The mistake it seems to me that all idealists make - whether post-Liberal, National Conservative or some other denomination - is ignoring the reality of power. All the policy proposals in the world are just so much digital detritus, loose litter and heated air if there is no power behind them. In a capitalist society, money is power, and this is true in other political models, even if it is called "the means of production", or more dishonestly, "the people's will". So the first questions that must be answered are: whence does power derive; how is it to be maintained; when and why is it to be deployed and who is to defend it?
Post-liberals seem basically be just classical liberals distancing themselves from the woke, who are also post-liberal in any meaningful sense. Most of what I've seen from them is critique of wokeness (which is great), and a vague desire to return to the glory days of 1993 (which is ... unlikely).
NatCons seem to basically be CivNats, which I find to be an incoherent ideology. A nation-state is organized around a nation, which is to say an ethnos, not a creed. CivNats suggest that a Sri Lankan who believes in the American Constitution etc. is just as American as anyone else ... But does a descendent of the Mayflower pilgrims cease to be American if they disagree with the Constitution?
On policy ... This is certainly too much for a comment, but. The core problem we face right now is demographic deflation. Exploitation of female labor has led to low birth rates, with immigration then being necessary to maintain population growth. I'm skeptical that welfare-type programs, eg parental leave, can address this. In addition to being expensive, such policies have already been tried in many countries without really moving the needle on birth rates very much.
Historically it was never the case that most women didn't work and just sat around pregnant all day minding the kids. I don't think women want to do that, either. People want to feel useful, not just to their family but to society. However, it was the case that the economic activity women engaged in tended to be that which was compatible with having small children running around. Household businesses, in other words. We're already seeing a shift to work-from-home driven by information technology and people's preferences, so that seems to me like a policy lever the state could lean on: encourage small household businesses, via tax policy and regulatory changes, while also encouraging a flex-time attitude towards WFH jobs such that women can more easily balance the chaos of demanding children with the demands of economic production, fitting the latter into the gaps that open in the former as they can. This would enable women to work and care for their kids simultaneously; would revive the civic life in residential communities; would almost certainly increase the birth rate since professional and family responsibilities would no longer be diametrically opposed; and would therefore attenuate the necessity for culturally disruptive levels of immigration.
"The same goes for post-liberal criticism of free markets and free trade."
I've been lamenting for years how often people fail to recognise that they're arguing at cross-purposes and that, underlying their disagreement, there's some factor they're both ignoring. Arguments about free markets are a good example: one side champions efficient *processes*, while the other side champions fair *outcomes* – and both sides ignore the fact that the structure of the market-place is determined by long-established laws which reflect the values and circumstances of another time.
As I say in the opening paragraph of my recent post, The Fog of Law, "A society which does not take proper care of the laws which shape it at the most fundamental level condemns itself to a broad range of difficulties and disputes which would otherwise not occur. Currently a significant amount of legislative and administrative activity does nothing more than try and mitigate the ill-effects caused by fundamental laws that have either become derelict (where the circumstances which originally justified them no longer apply) or were never adequate in the first place." (https://malcolmr.substack.com/p/the-fog-of-law)
Good luck with it, Helen. My angle is that the NatCons and the Left speak two different languages. Except that they are exactly the same, but not necessarily in the right order. Consider this, lifted from the NatCon website as a link to a Guardian piece by John Harris:
Last week, the Home Office minister Robert Jenrick gave a speech at the Policy Exchange thinktank, scattered with sentiments apparently copied straight from NatCon texts. Conservatives, he said, “should not shy away from their belief that the nation has a right to preserve itself”
And why is this a bad thing? Had he been talking about Native Americans, or Africans, or almost anybody else, all the lefties would nod in agreement. But no. Because it is Britain the default starter for all discourse is 'Britain bad, the rest good'
The result is that every non left or liberal stance begins with an apology. Worse, it attempts to argue the case using the time-bomb tropes of the enemy. NatCons live in a world of contradictions where preservation of culture is bad. Stopping illegal economic migrants from fleeing France (I never knew France had gotten that bad) to the point where asking them to apply for citizenship in the normal way is a 'violation of their human rights' Harris even conjures up the spirit of Enoch Powell to shock his readers. My God! With violent knife crime being disproprotionately the preserve of the descendants of migrants in this country - 'Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators - even alluding to this requires the public repentance. It cannot be mentioned and it is certainly never mentioned by most of the media.
Alternately, a black TV personality felt that her environment was safe enough to criticise the Royal family for being white; a "terribly white balcony" said Adjoa Andoh. Admittedly she is an actor and the species is not known for being bright, but all the same, she got away with it. To a point. There were complaints, over four thousand. Imagine if a white commentator had said this of a black event?
So, again, the angle is two contradictory streams of discourse mediated by what appears to be the same language. It will be condemned before it starts, as it already has. I believe it will be a struggle.
I suggest that NatCons must do what the Left do. They must begin to form their own language of discourse and stop trying to argue their points with the semiotics of the Left.
There is a War on; we are in Death Ground; and folk will be re-arranging the deckchairs on the Lusitania? The Beveridge Report and the NHS were the result when when we last engaged in such stupid. Let's see off the latest bastard offspring of Franco-German delusion first, eh? They seem not to even realise the Enemy has been ashore for more than a century and neither the Channel nor the Ocean are obstacle in the Internet Age, nevermind we invited the enemy in, like Honorius or Vortigern last time things were so dire in the West. Please; if you get anything over to them let it be that this is neither the time nor the place for such pratting about.
‘Is there anyone at the conference I should make a point of interviewing?’ I reckon: me
Of the speakers I think Juliet Samuel would be good value. There are also a lot of very oddball speakers; what are Grimes, Hannan and Toby Young doing there? I think Cates is good too. And Goodhart would be able to give the most informed view
I had the pleasure of attending the first day of NatCon, and it did seem quite light on concrete policy proposals beyond some tweaks tax breaks for mothers who stay home with their children, and very heavy on rhetoric. There also seems to be a disconnect between the speakers calling for an end to bioliberalism and building a society in which the family is valued again over GDP contributions, loowe immigration and affordable housing for young people Vs Conservative Party ministers who have seemingly done the opposite of that in all their time in office, and between the free trade Vs protectionist strands within the wider conservative movement. It's great to have debate and disagreement within a movement (and it's very refreshing after spending so much time on in left wing ircles) but I'm not sure it can be hashed out in short speeches like this.
It's all pretty enjoyable for me as a total layperson (and what a beautiful dinner, just incredible) but who knows how productive it will fare in concrete terms!
One thing I wish had been more discussed is how to actually create the kind of communities which encourage and support couples having children in practical terms, and allow them to access the necessary housing to start and sustain families - for example, could it become more possible in the biotech age to blend home and family life at least in jobs that can be done digitally and more remotely? If so, could that make it feasible again for young couples to have children even if they don't get to have extended time off to be a stay at home parent, and could it make it feasible for them to live near their home towns or extended families, or to buy homes in cheaper parts of the country? Or, do we really need so many young people moving away from home to universities, or could we create feasible and practical other paths into work which allowed young people to remain in their local communities and train in a skill while retaining their family links, etc?
The mistake it seems to me that all idealists make - whether post-Liberal, National Conservative or some other denomination - is ignoring the reality of power. All the policy proposals in the world are just so much digital detritus, loose litter and heated air if there is no power behind them. In a capitalist society, money is power, and this is true in other political models, even if it is called "the means of production", or more dishonestly, "the people's will". So the first questions that must be answered are: whence does power derive; how is it to be maintained; when and why is it to be deployed and who is to defend it?
First, personal definitions/impressions.
Post-liberals seem basically be just classical liberals distancing themselves from the woke, who are also post-liberal in any meaningful sense. Most of what I've seen from them is critique of wokeness (which is great), and a vague desire to return to the glory days of 1993 (which is ... unlikely).
NatCons seem to basically be CivNats, which I find to be an incoherent ideology. A nation-state is organized around a nation, which is to say an ethnos, not a creed. CivNats suggest that a Sri Lankan who believes in the American Constitution etc. is just as American as anyone else ... But does a descendent of the Mayflower pilgrims cease to be American if they disagree with the Constitution?
On policy ... This is certainly too much for a comment, but. The core problem we face right now is demographic deflation. Exploitation of female labor has led to low birth rates, with immigration then being necessary to maintain population growth. I'm skeptical that welfare-type programs, eg parental leave, can address this. In addition to being expensive, such policies have already been tried in many countries without really moving the needle on birth rates very much.
Historically it was never the case that most women didn't work and just sat around pregnant all day minding the kids. I don't think women want to do that, either. People want to feel useful, not just to their family but to society. However, it was the case that the economic activity women engaged in tended to be that which was compatible with having small children running around. Household businesses, in other words. We're already seeing a shift to work-from-home driven by information technology and people's preferences, so that seems to me like a policy lever the state could lean on: encourage small household businesses, via tax policy and regulatory changes, while also encouraging a flex-time attitude towards WFH jobs such that women can more easily balance the chaos of demanding children with the demands of economic production, fitting the latter into the gaps that open in the former as they can. This would enable women to work and care for their kids simultaneously; would revive the civic life in residential communities; would almost certainly increase the birth rate since professional and family responsibilities would no longer be diametrically opposed; and would therefore attenuate the necessity for culturally disruptive levels of immigration.
"The same goes for post-liberal criticism of free markets and free trade."
I've been lamenting for years how often people fail to recognise that they're arguing at cross-purposes and that, underlying their disagreement, there's some factor they're both ignoring. Arguments about free markets are a good example: one side champions efficient *processes*, while the other side champions fair *outcomes* – and both sides ignore the fact that the structure of the market-place is determined by long-established laws which reflect the values and circumstances of another time.
As I say in the opening paragraph of my recent post, The Fog of Law, "A society which does not take proper care of the laws which shape it at the most fundamental level condemns itself to a broad range of difficulties and disputes which would otherwise not occur. Currently a significant amount of legislative and administrative activity does nothing more than try and mitigate the ill-effects caused by fundamental laws that have either become derelict (where the circumstances which originally justified them no longer apply) or were never adequate in the first place." (https://malcolmr.substack.com/p/the-fog-of-law)
Sounds a lot like it will be just more status quo right liberalism to me: Humans are merely a means to an economic end.
And you will probably applaud the entire way through.
Sigh.
https://open.substack.com/pub/simoncooke/p/make-conservativism-great-again-a?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android Helen is bang on the money on the policy issue. I wrote about the lack of economic strategy in National Conservatism.
Good luck with it, Helen. My angle is that the NatCons and the Left speak two different languages. Except that they are exactly the same, but not necessarily in the right order. Consider this, lifted from the NatCon website as a link to a Guardian piece by John Harris:
Last week, the Home Office minister Robert Jenrick gave a speech at the Policy Exchange thinktank, scattered with sentiments apparently copied straight from NatCon texts. Conservatives, he said, “should not shy away from their belief that the nation has a right to preserve itself”
And why is this a bad thing? Had he been talking about Native Americans, or Africans, or almost anybody else, all the lefties would nod in agreement. But no. Because it is Britain the default starter for all discourse is 'Britain bad, the rest good'
The result is that every non left or liberal stance begins with an apology. Worse, it attempts to argue the case using the time-bomb tropes of the enemy. NatCons live in a world of contradictions where preservation of culture is bad. Stopping illegal economic migrants from fleeing France (I never knew France had gotten that bad) to the point where asking them to apply for citizenship in the normal way is a 'violation of their human rights' Harris even conjures up the spirit of Enoch Powell to shock his readers. My God! With violent knife crime being disproprotionately the preserve of the descendants of migrants in this country - 'Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators - even alluding to this requires the public repentance. It cannot be mentioned and it is certainly never mentioned by most of the media.
Alternately, a black TV personality felt that her environment was safe enough to criticise the Royal family for being white; a "terribly white balcony" said Adjoa Andoh. Admittedly she is an actor and the species is not known for being bright, but all the same, she got away with it. To a point. There were complaints, over four thousand. Imagine if a white commentator had said this of a black event?
So, again, the angle is two contradictory streams of discourse mediated by what appears to be the same language. It will be condemned before it starts, as it already has. I believe it will be a struggle.
I suggest that NatCons must do what the Left do. They must begin to form their own language of discourse and stop trying to argue their points with the semiotics of the Left.
Yes of course. The front page of National Conservatism links to it.
https://nationalconservatism.org
and the article is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/30/national-conservatism-far-right-divisive-tories
There is a War on; we are in Death Ground; and folk will be re-arranging the deckchairs on the Lusitania? The Beveridge Report and the NHS were the result when when we last engaged in such stupid. Let's see off the latest bastard offspring of Franco-German delusion first, eh? They seem not to even realise the Enemy has been ashore for more than a century and neither the Channel nor the Ocean are obstacle in the Internet Age, nevermind we invited the enemy in, like Honorius or Vortigern last time things were so dire in the West. Please; if you get anything over to them let it be that this is neither the time nor the place for such pratting about.
‘Is there anyone at the conference I should make a point of interviewing?’ I reckon: me
Of the speakers I think Juliet Samuel would be good value. There are also a lot of very oddball speakers; what are Grimes, Hannan and Toby Young doing there? I think Cates is good too. And Goodhart would be able to give the most informed view
I had the pleasure of attending the first day of NatCon, and it did seem quite light on concrete policy proposals beyond some tweaks tax breaks for mothers who stay home with their children, and very heavy on rhetoric. There also seems to be a disconnect between the speakers calling for an end to bioliberalism and building a society in which the family is valued again over GDP contributions, loowe immigration and affordable housing for young people Vs Conservative Party ministers who have seemingly done the opposite of that in all their time in office, and between the free trade Vs protectionist strands within the wider conservative movement. It's great to have debate and disagreement within a movement (and it's very refreshing after spending so much time on in left wing ircles) but I'm not sure it can be hashed out in short speeches like this.
It's all pretty enjoyable for me as a total layperson (and what a beautiful dinner, just incredible) but who knows how productive it will fare in concrete terms!
One thing I wish had been more discussed is how to actually create the kind of communities which encourage and support couples having children in practical terms, and allow them to access the necessary housing to start and sustain families - for example, could it become more possible in the biotech age to blend home and family life at least in jobs that can be done digitally and more remotely? If so, could that make it feasible again for young couples to have children even if they don't get to have extended time off to be a stay at home parent, and could it make it feasible for them to live near their home towns or extended families, or to buy homes in cheaper parts of the country? Or, do we really need so many young people moving away from home to universities, or could we create feasible and practical other paths into work which allowed young people to remain in their local communities and train in a skill while retaining their family links, etc?