the Right. More below.
Your respectable, educated, urban Conservative voter will describe himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. Indeed, he may, like The Economist, describe right wing economic views as "classical liberalism". (I say "he" because, let's face it, this is the sort of thing young men say.) We know about such people and we don't need to worry about them (at least not today).
Today we are concerned with the far more numerous occupants of the opposite quadrant of the well-known two-dimension political space diagram, i.e. the people who combine left-wing economic views with right-wing social ones. These are the people that Theresa May and Boris Johnson both attempted to convert to the Conservative Party's cause, the latter with more success than the former.
The point I want to make is that it is important to be aware that there is an important distinction between cultural conservatism and social conservatism. (Gray uses the phrase "moral conservatism" for what I - and Post-Liberal Pete - refer to as "social conservatism". I will explain my preference below.)
Let's start by talking about religion.
It is a striking fact that people with strong religious beliefs and/or backgrounds are hugely over-represented at the top of British politics. Of our last 5 Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Theresa May are both well-known for their overt religious observance, and if you have read a profile of Gordon Brown that does not include the phrase "son of the manse" then you are indeed fortunate. That amount of religiosity in upbringing (40% of PMs since 1997 have had a church minister for a father!) and adult practice is out of all proportion to the wider British population. You should not ignore it.
Note that the religion of our political leaders is not merely for form's sake: I give you the conception of Leo Blair, Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism after leaving office and Tim Farron's struggles to talk about homosexuality as striking examples of incidents explicable only by reference to serious attempts to follow religious beliefs come what may. Think also of Rebecca Long-Bailey and this attempt to scupper her by publicising her beliefs on abortion, e.g., her statement that "it is currently legal to terminate a pregnancy up to full-term on the grounds of disability while the upper limit is 24 weeks if there is no disability. I personally do not agree with this position and agree with the words of the Disability Rights Commission that “the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally”". What a toxic woman-hater she must be to say that!
People with strong religious beliefs are also, I think, over-represented among people who have tried to think about how to get the economically left-wing/socially right-wing vote, i.e. people who think about 'Blue Labour' or 'Red Tories'. Blue Labour itself was founded by Lord Glasman, whom I understand regularly attends synagogue, while Phillip Blond, who wrote Red Tory, was or is a theologian. Again, these people are not representative of British society as a whole.
Strong and serious religious belief often comes with social conservatism. What I mean by "social conservatism" is sympathy for traditional views on how society should be ordered: think of traditional views on abortion, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, public drunkenness, divorce, gambling etc etc. Many religious people do not hold traditional views on these topics, but they are at least familiar with them and will understand why other people do hold them: they understand them 'from the inside', so to speak. As a result they will know, for example, that opposition to abortion may be motivated by a genuine and sincere desire to protect vulnerable human beings and not merely a hatred of women or some such liberal caricature: it might be that Long-Bailey really does care about the dignity of disabled people.
Of course, many non-religious people also hold traditional views on some or all of these topics, but I suspect that in the absence of a developed account of what human beings and human relationships are for (an account that tends to need a deity), they will be hard pushed to explain why. Take, for example, traditional views on bestiality (views which are still widely held outside religious circles) or on the maximum number of people in a marriage: in which direction do you predict non-religious beliefs on these topics moving? Just try to think why a non-religious person should keep to the old views on these matters if everyone else were to change their mind: love is love, isn't it?
This kind of social conservatism is not the same thing as cultural conservatism. Cultural conservatism is an attachment to that which exists and is beloved in the country. This means, for present purposes: patriotism and a concern for law and order (right-wing?), but also a love of the NHS (left-wing?), the British sense of humour, eating cheap but tasty pork products, a tolerance of exposed male and female flesh in hardly differing degrees (is that right-wing or left-wing?), drinking tea (nothing to do with left-wing or right-wing?), etc, etc. It includes a fair degree of tolerance of sexual promiscuity (both gay and straight) and public drunkenness: indeed, part of its opposition to Islamic observance comes from these features.
Cultural conservatism is not devoid of morality (and hence I would not wish to use the phrase "moral conservatism" to describe social conservativism), but its morality is different from that of social conservatives. Ask yourself this: how do you feel about paedophiles in prison being beaten up by other prisoners? The social conservative is against it; the cultural conservative feels that the paedo was asking for it, at least to some extent.
If you want a cultural example of the difference between social and cultural conservatism then I give you Gavin and Stacey: this is a programme that has no concern for socially conservative mores. It is intended to show people living in realistic modern environments, doing broadly plausible things - and to celebrate them. It says: this is how you are and this is what you do - and that's all right.
By contrast, here is A Gay Man's Advice to Ghetto Christians. This is Rod Dreher taking the view that Christians will soon be a rather despised minority in a nominally free country and looking to the equivalent experience of gay men in the past for help. This is not the sort of thing a social conservative would do: for all that they are perfectly happy with the family-friendly heteronormative homosexuality we see around us today, they are perhaps less happy with the campness, subterfuge and underground codes of yesteryear. But Dreher is no knee-jerk social conservative or homophobe (I have previously linked to a New Yorker article that compares his life story to the typical story of a gay man) and his moral conservatism makes him willing to learn from people culturally quite different from himself.
So that's the landscape we are talking about. Where are the people?
The plain fact is that there are a lot more cultural conservatives than social ones: Gavin and Stacey is a bigger deal than Rod Dreher. Look at America: when people point out that Trump is not at all (socially) conservative and yet he gets lots of (culturally) conservative votes, they are not pointing out the paradox they think they have spotted - they just don't know what 'conservative' means. And the same is true of people spotting that Boris Johnson has had a couple of wives and who knows how many children. Cultural conservatism might be roughly approximated by imagining how things were a generation ago - say 25/30 years - and thinking that that was fine. Well, how were things in the 1990s? Full of things that social conservatives didn't like either. People who are annoyed about "wokeness" don't want to go back to the 1950s - they just want to go back to a few years ago when they knew where they were.
If the Labour Party wants to win the next election, it needs to win over cultural conservatives. To put it in a nutshell, it needs a leader who could plausibly be imagined singing "Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo-dah, doo-dah" after a few drinks: every cultural conservative knows it that is not an offensive song and merrily hopes that the Germans love singing their equivalent version - but can you imagine the leader of the Labour Party understanding that at a visceral level? If so, then you have a vote-winner on your hands.
But instead of having cultural conservatives, the Labour Party has got social conservatives. Catholics are a good example: internationalist (often as a matter of instinct and/or for family reasons), concerned about poverty, concerned about the environment, concerned about family life, opposed to abortion and divorce, suspicious of wars and nuclear weapons, not overly keen on capitalism, viscerally disgusted by Nigel Farage - and so on. (Think also of Muslims: the phrase "conservative Muslim" does not summon up the image of a typical Conservative voter, and now you know why.) In some times and places the views of these sorts of people fit into cultural conservatism - but increasingly they do not. So it happens that many of these people find themselves on the left nowadays - and indeed some of these views fit nicely into secular left-liberalism. But then the Left, unable to understand what it is that conservatives really think, can come to suppose that it has found some "conservatives" because it has found some people with what it thinks of as old-fashioned views. It would be wrong about this: the conservatism that social conservatives bring to the Left is the wrong kind of conservatism for the Labour Party's electoral purposes.
Which brings us back to Tony Blair. He was more of a social conservative than a cultural one, but he was culturally conservative enough. The Labour Party should be looking for another Blair: but it should not look at what Blair himself thought was important, but rather the reassurance he provided to people who are quite different from the leadership of the Labour Party but abundant in the country.
But let's not forget the social conservatives. As I say, they have had a good run at the top of politics in recent decades, but their place there is becoming increasingly untenable. With the Left adopting a strong moral code that is antipathetic to their own, and the Right increasingly apathetic about their concerns (Gray: "There is no detectable enthusiasm for the restoration of traditional family structures or sexual mores. Working-class voters want security and respect, not a wholly different form of life."), social conservatives are becoming politically homeless. This will not be the case forever, for reasons I hope to explore in a future post, but I would ask you to look out for the small but noticeable story during the next decade of various kinds of small-c conservatives finding themselves at odds with the major political parties.
UPDATE: And see Post-Liberal Pete here for some more stuff, consistent with I say above.
No comments:
Post a Comment