In beliefs about what is ‘right’ or ‘important’ in the life of our community, views will differ widely.  Two are connected.  Do we want to have more or less government interference in our lives?  Do we trust government, or are we pessimistic about its role in our lives? 

One side may be labelled as ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’.  The other side may be labelled as ‘conservative’.  But any label may be misleading, and each of these is likely to confuse or mislead.

In England, the two different approaches were sought to be found  in two parties – the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.  In Australia, the Liberal Party tries to do both.  That is a problem.  It is hard to envisage a ‘conservative’ in a ‘liberal’ party without mangling both terms.  And this is a problem shared across the three main parties in England now.

What does ‘conservative’ mean now in Australian politics?

The Oxford Definition of Philosophy states the issue:

Conservatism.  Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions.  In this ‘organic’ form, it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and a properly subservient underclass.  By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally.  The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

That is still spot on here.  If you look at Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, for ‘conservative’ you get:

One who essentially believes in amending existing institutions cautiously and who opposes doctrinaire changes.

That states the view of  the patron saint of conservatives, Edmund Burke, in his tract about the pitfalls of the French Revolution. 

The critical word is ‘doctrinaire’.  The English were appalled at the notion of rapid change driven by doctrine or dogma – which is exactly what they saw behind Rousseau and Robespierre over the Channel in France. 

They preferred the slow movement by experience – trial and error.   That is one aspect of the fundamental difference in world views on either side of the Channel.  The English favour the empirical approach.  The French and Germans favour the rationalist approach.  It resembles the difference between the common law and Roman law.  It is a difference that runs very deep but is little noticed, or at least commented on, by either side.

What is it to be doctrinaire?  According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

 One who tries to apply some doctrine without sufficient regard for practical considerations; a pedantic theorist.

That about states the difference in the two states of mind on either side of the Channel.

It is therefore hard to see how the word ‘conservative’ might be safely applied in Australian politics.  (The reference to ‘subservient underclass’ would not go down well anywhere now.)  The Liberal Party in Australia is not ‘conservative’ in the way that the English Tory Party was.  What part of its platform is ‘conservative’ in a way that may not be found in the platform of the Australian Labor Party?

But we find in what may be called the commentariat – parts of the press and some think tanks – people who like to style themselves ‘conservative’ when they are not entitled to do so – even on the loosest connotation of that term.  Examples can be found in the Murdoch media and in the Institute of Public Affairs (the IPA).

The most obvious disqualification is that these people are doctrinaire.  To go back to the definition, each is ‘one who tries to apply some doctrine without sufficient regard for practical considerations; a pedantic theorist’.  They are all heavily into ideology.  An outfit like the IPA lives and breathes ideology. 

For the term ‘ideology’, the Oxford English Dictionary has ‘ideal or abstract speculation; visionary theorizing.  A system of ideas concerning phenomena; especially those of social life; the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual’.  The Macquarie has ‘the body of doctrine, myth and symbols of a social movement, institution, class or large group’.

The English did not make the common law and their constitution, which we have inherited, by applying  ideology.  Neither did we.  The contrary is the case.  As mentioned, the English preferred slow advances by experience based on trial and error.  Ideology only started at Calais.  And it is not our schtick either.

That is the reason that these ideologues don’t appeal to most Australians.  Most people here would have more time for the Salvos than for the IPA. 

And that, in my view, is also the reason that Brexit has proved to be such a dreadful mess in practice.  It was brought about by well-off ideologues going in quest of some imaginary holy grail called ‘sovereignty’ – when an education at Eton and Cambridge did not preclude the faithful from engaging in deceit. 

And their Antipodean followers lapped up every bit of it.  They actually called it ‘people power’.

Sir Lewis Namier knew more than most about the history of political parties in England.  In commenting on the difficulty of distinguishing between Tories and Whigs in the eighteenth century, Namier said that ‘parties at all times rest on types and connections rather than intellectual tenets’.  (He also referred to an observation that the tradition of the eminence of territorial magnates was ‘comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’.)

The word ‘sniper’ is a term of abuse in Australian football.  It describes the kind of player who will strike an opponent off the ball.  (The Police ended up calling on the worst proponent.)  It comes to mind with these would-be conservatives.  They are not so much interested in what they are for, as in what they are against.  And they tend to be more against people than policies.  If you asked them to catalogue their enduring contributions of substance to our political life, I would be most interested in their response.  If you had to settle on one label, it would be ‘reactionary’.

They have a very strong contrarian nature.  It’s as if they had been claims managers for mongrel insurers in a previous life.  They are nay-sayers, not ay-sayers.  And they may well envy a lot of those on whom they comment.  Deep down they may be haunted by the prospect that those who can, do; those who can’t, just sit and watch.

The bad guy in Much Ado is Don Pedro.  He is born to thwart others.  Claudio refers to ‘mischief strangely thwarting’.  That is the correct term for fake conservatives who just get in the way.

The need to say No to something proposed by people they see as adversaries is nowhere better shown than in their advocacy of a No vote on the First Nations referendum.  What was the question they asked themselves before coming up with this answer?   And would they have come up with the same answer if the Liberal Party had proposed the referendum?

We may be looking at a very unattractive snowball here.  If the champions on the No side prevail, those on the other side will not forgive them.  And so the Liberal Party will be even more on the nose and unelectable.  And disabled from properly performing its role as His Majesty’s opposition.  That is very worrying.  They are now only in government in Tasmania, and they do not look healthy anywhere.

Their bogey-man is excessive government intervention ultimately represented by what they call ‘socialism’.  You can have that kind of chatter in the U S, but it is very difficult here and in the U K.  The tradition of ‘benevolent paternalism’ goes back at least to the feudal system.  The whole feudal compact depended on the notion that both lords and vassals had obligations as well as rights. 

We may have a sense of compassion for those not doing so well – like the sick, the aged, or the unemployed – but we go further and recognise that it is a function of government to look after such people.  We think that they deserve more than just our sympathy, and that they need and that they should get help from us through our government.

The English had accepted that view about the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I.  That notion never took hold in the New World over the water.  The United States began as commercial ventures mounted  by stern Puritans.  They saw both success and failure as coming from God.  The Puritans were gladly ushered out of England – they were shutting pubs and theatres down – but they had the numbers in America.  And it shows.

In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to Americans today.  By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’.  The English saw the need to look after these people since a prime function of the government was to keep the King’s Peace.

The English therefore accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence,’ and that responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon the community as a whole. 

The distance from this old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.

What is sometimes called the Welfare State is an essential part of our governance.  It is in practice irremovable here.  That has never been so in the U S.

In June 1908, Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh cobbler,  introduced a bill for an old age pension to the House of Commons.  In doing so, he stated the premise of what came to be called New Liberalism. He said that the problems of the sick and unemployed were problems ‘with which it is the business of the State to deal’.  That statement would be seen as dangerous heresy today by many if not most in government in the U S. 

Lloyd George was joined in what became a bitter and nation defining campaign by Winston Churchill.  Both were members of the Liberal Party, although Churchill had been a member of and would return to the Conservative Party. 

They were in part following the example of Bismarck in Germany.  And it is not often that you hear the Prussian Juncker, Count Otto von Bismarck, the Master of Europe, decried as a socialist, or a trendy Lefty.

So, we are not now called on to justify the role of government in looking after the infirm or the unemployed.  That is just a fact of life, and Australians know that the simplest way that you can commit political suicide in Australia is by proposing to cut back on some such area of government intervention. 

So, banging on about ‘socialism’ doesn’t wash here.  We can put aside the disaster of contemporary America.  Insofar as ‘socialism’ meant putting the means of production under social control, it has not been an issue in Australia for half a century.  Insofar as it may have any other meaning, it is just slippery and dangerous.

Now the hostility of the would-be ‘conservatives’ seems mainly directed at the Australian Labor Party. 

There is a variety of sources for that hostility. 

For some, it comes like the footy team they barrack for – from their home.  For some, it comes from the church they go to, especially if they enjoy a throwback to the Split.  (A ‘Left-Wing Catholic’ is virtually a contradiction in terms.) For some, it comes from membership of or service to the Liberal Party.  For each of those, there is a tribal connection. 

For some, it comes from the proprietor of their part of the media.  For some,  it is just their business model to get paid a lot to stir the possum for members of the tribe – they really couldn’t care less. (We are now seeing this in sports journalism.  The market is so crowded that some will say just about anything to get in the paper.)  For some, it comes from falling out with the Labor Party. 

For many, it comes from their social insecurity or immaturity – they fear that their status in the middle class may be compromised if they are seen to support a movement associated with blue collars and trade unions.  Another term is snobbery. 

But whatever the source, it does not lead to a coherent adherence to a political outlook that could decently be described as ‘conservative’.

The major disqualification of almost all in this group is that they dismissed or underrated the risks we face in the change of climate.  In doing so, they have failed to conserve the planet, and to an extent that is causing real trouble.  And they continue to do so in the worst way – by preferring dogma and doctrine to empirical evidence.

Conservative people are not what are called ‘populists’ – those who canvas for public support by appealing to what they call ‘ordinary’ people against those whom they decry as ‘elites’.  They regard their citizenship as a very valuable asset, and they are unwilling to share it.  They are very often bent on division in the community, and are willing to target migrants, and those people of different colour or sexuality.  All of us, it seems, need to have at least someone to look down on.

‘Populists come to power by saying their opponents are crooks – see Trump and Clinton – and then behave like worse crooks.’

Most of those who are attracted to people like Nigel Farage or Donald Trump are those who have not had many big wins in life.  They want to look askance at those above them and treat with contempt those that they regard as beneath them.  The phrase ‘winners are grinners’ illuminates the righteous anger of those at MAGA rallies.  Farage helped confect the Brexit campaign by exploiting the aversion of some in England to migrants.  And he did so shamelessly, and the Tories just looked the other way – even the high-minded boys from Eton.

The followers of the populists get a charge out of people like Trump or Farage getting away with saying things that are divisive about people of a different colour, faith, or sexuality.  Between them all, they brought us the term ‘dog whistling’.

The followers are not fully grown politically.  They cannot abide doubt, and they look for the mythical strong man to provide the answer – and to enforce it.  They are suckers for conspiracy theories and religious sects that look so sadly fake.  These people must prompt serious reflection on the education system that unleashes such credulous adherents of mountebanks.

The quest for certainty in political life is fraught.  Robert Shrimsley said this in the Financial Times:
This is not a complaint about Brexit, Corbynism or Scottish independence per se, though I disagree with all three. It is about the fusion of certainty with unfeasible radicalism. For certainty, unlike conviction, struggles to coexist with pragmatism and compromise.  What marks the leaderships of Johnson, Corbyn and Sturgeon (one might add Liz Truss) is the primacy of a revolutionary zeal that refuses to be tempered by economic and political realities, combined with fanatical supporters and the concentration of power in a purist vanguard. 

People who struggle in the race of life often succumb to envy of those who don’t.  And envy looks to be a driver for both the populists and those whom they attract. 

The first loathe the ABC.  It is a government construct, funded by taxpayers.  It is not run for profit, but to provide a community service, and will obviously have a very different approach to one that is run for profit.  This unnerves the ideologues of free enterprise who envy the ABC because it is more trusted in the community at large.

It is absurd to suggest that Trump or anyone supporting him may be described as ‘conservative’.  He was out to trash the joint from the start.  Now he wishes to overturn the whole state of the union.

Trump is a common garden, two-bob crook.  Boris Johnson was not much better.  And in his departure from Parliament, he is looking and sounding more and more like Donald Trump. 

They are both nostalgic jingoists, but Johnson comes from the definitively ‘elite’ part of society.  No decent club would have Trump as a member.  Johnson has no idea of the problems faced by most people who vote for him, and his connections insulate him from the risks he takes with their money. 

(Autocrats are gamblers by nature.  Napoleon and Hitler are terrible examples.  And since they only care for themselves, that narrows the arc of their responsibility to about zero.)

Only a lunatic would suggest that either Trump or Johnson might dabble in ‘benevolent paternalism’.  And now each claims to be a victim of the system!

Both behaved appallingly in office and treated so much of the customs and conventions of their nation with contempt.  That is the precise reverse of what is entailed by the notion of ‘conservative’. 

Each is a spoiled child who has never been driven to act responsibly, and on that ground alone is unfit for public office, and disqualified from claiming the label ‘conservative’.

In the Australian context, it is best to pass over the recent history of members of the Liberal Party in silence.

The tribes that make up these ‘conservatives’ interlink and they have common call signs including activist, broad church, cancel culture, core, draconian, elite, flipflop, holistic, identity politics, jihad, Left, libertarian, Marxist, political correctness, Right, socialism, sovereignty, weaponize, Western Civilisation, and woke. 

Some of them can’t help themselves in their pursuit of the doctrinaire and issues, commonly called ‘culture wars’, that most of the electorate could not care less about. 

The press reported that two former Liberal prime ministers had joined the modestly dubbed Alliance for Responsible Citizenship led by Jordan Peterson. 

Their ‘vision document’ says: ‘We at ARC do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.’  The document asks how it might ‘effectively conceptualise, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centred intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend.’ Peterson has said a model for this was ‘something approximating the nuclear family’ with ‘long-term, committed, stable heterosexual marriages sanctified by the community’.

That kind of bullshit can be trafficked in North America, but here it is hard to imagine anything more offensive or irrelevant.  It wouldn’t go down too badly at a meeting of the KKK. 

And it is plain murder of sense and the English language.  Of the kind you can get when one with a law degree, but who has never practised law, condescends to posit gloom and doom at the hands of those who stand for the great unwashed.

It is to this kind of level that the Liberal Party in Australia has now come.  And it is the false conservatives who are making  the Liberal Party more and more unelectable, especially in Victoria. 

A two-party democracy only works if both parties do their job.  We have here a serious flaw in our political life.  The Liberal Party in Victoria is very small, and its current problems suggest that it is not fit to represent anyone.  It has the job of opposing a government that has been there for a long time – too long for the taste of many.  The Victorian branch is thought to have 12,000 members.  Three AFL clubs have more than 100,000.

It was in a book about the French Revolution – Leaders of the French Revolution – that the wonderful English historian, Dr J M Thompson, set out the ground rules for a party in opposition.

…an Englishman …. has been trained to exercise his party spirit in the game called the Party System; and among the rules of that game – not always observed [1929] as they should be – are the obligation to sink personal differences in party loyalties, not to criticise your opponent’s policy unless you have a better one that you are prepared to carry out yourself, and in case of national crisis, to help rather than hinder whatever government may be in power.  But party politics in the French Assembly meant a very different thing….so majority legislation might be merely partisan, and minority criticism merely destructive and irresponsible.

The last sentence encapsulates the roles played by Republicans in the U S, and by too many so-called conservative politicians in Australia.  Obstructionism for the sake of it gets nobody anywhere.

And this is the major charge against those people who engage in obstructionism.  The game is played by rules and conventions.  These people refuse to abide by them. They thereby set about undermining our whole system of governance.  That is a flat repudiation  of conservatism.  Edmund Burke, Disraeli and Churchill  would be horrified.  (There is little point in referring to Menzies, since he gets claimed by all factions, and it would be grossly indecent to mention Trump and Lincoln in the same breath.)

The Liberal Party in Australia is not even close to fulfilling the role of opposition at either federal or state levels, and the fake conservatives seem intent on keeping it that way.

Politics – conservatism – populism – IPA – Murdoch Press.