Burke versus Gramsci – the Great British Institution and the Conservative Dilemma

 Conservatives look to Edmund Burke as their great founding father.  Central to Burkean thought is the institution with its historical memory as a repository of the wisdom of the ancestors.  In terms of modern philosophy and the Burkean tradition one might also look to Alasdair MacIntyre in his account of institutions and nations acquiring a tradition of virtue and as a Burkean opponent of Burke’s dreaded sophists, economists and calculators .

If conservatism depends for its philosophy upon manmade institutions there is always the risk such institutions will prove fatally fallible and corruptible.  Such could well be the problem in today’s United Kingdom.  Unlike the United States with its revolutionary origins, there has not been such a strong suspicion of Government and institutions within the British Right, sometimes quite the opposite.  The Crown and the Church as Margaret Thatcher once outlined are of far greater import to a Tory than the economy.  This perspective, it should be remembered, was held by the Conservative Prime Minister now looked to as an exemplar by today’s sophists, calculators and economists – the libertarian and neoliberal Right.

Margaret Thatcher though experienced the problem of the dilemma I intend to outline at first-hand.  All the British institutions, the Church of England, the BBC and even the hierarchy of the Conservative Party were opposed to her.  This tension has only grown more stretched and extreme.  While the Conservative Party has moved culturally to the Left, it is still faced by a hostile hard Left in control of the institutions that it should naturally be at home with.

The Church of England is no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, as the saying had it.  The BBC is faced with calls to be defenestrated by conservatives not radicals, because of its cultural Marxism.  Even the Conservative Party itself, at least its high command, is now a proponent of the hard-left cultural agenda in terms of same-sex marriage, “diversity” and equality of outcome.

It seems as though the Gramsci agenda of the “long march through the institutions” as extreme Leftist German-activist Rudi Dutschke put it, has been emphatically achieved in Great Britain.  The universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, the BBC, the Church are all advocates of a hard-line cultural Marxist agenda dressed up in palatable phrases such as “diversity”, “equality”, “openness”.

So what does a Burkean conservative do when the institutions its whole philosophy seeks to conserve and be guided by have fallen into the hands of the Marxists?  One answer is the populist response, looking to the American Right as an example.  Here characters like Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks are notable champions for such an agenda.  Indeed, despite being placed upon the Right, their populist agenda sometimes puts them on the Left.  For example, whereas an earlier Eurosceptic like Enoch Powell was a keen defender of the House of Lords, as well as the Crown and the established Church, Farage and Banks are radical constitutional-reformers.

The other response is the classically liberal agenda, advocated by the sophists, calculators and economists that conservatives should instinctively distrust.  From this free-marketeer liberal perspective privatisation rather than conservation is the answer to the BBC’s political subversion.  The free market is not really a conservative response to dealing with preservation of the institution.  We are not talking about a nationalised industry, but a British institution which is a custodian of many great British traditions.  Would commercialisation and advertising culture really be a conservative answer?

One might contrast arch-liberal free-marketeer George Osborne with populist Nigel Farage as two contrasting answers to the Gramscian victory within British institutions from Oxbridge to the BBC.  To abolish our institutions though is surely not a conservative solution, whether it be BBC privatisation or Church disestablishment. 

The populism of Brexit might have unleashed patriotic forces against the Gramsci institutions, but populist nationalism is not inherently conservative, as any cursory knowledge of Nineteenth Century nationalism will tell us.

It is undoubtedly the case that while the Right and conservatism look to be in the ascendancy, the whole movement is riven by internal contradictions.  This new populism rightly unleashed against the EU has now turned on British institutions like the House of Lords (admittedly corrupted into a culturally Marxist institution by the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg).  It could just as easily turn upon the Monarchy and nationalism again would have reverted to its radical-Leftist Nineteenth-Century roots.

It has to be admitted that when the Marxists own and control what you are trying to defend it is difficult to know how to proceed.  The only answer I believe is not one for people looking for instant solutions.  Only a gradual return to the values of Tradition will rescue our institutions and our culture.  And this might have to be carried out in a radical and unconventional way, outside of the apparatus of British institutions.  It might mean home schooling of our children, to teach them traditional values outside of the Marxist-run education system.  It might mean leaving the Church of England as a Church of Laodicea for a more traditionalist denomination that might feel foreign at first, such as Eastern Orthodoxy.  It might mean stepping back from the rat-race of the neoliberal economy with more self-sufficiency and less consumption.  In short it might mean letting the light of conservative tradition shine before men as an example, rather than trying to fight for it and impose it through democratic elections and the party system.  From the small acorn and with Providential nurture we might see a large oak of conservative counter-culture grow that provides a genuine alternative to the anomie of cultural Marxism and its insipid shadow, neoliberalism.  Only with a cultural change, rather than election victories will conservatives see their institutions restored and again linked back to the Burkean wisdom of ancestors. 

Civic Virtue and the World

Aristotle taught that man’s telos was to achieve virtue.  Just as the purpose of a musical instrument is to be played and thereby produce music, so Man is to live ethically.  Part of that ethical living is to make a commitment to the Polis, the city state, and to devote oneself to public life.  It is ethical to participate in politics.

As Edmund Burke famously pointed out, for evil to triumph good men simply need to do nothing.  If men of virtue do not participate in public life it will become dominated and controlled by the corrupt, the careerist and even the criminal.  In the West after generations of participation, engagement in politics has been decreasing, leaving the field of public life to the cranks and fanatics that our current university system seems intent on churning out of its post-modern system.  Indeed, it seems it is only those driven by vanity as opposed to virtue that have the energy and zeal to enter public life.  

Whether it is fanatics like Corbyn and McDonnell who wish to change the country in a way no normal person could accept or shallow careerists like David Cameron, there seems little room for the man committed to public service as an Aristotlian virtue.  There are two predominant forces in politics today – the ideological leftist extremists and the careerists.

In the United States we have seen a peaceful revolution against this corrupt (in the broadest sense of the word) system.  Donald Trump was elected because there was something rotten in the state of the Western democracy.  A professional and managerial political class committed to its own shibboleths of ideology, well out of step with the consensus of normal people had become isolated in its apparently impregnable position of power.  Donald Trump was elected to change all that – he said the unsayable in an environment of suffocating political correctness.  Paradoxically this New York TV celebrity gave a voice to traditionalist conservatives and Christians deeply troubled by the course the political class had set their nation upon.

It is no cliché to draw a parallel with Brexit.  That other Anglo-Saxon nation, the old country, the United Kingdom went through its own peaceful revolution in the Brexit vote.  Delivering the largest democratic mandate in history the British public voted decisively to leave the international and globalist project that was set up to destroy the nation state and democratic accountability - the European Union.  In England and Wales the vote was emphatically for leave, the figure only being made more marginal by a capital city out of step culturally and politically with England and Wales as a whole.  Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain for specific reasons and should not be considered as having voted against the United Kingdom itself.

Whereas in recent weeks we have seen a significant triumph for the Trump administration, in the exoneration of the President from any suspicion of being complicit with the Russian Government to win the election; in the United Kingdom Brexit has been dealt what is perhaps a fatal blow.  Theresa May will now work across the House of Commons, where there is a majority committed to stopping Brexit.

This tells us much of the decline of British institutions after forty years of being governed by an unelected and foreign bureaucracy.  It is no wonder that when Parliament was merely there to provide a fig leaf for two thirds of laws not democratically processed, the quality of politician and the institution of Parliament itself should have suffered a serious decline.  Our political class is not up to the job of Brexit because it has been enervated and corrupted by the European Union and its corrosive effect on representative democracy.  Participation in politics when ruled by Brussels is a charade and it has attracted those who are happy to play a charade.  Now their bluff is called and they are terrified by the thought of political responsibility and accountability.  What might seem like an opportunity to the public man of integrity is terrifying to the careerist politician.

The corrupt careerists therefore did what comes easiest to them, they lied that they would deliver Brexit while spending three years plotting to subvert the democratic result of the referendum.  This is of course disgraceful, wrong and corrupt.  How should one respond?

Despair or extremism are two very tempting responses.  Our system appears to have shown itself irredeemable.  The public gave Parliament a chance to restore its sovereignty and it preferred vassalage.  Yet neither anger nor despair are responses that one striving for virtue should countenance.

There is the so-called Benedict option  If we look at the betrayal of Brexit not in isolation but as symptomatic of the decline of Western politics, then rather than despair should we not be liberated from placing any hope in temporal victories?    One could then withdraw from the world not in despair, but in a spirit of devotion and hope for the next world.  It is interesting to note that Aristotle himself placed the life of contemplation at an even higher level of attainment in virtue than civic participation.

If we are thinking in typological terms, then an analogy might be drawn between a Brussels-administered United Kingdom and First-Century Judea, with its charade of independence, while de facto power was very much in the hands of the Roman administration.

There was a political movement in Judea, the Zealots, who sought for a political victory over Rome.  They were disappointed in a corrupt Jewish establishment that had come to terms with Rome.  These zealots were also to be deeply disappointed in Christ, because they had hoped for a Messiah who would overturn the oppressors and bring about a political Utopia in the form of a new Davidic Zion, powerful and flourishing.  Yet as Christ taught, His kingdom is not of this world.

The temptation to zealotry in today’s circumstances would be to slip into a revolutionary mindset, perhaps even looking at a violent solution to the political corruption and lack of national sovereignty revealed by the Brexit betrayal.  Such an extremist Brexiteer zealotry is not the answer.

Yet again just as despair and extremism are temptations that should be resisted, abdication of responsibility is not an answer either.  We are in the world at the moment that we should be, with all the responsibilities that entail to act or not.  We cannot entirely disengage from this disappointing and fallen world, but neither can we place the totality of our hope in it.
 

Christian civilization is under attack in subtle ways, for the serpent is the subtlest creature in the garden.  Whether it is the attack on gender as a reality or national identity or marriage, forces have combined to destroy the foundations of our culture.  Brexit is just one example of this attack on all that gives meaning, in that national identity has to be dissolved if the post-modern agenda is to succeed. 

The point is not to give in to despair, but to continue the good fight, with an expectation of all being put right eschatologically.  With the specific example of Brexit our nation shook and destabilised the foundations of the new establishment’s new Tower of Babel.  It is right to continue shaking it, without believing we can replace it with a perfect state ourselves.  If we were to do that we fall into the very heresy of chiliasm that lies behind the concept of the European Union.    There will never be an ultimate political solution to this world, but it is right to strive against corruption and duplicity and attacks on our core values.

GLOBALISM TRUMPED?

After a long hiatus and many major political events having taken place I have decided to resume this 'blog.  This year is the centennial anniversary of both the end of the Great War and the regicide of the Tsar - two events that were to shape the next century in so many dreadful ways.  From the perspective of the English shires neither event brought much happiness.  The Great War drastically and tragically reduced the number of young men in the fields and was arguably the cause of the next cataclysm, the Second World War.  The Tsar's murder and the murder of the Empress, the Tsarevich and their daughters, made hard-line Socialism a real alternative that inspired some of the British Left's worst attacks on the English of the shires.

The Century went on to see rapid mechanisation of agriculture, the replacement of smallholders with agri-business, the mass shifting of women into the workplace, with all the implications for family, and a profound loss of confidence in faith and patriotism.  After the Second World War the move towards the abolition of the nation state by the powerful elite of Europe gathered momentum and became more formalised with the first steps towards a United Europe.  With National Socialism vanquished in the Second World War and International Socialism with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama's End of History with the triumph of liberalism seemed to have been reached.  The secularist individual whose only guiding principle is choice has become the ubermensch, so contrary to the actual Nietzschean idea.

Yet this victory now seems hollow.  If the new liberal world can be seen as globalist and cosmopolitan, so that everyone is just an individual, not defined by culture, religion or nationality - a citizen of the world and therefore a citizen of nowhere to paraphrase the current (at the time of writing) Prime Minister - then human beings seem to be rebelling against this individualist, consumerist globalism.

And this rebellion is completely understandable, because we are more than consumers, more than individuals and life is about more than choice.  The effect on the English shires of this liberal globalism has been profound.  The high street has become a uniform entity from John o' Groats to Lands End.  Agricultural workers are cheaper migrant labour, and even more noticeably to most, retail and services have recruited from abroad, changing the fabric of small communities and the pressure to accommodate a massive influx of foreigners means the green and pleasant land young men went to die for a century ago is to be turned into housing.  Meanwhile a political class that has become absorbed into a globalist elite has no sensitivity or understanding of the impact of these issues, only able to think as it is, in terms of GDP and economic calculation.

Globalisation can certainly be said to have had a greater impact on the third-world economies, for better or worse.  Economic growth has certainly been achieved (and we cannot surely begrudge that) but at the expense of traditional lifestyles and has brought in the Western-liberal influence that cannot tolerate the traditional family structure and wants to pull women out of the family home into the workplace.

Yet in the West, from which the reductionist doctrines of individualism and globalism emerged, resistance too can be found.  The referendum in the UK in which the public chose by the highest ever turnout to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States were serious blows struck against a detached elite's vision of one globe of atomistic individuals.  Immigration has been the very real problem that has galvanised popular resistance; yet other issues, such as deindustrialisation and firms relocating to countries with cheaper labour on the economic side, and on the social, an aggressively liberal vision of human beings that places choice of lifestyle above any sense of a human telos in family, were also being rejected.

In reaction to the perceived effrontery of ordinary people rejecting the ideology of their betters, the elite has responded with ferocity to both Brexit and Trump.  At every turn the political/globalist establishment has attempted to subvert these two Anglo-Saxon rebellions.

Part of the tactic of the liberal elite has been to attempt to tarnish Brexit and Trump by association with the bogeyman caricature of Russia that its allies in the media have created.  Anyone in Britain must be unnerved by the prospect of Russian interference, given the recent appalling crime in Salisbury, where a British subject has now become a fatality; yet Russia is being portrayed as a bastion of reactionary conservatism by the elite in an attempt to discredit the valid cause of Anglo Saxon conservatism.  Russian politics is far more complicated than that and this caricature has been created by the elite for its own propaganda purposes.

What is the vision the Anglo Saxon people on either side of the Atlantic have voted for, which has so horrified the establishment?  It is no Corbynista socialism (our elite seems far more comfortable with Corbyn, than with President Trump or Nigel Farage interestingly!).  It is rather a more compassionate version of our own economic system.  Donald Trump with his emphasis on protection is not a Socialist revolutionary, but is a patriot.  He is proposing economic policies that protect domestic jobs.  He wants capitalism to serve people rather than people having to serve a capitalism with no roots in any country.  President Trump recognises that globalisation and mass-immigration are choices made by the elite and that they are not inevitable.

In just the same way Brexit was about restoring national control, in terms of democratic accountability for laws that we live by and an end to the right to freedom of movement of virtually a whole continent to our small island.  This is not revolutionary, it is the restoration of common-sense and a capitalist economy that enables people's lives to get better, rather than live at the whim of globalist companies.

This vision won the democratic battle, but now the battle continues in the corridors of power and in the media, which is compliant to and complicit in the globalist agenda.  Given Theresa May's decision to betray the public on Brexit and the continued attempts to undermine the Trump presidency, it is by no means clear whether two victories in two battles against globalism will ever translate into winning ultimate victory.

The True European is no friend to the Eurocrats

To talk of scepticism about the European Union, that political and economic project, as being an anti-European phenomenon is (often) a complete misunderstanding of that position.  Of course, there may be a minority of Euro-sceptics who genuinely loathe their European kin, but what really fires mainstream Euro-Scepticism is opposition not only to loss of democracy, but more fundamentally opposition to the standardisation of Europe.  That standardisation is the destruction of European culture in all its various national manifestations.

T S Eliot, in a radio lecture to a German audience in the Post-War years, stated:

“For the health of the culture of Europe two conditions are required:  that the culture of each country should be unique, and that the different cultures should recognise their relationship, so that each should be susceptible of influence from others.”

What is relevant here in terms of the political project in Europe today is that it is based upon standardising and making all Europeans the same.  If we believe in a European culture however, we must understand that it is strengthened by the different local expressions of that heritage.  If everything is forced from above by a political and legal authority to be the same, there can no longer be the cross fertilisation necessary to sustain European culture.

This blogger does believe in European culture and that there is something unique and special that Europe has to offer the world.  It is from the interaction between Christianity and the heritage of Greece and Rome.  These two societies, which valued humanity, were fertile ground for this new Semitic faith from Galilee.  Greek was the language of Scripture and Rome the ecclesiastical centre of the new religion.  Today we are all still shaped by that interaction between these forces.  All Europeans have this in common, including Eastern Europe with its Christian Orthodox and Byzantine heritage, which can trace its genesis to the same three roots.

However, that cultural unity is achieved through the diversity of local sub-cultures, from the Anglo-Saxon to the Italian.  Our strength lies in our difference and our culture is not the same as politics.  The trouble with the European Union is that it is trying to replace European culture with European politics.

The two forces are in complete antithesis, because the predominant political ideology is anti-cultural.  The dominant political outlook, to the exclusion of all others, is secularist, liberal and materialist.  To value Europe’s cultural heritage is to destroy your career in the European Union.  One only has to call to mind the debacle of Rocco Buttiglione’s candidacy for the European Commission to understand that the Commission is instinctively opposed to European values.  It was precisely because Buttiglione as a Roman Catholic held to a moral and spiritual code that sustained our culture since the Holy Roman Empire that his candidacy was undermined.

So the European Union is more about secularism and liberalism than sustaining European culture.  It would rather see a Europe in which the only value was the legitimacy of personal choice – a moral code described by American Distributists as similar to that of “the psychopath”, in which one choice is no more morally valid than another.  This is in contrast with a European culture based upon real values.

Furthermore by its aggressive project of standardisation the strength of Europe’s different cultures is being eroded.  A key example is weights and measures.  This may seem a mundane subject, but weights and measures are part of everyday life, they become part of our unique colloquialisms and our sayings.  They reflect an outlook on life and are therefore part of popular culture.  Thus imperial measurements in England do not adhere to an abstract theory of measurement, but rather commemorate specific events or individuals – the foot for example, mythically being based upon the size of King Edward’s foot.  This uniqueness is of course anathema to the anti-cultural European Union and so selling goods in imperial measurements in England has become a criminal offence!

So the argument of this blog is that the true European loves what makes Europeans different and what makes them the same.  The English, with our common law, adversarial politics and law, our foxhunting, pubs and yes selling our goods in pounds and ounces, and of course with William Shakespeare and our poets.  The French: with their painters, their strong secular state, sustained rural way of life, their gentler form of capitalism, their wine and cuisine.  The Germans: with Goethe, with their music, their philosophy, their consensual industrial relations and yes their beer festivals.   The Italians: with Dante, their opera, strong family-values, their Catholicism.  It is sad when these traditions diminish and standardisation undermines tradition.  Politics undermine culture.

In the same way, what holds Europe together is inheriting the universal and cultural values of Christendom, expressed differently throughout Europe, from the severe Calvinism of some parts of the North to the sumptuous Catholicism of the South.  Whatever the local manifestation, that common culture holds us together and a political system so averse to that inheritance also undermines what Europeans share.

The European political class must realise that Europe’s spiritual and cultural survival does not depend on political unification, but local diversity.  We saw in the last century the danger of that impetus to unite politically when Germany became a political unit and standardised, it went on to try and create a standardised, political unit of the whole Continent and its archipelagos.     

John Major, during his more beleaguered years as Prime Minister, trying to gain acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty emphasised the Catholic concept of subsidiarity - a principle that was championed by that English Catholic and Distributist G K Chesterton.  The Roman Catholic Church has learnt from history what a dangerous path it is to ignore local conditions.  It had to face the Reformation as Northern Europe began to express its Christianity in its simpler, more democratic way.  The European Union should learn from the Church and in that way Europe will become stronger through its diversity of Protestantism, Catholicism, different languages, customs and different national traits.  The best way to achieve that European diversity is through that tried and tested political institution – the nation state.

The nation state is large enough to unite, without being too large to gain popular engagement and acceptance.  It is of the same size as a nation of people by definition.  It is the nuclear family, with those special ties, as opposed to the extended family of a whole Continent.  It holds together a people who have specific things the same in common: language, race, history, religion.  Of course all European nations are part of something bigger, but they are the local manifestation of that culture and because they are of the same size as a people they command the political legitimacy a super state could never command.  Men will die for their country and thereby save democracy from threat; they would not die for an international bureaucracy. So Europe should not vest an international bureaucracy with law-making powers and all the trappings of a nation state.  No one will come to save it when it falls under threat.