RSSDavid Brooks on the Tory Revival
Today’s New York Times has a thoughtful op-ed by David Brooks describing the striking electoral success of the new Tories.
The best line is this, “They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.” Amen.
Brooks notes that much of the Cameron’s Tory application of the above stated principle would not fly with American Conservatives… rightly so. The last thing I want is the nanny state dropping bye to help me raise my children. I don’t even want them butting their noses in my kids education. But faulty application does not destroy the principle. Rather, I think the Cameronian (Covenanters please forgive me!!!) application is destroying his own stated principle- again confusing society with state.
If Conservatism finds it self in the wilderness in 2009 we will have lots of time to think. We need it. Thankfully, we have plenty of resources from which to rebuild a conservatism that understands society in terms of Edmund Burke’s eternal contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. We can be driven back to Burke, to the Southern Agrarians with Burkean tendencies (my Presbyterian friends will note that this includes Thornwell, Dabney, Machen, and Hart), Russell Kirk, and Wilhelm Roepke. We might even find it in ourselves to head the prophetic voices of Wendell Berry, Bill Kauffman, and I dare add Caleb Stegall and Rod Dreher.
We can rediscover that WE are more than the aggragate of individuals and the the community is greater than the sum of its parts without losing our grasp of the sanctity of the individual liberty. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” can be restored.
We have the resources for a 21st Century Conservatism. Can we make them work?
Iohannes
May 10th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Does Thomas Chalmers have a place among all these worthies?
Hugh Watt’s biography contains a neat comment on Chalmers’ politics:
“It may here be said that Chalmers was not definitely attached to any of the political parties of his day. If he once called himself a Radical it was only to claim that his plan of Christian education was the only radical remedy. His closest affiliations certainly were with the Tory party. He had greater faith in its leaders and more confidence in their integrity. He had larger expectations from its policies. The attractive but delusive gilt wrappings of Whig promises were contemptible devices to delude the public. (No political saying of his is better known than the oft-repeated, ‘I hae a moral loathing o’ thae Whugs.’) But when the contents unexpectedly proved palatable he did not hesitate to acknowledge the fact. He obeyed no party whip, though he liked best the crack of the Tory one.” pp. 92, 93
W.H. Chellis
May 10th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I am interested in Chalmers but do not know a lot about him… except that he, according to Carl Trueman, is the only Presbyterian to gain a (negative) mention in Marx’s Das Capital. That give him some street cred in my book.