Tory MP: what does it matter what someone's sex is?

I've often written that liberals want to make our biological sex not matter. Just to help prove my point here is the latest offering from a UK MP, Maria Miller. She wants a person's sex to be removed from documents such as passports and driver's licences. She said in support of this:

As a society and a government we should be looking at ways of trying to strip back talking about gender...what does it matter what someone's sex is?

She is not a radical communist but a member of the Conservative Party - as such she is an establishment liberal following the state ideology.

I want to stress this point because there are plenty of Daily Mail readers who criticise her in the reader comments, but it is mostly along the lines that she is stupid or that it is political correctness gone mad.

She is not stupid. She is someone who is clever enough to understand the logic of the ruling ideology, she just isn't clever enough to consider the destructive aspects of it. In a sense, she is a woman trapped within the intellectual and moral assumptions of her own times.

Nothing will change until the state ideology is clearly identified, effectively criticised and finally jettisoned.

What would you say if you became PM?

When Malcolm Turnbull took over from Tony Abbott as PM, he fronted the media and declared:

This has been a very important, sobering experience today. I am very humbled by it. I am very humbled by the great honour and responsibility that has been given to me today. We need to have in this country, and we will have now, an economic vision, a leadership that explains the great challenges and opportunities that we face.

Describes the way in which we can handle those challenges, seize those opportunities and does so in a manner that the Australian people understand so that we are seeking to persuade rather than seeking to lecture.

This will be a thoroughly Liberal Government. It will be a thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market. It will be focussed on ensuring that in the years ahead, as the world becomes more and more competitive, and greater opportunities arise, we are able to take advantage of that. The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile, that is innovative, that is creative.

This is a vision of the nation as an economy and of our political leaders as economic managers.

This is too small a view of nation and leadership. It is too limited in scope.

This is true also of Turnbull's commitment to "freedom, the individual and the market". This is misconceived. You don't serve the individual by serving the individual alone. You serve the individual by upholding the institutions and traditions which help form his identity, which inspire his loves and attachments, and which anchor his commitments.

Turnbull is a classical liberal (a right-liberal). A few years ago I wrote a post attempting to explain why classical liberalism doesn't work over time, which I think is worth reading: Can classical liberalism get what it needs?

You have to choose your freedoms

There's a report in today's Herald Sun that the Government is planning to make all religious clerics take out an annual licence. They would face a state registration/training system similar to that applied to school teachers.

Under the plan the state would effectively set the norms (the educational/professional development standards) under which religions would operate.

Here's the thing. It is obvious that the Government is keen to do this to try to rein in the more radical Islamic imams. In the process, though, all churches are being brought further under the sway of the state.

One political point to draw from this is that classical/right liberalism has again failed in its approach. The "freedom" of open borders has led, in practice, to a more intrusive state. In other words, there is a contradiction between the right liberal policy of open borders and the (supposed) right liberal policy of a small and non-intrusive state. You can't have both - you have to choose between them.

My prediction is that right-liberals will choose to become statists.

Boris at it again

Boris Johnson is the supposedly "conservative" Lord Mayor of London. He is, in fact, typically right-liberal in his politics and has described himself as a libertarian.

Right-liberals often believe that we fulfil ourselves by being self-made in the free market and this means that:

i) they have a positive view of the free movement of labour along market lines

and

ii) they think that economic migrants, who take the initiative to improve themselves economically by migrating to a wealthier country, are an ideal group - more so than the native citizens

Therefore, right-liberals are often committed to high levels of migration. So it's not surprising that Boris Johnson has come out with this:

London will fall like the Greek city of Sparta if it turns away immigrants like the ancient militaristic regime which "kicked people out", Boris Johnson has said.

David Cameron's pledge to bring down immigration into the tens of thousands was a "policy failure" and should never have been attempted, the Mayor said.

"Look at Athens and Sparta," Johnson told the Telegraph. "Athens was an open city and Sparta kicked people out. Go and look at the ruins of Athens and Sparta now and ask which of the two cities made the greatest contribution to civilisation. Look at the greatness of the American economy."

Again, typically for a right-liberal Boris wants open borders combined with assimilation:

But Johnson said that efforts to celebrate and promote multiculturalism had meant many migrant communities had not felt the need to integrate. "I want to see people proud of Britain, we have to insist on that. We went through a long period of cultural laissez-faire, where we didn't understand that they want to speak English."

Interesting that Johnson wants people to be proud of Britain and yet he doesn't think the British can run a city by themselves but need constant waves of foreign migration to keep things going.

Nor is becoming yet another globalised, multicultural city likely to improve London's contribution to civilisation. Cities like London and Paris once had a culture and heritage of their own which gave them a unique character and charm. But if these places instead become globalised centres of finance dedicated to economic matters alone, then what is to distinguish them from all other such centres scattered around the globe?

(Johnson also appears to be wrong when it comes to the history of Athens and Sparta. In fact it was the famous Athenian leader Pericles who changed the law on citizenship to require that citizens had both an Athenian father and mother. Sparta had no such law.)

Breaking with Marx is easy, but can we break with Hannan?

This is a longish post - but it's an important one, so I encourage readers to take the time to read through it.

Conservatism is not unknown on the right-side of politics, but it is overshadowed by a right-liberal tradition that has dominated since the 1800s. I want to make a blunt case in this post that we ought to be more concerned about being trounced by the right-liberal tradition than by the Marxist one on the left. It is easy for people on the right to break with Marx, it has not proven easy to break cleanly with right-liberalism.

As readers know, I recently read the book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America by Eric Kaufmann. According to Kaufmann, in the 1800s the American elite had a dual consciousness. They identified positively as Anglo-Saxons, in the sense that they thought that Anglo-Saxons had a special dispensation to bring liberty (in the classical liberal sense) to the world. However, the commitment to this kind of liberty meant that open borders prevailed bringing millions of immigrants from many parts of the world to the U.S. The idea was that they would all assimilate to become WASPs themselves, but this didn't happen. Immigrant groups preferred to maintain their own religion and identity and sought political influence themselves. An alternative, pluralistic view of the U.S. emerged by the early 1900s in which Anglos were, first, reduced to just one group amongst many and then relegated further to being a group lacking a vibrant, worthwhile culture of its own.

Now, you would think that lessons would be learned and that this particular classical/right-liberal tradition would be seen as having failed historically. Instead, it has found ways to endure and even to continue to dominate on the right.

This brings me to a current day English journalist, author and politician named Daniel Hannan. He is prominent within the Conservative Party, being an MEP, Secretary-General of the Alliance of European Conservatives and President of the Young Britons' Foundation (which trains future conservative leaders and activists).

Hannan is by no means the worst amongst the Tories. He is a Eurosceptic; he defends national sovereignty and he supports the family. Nonetheless, it is remarkable just how much he is carrying on the nineteenth century classical/right liberal tradition rather than a conservative one.

Hannan wrote a column recently about the demise of the Liberal Democrats. In it he praised the Whig-Liberal tradition (the one that was opposed to the Tories in the 1800s). He went so far as to claim:

The Whig-Liberal movement was responsible for the finest developments in our history... 

...Whig-Liberal principles survive best in a goodly part of the Conservative Party.

The takeover happened slowly, through successive transfusions. The first occurred in the late nineteenth century, when traditional Palmerstonian Whigs, alarmed by the Liberal Party’s drift towards social democracy, sidled up to the Conservatives, formally amalgamating in 1912...There was a second transfusion with the assimilation of some of the “coupon” Liberals following the First World War, and then a third with the absorption of the National Liberals during the 1950s and 1960s.

Ralph Harris...once told me that he had held a number of meetings with other classical liberals in the 1950s. They had concluded that their best tactic was to convert one of the two potential parties of government. Since Labour was hopelessly statist, they would try their luck with the Tories.

It worked. A party that was still imperialist, militarist and mildly protectionist in its outlook began to make space for what we would nowadays call libertarians. A few key individuals were convinced, including Keith Joseph, who after reading Hayek (a self-described “Old Whig”) declared that he thought he had been a Conservative all his life, but now realised he had only just become one. Keith Joseph had several disciples in the party, one of whom was the daughter of a Methodist grocer with a classic Whig-Liberal background. She, too, was convinced, and went on to become our country’s greatest ever prime minister. The revolution had happened peacefully and benignly in one generation.

Pure liberalism will always struggle to secure an electoral majority. While some of its positions are popular – tax-cuts, welfare reform, Euroscepticism – others are not. I always tell libertarian students to focus on the big issues, such as the economy and education, rather than fighting losing battles on relatively minor questions such as drugs and pornography. As part of a wider conservative alliance, as under Thatcher or Reagan, classical liberalism can enjoy meaningful triumphs. On its own, it will only ever be a fringe movement.

And yet, more than a century after its death was proclaimed, Liberal England lives on in large parts of the Conservative Party. We Whigs are not finished.

Revealing, isn't it? Hannan has a considerable influence in the Conservative Party, even though he identifies explicitly as a classical liberal. He believes that there was a "takeover" which transformed the Conservative Party into a classical liberal/libertarian one. He admits, too, that classical liberalism wouldn't win on its own but needs the electoral support of rank and file conservative voters.

Here's something else that is remarkable. Hannan wants to follow a very similar political course to that of the Anglo elite in America in the 1800s - despite the historic failure of that policy. He wants to lead the UK down a similar path.

For instance, he has a similar view that the English speaking peoples have a special dispensation to bring classical liberalism to the world. He has written books with titles such as, Inventing Freedom: How the English-speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. He does, it is true, advocate an orderly rather than an uncontrolled immigration programme; nonetheless, he writes very positively of the waves of immigration that transformed America into a "global" civilisation:

Immigration – controlled, legal immigration – can bring advantages to the destination state.

...Human capital is the most valuable resource in any economy and, by and large, the people who have the energy to leave everything behind for an unknown country are the kind of people who will boost their new home’s GDP.

A museum has just opened in Antwerp in the old warehouse through which more than two million emigrants, including Einstein and Irving Berlin, passed between 1873 and 1934 on their way to North America with the Red Star Line. The display manages to convey the vastness of the population movement without losing the scale of the individual families.

...Every migration involves courage – often a quiet and unremarked heroism. We know it better than many peoples: the Anglosphere became the first global civilization, and English the first global language, largely as a result of massive migratory flows.

“Every immigrant,” as Ronald Reagan put it in a characteristically upbeat phrase, “makes America more American.” The reason that immigration worked in the United States was precisely that it was regulated and controlled...In a country that was hungry for labour, there was scant interest in absorbing those who would be unable to work.

It's not exactly the same as the laissez-faire attitudes of the nineteenth century, but it's not far off: there is an idea that the needs of the market are what matters (migrants as "human capital") and that making yourself in the market is a higher purpose, so that immigrants who uproot themselves to do this are heroic, ideal citizens. Hannan believes that the transforming waves of migration to the U.S. are a lesson for the UK and Europe to follow rather than avoid, despite the fact that the long-term result in the U.S. has been the creation of a large political constituency for the leftist party rather than the rightist one.

Hannan is aware of the problem. He has admitted that if Ronald Reagan had faced the same ethnic balance as exists today he would not have been elected. Immigrant voters have stuck to the left:

The GOP faces a problem common to Right-of-Centre parties around the world. Immigrant communities, despite the initiative required to relocate to another country, and despite their often conservative values when it comes to enterprise, self-reliance, family and so on, tend to gravitate to the Left.

Again, that's a revealing comment. In his mind, the waves of immigration are made up of people who want to be self-made in the market and who are therefore right-liberal brothers-in-arms. And yet they vote for the statist, left-wing party.

He finds hope in the success of the Canadian right-wing party in appealing to immigrant groups by granting them special favours, for instance, in granting visas or in getting them into parliament.

Whether such outreach programmes work or not (I'm sceptical), the larger point is that the right-wing parties are still carrying on as if it's 1839. The message is still that being Anglo is positive in the sense that Anglos have brought liberty to the world; that this liberty involves a focus on the individual and the free market; that it is such a positive to uproot oneself to another country in order to be self-made in the market that the immigrant identity becomes a focus of national identity (a nation of immigrants); that immigration policy should be focused on the needs of the market for human capital; and that immigrants will naturally assimilate to (and be a natural constituency for) this view of the world.

The right-liberal view is a radically transforming one, that won't leave much behind of the original populations which adopted it. We are supposed to bequeath to the world not ourselves but a certain understanding of liberty, but it isn't even likely that this understanding of liberty will survive in the leftist, technocratic states that grow from right-liberalism.

Let me return to my starting point: if we focus on criticising Marx, then who is going to criticise Hannan? What is the greatest negative influence on our current PM, Tony Abbott? Surely it is more the influence of figures like Hannan than anyone associated with Marxism?

We can contribute something positive by creating a political culture that has broken cleanly with right-liberalism. I don't think we've achieved that yet.

Interesting thoughts from Lord Glasman

The electoral success of UKIP has brought some interesting thoughts from a Labour peer, Lord Glasman:

UKIP has done us all a service in one key respect: it has forced the elites to confront the flaws in our democracy.

...I have come to the conclusion that Labour is in danger of losing England.

...the cohesive world which the [labour] movement helped to create has now fallen apart.

People are isolated and lonely, and feel both dispossessed of their inheritance and abandoned by their rulers.

It is no surprise, therefore, that so many core Labour voters – people who work and are members of a real village, not the global one, who love their country and their family – feel abandoned and neglected by the party that was established by their forebears.

That is why it is not just the Conservatives who are bleeding support to UKIP.

UKIP has benefited because people feel powerless.

The dispossession they feel is not an individual complaint, but a shared grievance.

I believe that this Government is incapable of responding. The Conservative party is nowhere near conservative enough. It is a liberal party that serves the interests of those who already have much.

Neither the Conservative nor Liberal parties are held in the hearts of people as the local election results show. They lost seats by the hundreds.

I'll go on to mention Lord Glasman's proposed solutions in a moment. It's worthwhile pausing first to consider what is important in Lord Glasman's observations.

First, he admits that diversity and globalism have undermined a sense of belonging to a cohesive world. So much for the "diversity is strength" mantra.

Second, he admits that people feel dispossessed and powerless. This raises the issue of agency. Much of what liberalism does was supposed to increase the sense of agency possessed by individuals. Agency means an ability to self-determine rather than to be constrained by aspects of the social structure:

In the social sciences, agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure are those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and his or her decisions.

If people are feeling increasingly powerless and dispossessed then it can hardly be said that the liberal approach to agency has worked. I would suggest that two things have gone wrong. First, liberals have emphasised individual agency at the expense of collective agency (so that, for instance, a nation of people no longer feels that it has the capacity to determine its future). Second, the underlying assumptions of agency itself are mistaken: "structure" sometimes helps to enhance agency, as structure provides the framework and cultural support that provides the context for meaningful choice.

Third, it is interesting that Lord Glasman wishes that the Conservative Party really were conservative rather than liberal. He's not the first left-winger I've heard utter this thought. At some level, people do understand that you need a genuinely conservative force in society to hold things together and to represent a truly national interest.

So what does Lord Glasman propose the Labour Party do? Amongst his suggestions are the following:

Labour’s policy review is built around three themes: family, place and work.

That is what people care about.

Only through coming together for a common good can a decent human life, based on faithful relationships and an attachment to the people you live and work with, be forged. It is an active task not a passive policy.

Immigration and Europe, which are closely connected, have ruptured Labour’s relationship with its own supporters.

We need to heal that rift.

People feel powerless because we do not control our borders, we cannot shape our destiny and we have lost our sense of political community.

We need the Church and unions to find a common good between them to support people to fulfil their obligations to their loved ones and ensure normal dramas don’t turn into a catastrophe.

The future is based on skilled work and respecting work, and preserving our proud inheritance of shaping our own destiny together.

What's good in this? Well, he does state clearly that open borders makes people feel powerless and not in control of their national destiny. He believes that Labour lost support on the issues of immigration and Europe. (Note, though, that he doesn't offer a firm policy of limiting numbers in future.)

He also talks about the importance of faithful relationships and family, but again without any particular policy recommendations about how a culture of stable family life might be upheld.

In a more general sense, he also recognises that there is a problem within modern liberal societies of people losing particular attachments and a sense of togetherness.

Swedish PM doesn't like the nation

Fredrik Reinfeldt is the supposedly "conservative" PM of Sweden. But just like David Cameron in the UK, it's not obvious that he is very conservative at all.

Last week he stridently rejected the idea of nationalism and national identity, setting this against the idea of individual rights and individual differences:

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Wednesday urged young voters to head to the European parliamentary polls on May 25th "to cure the European disease of nationalism".

"European cooperation has created a foundation where individual rights are paramount, and has created the possibility to move freely," Reinfeldt told students at Luleå Technical University, adding that his party encouraged diversity.

The prime minister said that while the union was not perfect, it was better than the alternative.

"Let go of the age-old and revolting thought that what sticks out is dangerous," he cautioned. "Safeguard the idea that we are individuals, who are different and can live together with tolerance and mutual respect."

That's a false way of posing things. Reinfeldt is setting the idea of the individual against the idea of belonging to a nation, as if the two things were at odds.

In fact, a strong sense of belonging to a national community will generally enrich the life of the individual and add to his sense of identity, his commitment to the society he lives in, his connection to a particular culture and the meaning of his work and his efforts to raise a family.

Nor does a national community erase individual differences. If you were to take, for instance, 100 ethnic Japanese you would find a diversity in character, personality and sensibility that would more than satisfy the human urge toward difference.

It's true that jingoism - the stirring up of national feeling to support an aggressive foreign policy - is a negative thing, but it should be remembered that nationalism can also be drawn on to resist aggressors. Was it not, for instance, a love of country that helped to motivate young Australian men to defend their nation in WWII?

It seems to me that the individual loses power when he is reduced to the status of an individual consumer or careerist in a modern, internationalist, liberal state. He is no longer part of a larger community existing through time. He is no longer a participant in a unique culture, nor does he share in the achievements of a national community. He no longer has the inspiration in his life of heroes whom he is related to in a particular way; nor does he feel a sense of ownership over the particular landscape of his national homeland.

If he feels himself to be just one atomised individual in a mass society, then how can he not feel smaller than the man who feels himself to be a part of a great tradition?

A right-liberal thought experiment

Let's say, as a thought experiment, that right-liberals got what they wanted, so that in 50 years' time all that existed were deracinated individuals each pursuing their rational self-interest in the market.

Let's say that you were one of those individuals. Who would you then vote for? Would you vote for a right-liberal party emphasising small government, low taxes and equal opportunity, or would you vote for a left-liberal party emphasising the idea of high taxation in order to redistribute wealth from the upper middle-classes to the lower classes?

It seems to me that in the most ideal right-liberal conditions most people would vote for the left-liberal party. Why? Because it would be in their rational self-interest to do so. If all that I am told is that I must pursue the best material outcomes for myself, and I belong to the majority which will benefit from a redistributive state, then why wouldn't I vote for that state?

What right-liberals really have to think about is why someone from the majority social classes would vote against their own material self-interest and in favour of small government, low taxation and low welfare.

And the problem here for right-liberals is that the reasons people might do so are not supported by right-liberalism itself.

For instance, a working-class man might from a sense of masculine pride prefer to stand on his own two feet and support his family from his own labours rather than having things handed to him by a welfare state.

But this requires a culture of masculine honour, as well as a very strong sense of a masculine provider role, that the materialistic and individualistic ethos of right-liberalism cannot uphold. Right-liberalism does not reach deeply enough into men's souls to be able to draw on such motivations.

Similarly, if the middle-classes thought of themselves as belonging to a distinct, historic people and as having a duty to promote the highest existence of themselves as a people, then they might forego material self-interest to promote the overall well-being of their own tradition. They might then reject welfarism and statism as sapping the energy and spirit of their own people, and as disrupting intermediary forms of communal life, such as the family.

But right-liberalism is again too individualistic to allow people to form such motivations. Right-liberalism encourages us to identify with ourselves alone as individuals.

Is it really so surprising that nineteenth century right-liberalism was followed by twentieth century left-liberalism?

Would right-liberals advocate leaving America?

A reader sent me a link to a post at Bearing Drift, a website representing the Republican Party in Virginia.

It's an interesting post because it highlights how profoundly different right-liberalism is to a traditionalist conservatism.

The post is about amnesty for illegal immigrants in the U.S. The writer of the post not only wants amnesty for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, but he wants those opposing amnesty driven out of the Republican Party.

That's not surprising when he describes the aims of the Republican Party in these terms:

Free markets, free speech, and a free society — that is the cornerstone of American conservatism.

If that is all you believe in then of course you can invite the world to live in your country. As I've pointed out before, right-liberals believe in the aim of being self-made in the market. That means that they look up to economic migrants who cross the seas to improve their material standard of living - after all that's a mark of a moral life for a right-liberal.

And so the author at Bearing Drift says of the illegal immigrants:

There are 12 million people in the United States today who want a better lives for themselves and their families, whose only crime was that they came to America to do it.

And this:

Conservatives embrace the idea of more Americans coming into this country to work hard and prosper.

There is a contradiction in this kind of "conservatism" (i.e. right-liberalism). The author writes:

The Republican Party is the party that is fighting against welfare, fighting against the entitlement system, fighting for individual freedom.

And it is true that right-liberals don't like welfare or entitlements. But in pushing for open borders they are effectively guaranteeing the victory of a left-liberal statism. Those 12 million Mexican illegals are going to be amongst the biggest users of state welfare and, therefore, reliable voters for the Democrats. Whereas only 6% of immigrants from the UK in the US rely on welfare payments, 57% of those from Mexico do:

Families headed by immigrants from specific countries or areas of the world range from just over 6 percent for those immigrants from Great Britain to more than 57 percent of those from Mexico using some type of welfare.

In that sense, right-liberalism is self-defeating. It promotes open borders, which then fuels the ascendancy of the left-liberal welfare state.

It is also shallow and materialistic. The logic of right-liberalism goes something like: we should be free to pursue our rational self-interest and our rational self-interest is a materialistic one of maximising our individual profit-seeking behaviour.

This is a vision of Economic Man, one which leaves out the less "scientific" but nonetheless real human qualities of identifying as part of a larger communal tradition, one that we feel a love and affection for and that is a good in its own right.

Finally, here is a thought for right-liberals to ponder. If the Mexican economy is not as prosperous as the American one; and if that means it is a virtue for Mexicans to seek to improve their standard of living by moving to America; then doesn't that also mean it would be a virtue, if the American economy were to decline, for Americans to pack their bags and head elsewhere?

What if China ends up with a better standard of living? Is the correct moral response of Americans then to seek entry to China? Would the best Americans, by definition, be the ones who departed America?

Can Elle Hardy's definition of the right hold?

I was interested to come across a post at The Guardian titled "What's wrong with the Australian right - and how to fix it." It's written by a young woman named Elle Hardy. She claims to be a rightist, but here's the problem. She attempts to define the right as follows:

It is of course difficult to define the range of views held under the banner of those who consider ourselves "right", as it spans conservatism and liberalism. But broadly, we can class our fundamental beliefs as follows: limited government, belief in the rights of the individual, and the desire to preserve the institutions that make our democracy function.

This is the problem with attempts at "fusionism" between conservatism and liberalism. The fundamentals of liberalism remain untouched, and the role of conservatism is limited to preserving liberalism itself.

That's why Elle Hardy has not escaped that limiting framework of politics, in which the big debating point is still how to best regulate a society made up of millions of abstracted, interchangeable individuals each in pursuit of their own self-interest.

For left-liberals the answer is regulation by an interventionist, technocratic state. For right-liberals like Elle Hardy the answer is regulation by the free market (and along the formal lines of statements of individual rights). She sees the market as a source of morality and freedom; her politics is a vision of Economic Man. And so she writes:

Intellectual and moral leadership is required to bridge the gap between populist policies, with which we must grapple as ardent democrats, and the promotion of fundamentals such as free markets and natural rights.

She complains about the left,

rejecting the benefits of technological advancements such as fracking and necessary workplace relations changes to compete in a globalised economy. We need to build the intellectual heft to prosecute the case against the propensity for government intervention.

And that,

As many of the left devote their time to demonising capitalism, posting comments from their iPads, it is crucial that we continue to endorse its benefits and inherent morality...Foreign ownership of farms, and the natural shift of our economic base away from manufacturing are both positive things, and we cannot allow a selective fear of Chinese capital to flourish.

Even when she writes to defend civil society, she does so in reference to the market:

A strong civil society helps to keep government out of our lives, strengthens our interactions with the free market, and aides inclusiveness

Which leads me to the main point I want to make. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this right-liberalism is a suitable vehicle for defending the traditions we belong to. To help prove my point, take marriage as an example. What does someone with Elle Hardy's mindset think about marriage?

Not much. She writes:

Historically, the institution has much of which it should be ashamed. Marriage likely evolved due to men’s desire to secure their agricultural and human property, and ensure legitimate succession...

Marriage has been antithetical to liberty for the majority of human beings who have inhabited earth throughout the ages, most notably women (or girls, as so often has been the case). Today, in many parts of the world, legalised marriage continues to be a tool of oppression...

The history and traditions of marriage show it to be a patriarchal institution of the highest order. 

Why, then, are Western liberal democracies so polarised between defending and fighting for something which has been such a pejorative concept to so many, for so long?

According to Elle Hardy all that matters is the right to choose whatever we want as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Therefore, the state should not restrict who may or may not marry; marriage should be a private matter in which we might marry a group of people if we so desire:

When Kevin Andrews preached his views to us last year, he disguised socio-economic disparities to make the case for marriage in his book Maybe “I do” – Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness. Central to his argument was the logical fallacy of the slippery slope: “Once the state can no longer insist that marriage involves a commitment to a member of the opposite sex, there is no ground (other than superstition) for insisting that marriage be limited to one person rather than several.”

There is no justification in his diatribe as to why government should play a role in enforcing this view. The principles of liberal democracy hold that consenting adults should be able to make any union they so wish, provided it does not interfere with the rights of others.

There is simply no role for state regulation of group marriage, homosexual marriage, or heterosexual marriage in a democracy

Finally there's this:

That which we know as marriage – a nice, albeit expensive, celebration of commitment, which comfortably dissolves into drunkenness and bad dancing – is not a bad thing in and of itself. On a semantic level, it would be futile to try to stop the use of the word marriage, or to change its heteronormative nature. But it is important for people to be able to define marriage of their own free will.

We must immediately, symbolically, give all people the right to marry whoever they choose.

I rest my case. This is liberalism and not anything that can truly be termed conservatism. She does not want to conserve an institution that is inherently meaningful, she wants to uphold the right of the individual to self-define what the institution means. It is the right of autonomous choice that matters to her and this leads her to take a very negative view of marriage as being an impediment to individual freedom, rather than an institution which fulfils aspects of our natures as men and women; which provides a relatively stable environment for the expression of marital and parental love; and which encourages individuals to invest in the societies they belong to.

How do you bridge this gulf?

There is a gulf in understanding between those who follow "interest group politics" and those who identify with the larger tradition they belong to.

The leaders of minority groups often understand that in a liberal society the aim of politics is to create a formal structure through which self-interest can be equally pursued (with the formal structure including definitions of rights). They see the aim of politics, therefore, as being to organise as a minority interest group and to make sure that this framework (of pursuing self-interest) is structured in a way that is biased for rather than against their own group. The minority groups will often assume that this has also been the focus of the majority, meaning that the majority has used its influence to structure society to its own benefit (hence the notion of majority privilege dominant on the left today).

White liberals who belong to the majority often perceive society the same way that minority groups do, and so tend to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege.

But for most members of the majority all this is very confusing. They don't see their society as being a field of contest for competing rights. Their society means much more to them than this. It has a meaning as an entity in itself: as a source of identity, as an expression of the culture that is connected to one's own people, as a means of transmission of a distinct tradition.

Furthermore, the non-liberal member of the majority will want his society to be ordered according to objective moral truths, rather than being merely a system enabling the pursuit of self-interest.

So there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf in understanding here. Unfortunately, the majority has to understand that it is liberal whites and minority interest groups who are running the show, so their understanding now dominates.

I have had readers in the past who have insisted that liberals aren't interested in the truth and that there is therefore no purpose in trying to argue with them logically. I've mostly disagreed as there do exist principles within liberal thought which liberals follow through to their logical conclusions.

However, I agree that liberals, in thinking about the nature of society, aren't as oriented to what is objectively true or good. Instead, they focus on relationships of power - on who gets to benefit from structures which limit or empower the pursuit of self-interest (when liberals praise someone for being "empowered" doesn't it often mean that the person has thrown off limitations in the pursuit of what they want?)

It should also be said that even though it is left-liberals who have made interest group politics their own, right-liberals did much to prepare the ground for it. It was right-liberals who pushed along the idea of society being made of millions of rights-bearing individuals each pursuing a rational self-interest. It was not a long step from that to the idea that the contest was not just between individuals but between interest groups.

So even though it's true that right-liberals often hate the idea of interest groups replacing individuals (with many complaints about the intrusion of ethnicity, culture and race into politics), it was right-liberals themselves who set up the idea of society as being a neutral or vacant space rather than a space that was already inhabited by a particular culture, tradition and people.

Melanie's big mistake

Melanie Phillips greeted the election of Tony Abbott as Australia's new Prime Minister with elation:

So what is this miracle? That a true conservative has won a general election on true conservative principles.

I rolled my eyes when I read that. The single biggest mistake that we make is the one that Melanie Phillips just made. It is passively awaiting for a saviour, a "true conservative," from one of the mainstream centre-right parties, such as the Australian Liberal Party.

We could play that game forever if we wanted to, decade after decade, never learning the lesson that such parties are committed to liberal modernity.

Tony Abbott quite possibly sees himself as a conservative. Certainly, he has read Edmund Burke and likes to quote from Burke in his speeches. But time and again he has proven himself to be closer to liberalism in his policies and principles.

For instance, Abbott has repeatedly stressed his strong belief in mass immigration. He wrote once:

the immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story.

To the extent that it is a celebration of our nation, Australia Day is necessarily a salute to an immigrant culture.

Abbott has more recently gone much further than this and claimed that immigrants, particularly from Asia, make much better Australians than the Australian born:

People who have come to this country from many parts of Asia...that is the face and the name of modern Australia.

...I want to say how brave every single migrant to this country is, because every single one of you has done something that those who are native born have never done. You have been gutsy enough to take your future in your hands and to go to a country which is not yours and make it your own...migration...has added a heroic dimension to our national life

...those who come to this country as skilled migrants...they might come as temporary migrants originally, but they make the very best Australian citizens eventually. They are the most worthy, the most welcome parts of the Australian family...

Can we reliably expect someone who has voiced such opinions to uphold traditional Australia?

And it's a similar story when it comes to the family. Abbott's concern is the same one as the feminists: to make sure that the family does not hinder a woman's career and earnings. He once warned conservatives in his party that:

Supporting families shouldn’t mean favouring one family type over others. We have to resist yearning for “ideal” families and “traditional” mothers.

What followed was a paid maternity leave scheme which would pay women a full wage for six months (to a total of $75,000) per child.

What about the idea of a husband supporting his wife? Abbott doesn't think this is viable anymore:

"The fact is very few families these days can survive on a single income"

So Abbott's commitments here are not distinctively conservative ones, but more in line with modernist trends in society.

Melanie Phillips is selling a misleading image of Abbott to her UK readers. In doing so she is encouraging a belief that things might be put right simply by the right leader coming along. What she ought to be doing is encouraging her readers to get active themselves.

Fortunately, not everyone is being overly optimistic about Abbott. Credit to the Sydney Trads for an excellent column on Abbott which I highly recommend that you read here. I look forward to the day when this more clear-eyed view is a commonplace one.

(Comments note: I have temporarily switched on comment moderation. If you wish to submit a comment feel free to do so, but I'm only likely to check them a few times a day, so you'll need to be patient.)

Brandis: unique identities, individual ends

It's uncommon for members of the right-liberal parties to set out their beliefs in a systematic way. Back in 1984, George Brandis did just this (I am assuming he is now Senator George Brandis of the Australian Liberal Party).

So what did George Brandis set out as his beliefs?

a) The liberal theory of society

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism.     

Traditionalists strongly disagree with this view of human society. We would not use the word "unique" when describing identities and aspirations. The reality is more complex than this: some aspects of our identity and aspirations are uniquely individual, but others are shared and communal.

Is it really unique for instance that I have a male identity? Is it unique that I identify with my ethnic tradition? Is it unique that I aspired as a young man to find an attractive woman to love and with whom I could form a family?

Some aspects of our identity and aspirations, far from being uniquely individual, are part of an eternal human condition. Does that mean that it is all dull conformity? No, because these identities and aspirations are refracted differently within each human personality.

It is important to get this right, because if you take the liberal view that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations, then you end up with the liberal idea of society as being a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing ends that can only possibly be known to them.

What you lose is a sense of the larger social entities which help form individual identity, to which individuals feel a sense of belonging and attachment, and which provide the social context (the framework) for the lives of individuals (i.e. for expressing our nature as men and women).

It is terribly mistaken, in the traditionalist view, to base a theory of society on "the pursuit of individual ends." Let's say that we have a masculine identity and it is a part of this identity to play an effective role as a husband and father and also to uphold the larger communal tradition we belong to. Our "individual ends" cannot then be separated from a number of "social ends" relating to family and community. Our social ends and our individual ends blend together.

That possibly helps to explain why it doesn't feel free to be limited to individual ends. If we are limited in this way, we can't fully pursue some of the more significant ends in life, so part of our personality feels bottled up or stifled.

There's much more to comment on in George Brandis's essay, but I don't like to make these more theoretical posts too long, so I'll resume discussion in a future post.

Out of the Antiworld: right and left

For most of the 1900s, political debate in the Anglosphere countries was limited to arguments between right and left liberals.

James Kalb has described the differing outlooks of right and left liberals in his recent essay Out of the Antiworld. He argues that both kinds of liberals want to make individual preference the supreme good in society. Right-liberals tend to be those who like action and who therefore see the satisfaction of individual preference in terms of "the unlimited pursuit of career, power and money in a sort of competitive free-for-all". This right-liberal "party of action" focuses on "markets, entrepreneurs and minimal regulation."

The left-liberals want to maximise individual preference differently. This party consists of:

experts, officials, and explainers, who are enormously influential in a complex, bureaucratic, technological, and media-ridden society like our own. Such people are less interested in action and acquisition than in the creation of a scheme of total control through exact knowledge. The ideal they strive for is a sort of EU writ large, a universal system of social management run by expert functionaries that secures and fine-tunes maximum equal preference satisfaction for everyone everywhere. Such a system requires uniformity, centralization, and strict limits on disturbing factors like enterprise and competition.

In 1965 the Federal President of the Australian Liberal Party (our right-liberal party), Philip McBride, made this comment:

...We are not to be held back, nor do we want to see Australia held back, by the belief that our national destiny is to be found in a bureaucratic State where theorists are paramount

You can see that in 1965 right-liberals were focused on the debate with left-liberals, not with traditionalists. McBride saw his opposition as being the left-liberal party of "experts, officials and explainers".

But if the debate is limited to an argument between right and left liberals can we really be surprised if society drifts ever further in a liberal direction? James Kalb has made an excellent contribution with his essay to opening up debate, by criticising liberalism as an "operating system" rather than just opposing this or that liberal policy.

Margaret Thatcher 2

I know that those who admire Margaret Thatcher (and there were qualities to admire) may not like me pointing such matters out, but she did not see herself as a traditionalist conservative.

She said of herself that:

The kind of Conservatism which he [Keith Joseph] and I — though coming from very different backgrounds — favoured would be best described as "liberal", in the old-fashioned sense. And I mean the liberalism of Mr Gladstone not of the latter day collectivists.
 

Thatcher also referred to herself as a libertarian, albeit one who thought a state was need to uphold law and order:

The first task of the State is to defend its citizens against attack from within and without. It is in this sense that the libertarian insists that government must be strong.
 

When you look at the politics of the day you get a sense that it was not even that traditionalist conservatism was explicitly rejected, it just wasn't what was being contested. What was being contested was a vision of society being ordered around a constantly expanding welfare state versus a vision of society ordered around freely enterprising individuals and a limited state directed at law and order.

If that's where the debate stays, then we've failed. We've got to open up new debates in which traditionalist values are not kept in the background but become a focal point.

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher passed away yesterday. She was a major figure on the right and so it's worthwhile to look back at her politics.

In 1981, whilst British PM, Thatcher visited Melbourne and gave a speech outlining her political beliefs. It is a striking statement not of conservatism but of right liberalism.

What is right liberalism? Like all forms of liberalism, it is a belief that the highest good is an individual freedom, understood to mean a freedom of the individual to be autonomous: to be unimpeded in choosing, subject to the condition that these choices don't hinder the autonomy of other individuals.

The assumption here is that there aren't goods that a community might value and seek to uphold (apart from liberalism itself). Instead, the focus is on the things we can choose as individuals, usually involving career, consumer choice or, perhaps, lifestyle choice. (So liberalism, for all its talk of choice, involves placing a major limitation on the type of choice that is available to people.)

By taking away the level of existence above that of the individual, liberalism also tends to assume that individuals are interchangeable. If we are seen as rights-bearing, choice-making individuals, then the woman in Peru is interchangeable with the man in Japan. There are no particularities of identity or relationship or essence that fundamentally matter anymore.

But how do you order a society made up of radically autonomous individuals? This is where right-liberalism departs a little from left-liberalism. First, it has been common for right-liberalism to more greatly emphasise the rule of law and personal responsibility as means to order a society. Second, right-liberals have been more sceptical of the role of the bureaucratic state in socially engineering society: they have generally stood for a lower-taxing, smaller state. Third, right-liberals have placed much emphasis on the role of the free market in ordering society. The free market is not only seen as an aspect of personal liberty, but it is thought to create prosperity and progress. For these reasons, right-liberals often see the free market not just as an economic system but as a moral one.

If you read Margaret Thatcher's Melbourne speech it's not difficult to recognise her commitment to a right-liberal philosophy. It's evident, for instance, in her praise of the former Australian PM, Sir Robert Menzies:

When he founded the Liberal Party he said "we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise".

...He saw the Commonwealth as a vehicle for spreading and defending the ideals for which the English speaking peoples stand: democracy, the liberty and responsibility of the individual, the rule of law—in a word, the ideals of freedom.
 

Then there is her placing of individual choice as the primary good:

What sets man above the rest of the living world is his sanctity as a human being, with the ability and the right to choose...

...Where freedom to exercise personal choice exists, I seek to expand it; where it is under attack, I shall defend it; where it does not exist, I shall try to create it.
 

Thatcher then goes on to defend the rule of law as a means of ordering society:

We live in families, neighbourhoods and communities, whose members need rules to enable them to live together harmoniously. These rules or laws must be just, must be backed by authority and administered impartially.

...Order, in a free society, means the ability of ordinary men and women to go about their business and their leisure pursuits in freedom and without fear, so long as what they do does not harm or damage others. The first task of the State is to defend its citizens against attack from within and without. It is in this sense that the libertarian insists that government must be strong. Strong to uphold the rule of law. Strong to maintain order. Strong to protect freedom...Government must secure the conditions for freedom to prevail. That is its task. People must live their own lives within these laws.
 

Then there is her commitment to the free market:

The right to choose. The rule of law. We need even more than these to promote and protect liberty. It is not by chance that every free society is fundamentally a capitalist society. For without economic liberty, political liberty will soon die. The converse is not true. Not all capitalist societies are free. Capitalism or free enterprise is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of liberty. I have already described two of the other essential ingredients—the right and responsibility to choose and the rule of law.
 

There's one final issue to be discussed, namely that of the nation state. This is one area where Thatcher was "conservative" in the sense of wanting to move more slowly than other liberals of her era. She said in her Melbourne speech:

I believe that, despite our growing inter-dependence, the day of the nation state is not over; that such states still have their contribution to make to the development of the human story.
 

The background to this is as follows. Nations were originally thought of as a large community of people united by a common ethnicity (history, language, race, culture, religion etc.). Liberals rejected this traditional nationalism and put in its place a civic one. The civic nation was supposed to be united by a shared commitment to liberal values and institutions.

But within the space of just a few decades many liberals were giving up even on a civic nation, which they considered still too exclusive and discriminatory (or else too small a unit to pursue power globally). In Australia, for instance, Paul Keating expressed his commitment to post-nationalism, as later on did Kevin Rudd.

Margaret Thatcher was not a nationalist in the traditional sense, but she did still believe in the civic nation state. This led to her political demise; other members of her party wanted to move toward closer European Union integration whilst she did not and so she was deposed as PM.

But she was proven correct in her warnings about monetary union and building a European superstate. In a 1993 memoir she recalled some of the arguments she made against monetary union:

We had arguments which might persuade both the Germans...and the poorer countries, who must be told that they will not be bailed out of the consequences of a single currency, which would therefore devastate their inefficient economies.

Well, we've now seen the German taxpayers having to bail out those countries.

Margaret Thatcher was an intelligent, strong-willed and principled politician, but her principles were right-liberal rather than traditionalist ones.

An inadequate formula for the right?

I haven't read much by Kenneth Minogue so please don't take what follows as a general criticism of his writings. It's a criticism of this particular passage:

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism.
 

I don't think that's a place for the right to take a stand. It's true that nearly all of the right, including traditionalists like myself, want a smaller and less intrusive government. So on that point we find agreement.

But Minogue seems to be sailing close to something like a classical liberalism in the sentence that I bolded. It's an image of a society in which the government merely sets a framework of laws within which individuals then pursue happiness as they see fit.

What's wrong with that? I think it's a political orientation that is doomed to failure, for three reasons.

First, we humans are moral creatures. We wish to think that we are not just acting selfishly for our own happiness, but that we are acting rightly and upholding the good. After all, if it were just a case of my own individual happiness I could easily justify adultery, or neglecting my children, or any number of dishonesties.

So there are two problems with the idea that government should stay out of our lives so that we may "pursue happiness on our own account." First, it's likely to lead to a self-serving hedonism (which is unlikely to be entirely corrected by life as a teacher of virtue). Second, and just as importantly, it will fail to connect to the normal and healthy orientation that people have to what is right and good.

The left has been very successful in connecting to this orientation. The left has been superbly talented in taking people on an emotional journey centred on moral ideals of justice, equality and freedom. They have won conscientious people this way, in fact they have even managed to shift the moral imaginations of many serious Christians away from Christianity and toward liberalism.

A successful right-wing politics cannot abandon the field of moral idealism to the left and expect to prosper. We too should be asserting an understanding of justice and of public virtue (such as loyalty or piety or prudence etc). Unless we do this we allow the left to triumph unopposed.

Second, we humans are social creatures. This means that we are strongly influenced by the culture surrounding us and by the institutions of society. Realistically only a minority of people are able to act against the stream of society.

The left understands this and so has made a big push to influence the larger culture of society and to control the leading institutions of society. They've been highly successful in their aims; for instance, the schools and the universities are now probably 90% incubators of a leftist world view.

A successful right needs to be equally determined to hold on wherever it can to institutions and to influence over the culture of a society. If that means tenaciously rebuilding influence at the local level, then so be it. But the idea of just having people acting individually is no match for a left which understands the influence of culture and institutions; again, it leaves the left unopposed in a critical area of politics.

Third, it is misconceived to think of people acting only at an individual level to secure their happiness. Much of what is important to us requires a social setting that has to be defended at a public level. For instance, if we want to form a family successfully, then we need a culture of family life to be defended at a public level. Similarly, if our identity and our sense of belonging depends on the maintenance of a communal tradition, then we need that tradition to be defended at a public level.

It's no use having a view of life which focuses only on the things that people do individually for their own happiness. If you limit yourself to this, then what really have you got left to complain about? In practice, you're likely to be left complaining about the state interfering with your right to gamble, or smoke, or drink, or drive fast. In other words, you'll be left to complain about the existence of a nanny state - but you won't have the political vocabulary to take on the really big issues effectively. You won't be able to challenge the left when it comes to the larger social settings which make a full and complete human life possible.

For all these reasons, an effective right cannot limit itself to the idea of a neutral state maintaining social order whilst individuals go off and do their own thing. It leaves out too much and misunderstands the real driving forces of both the individual and society. It abandons critical areas of politics to the left.

So how do our politicians deal with national identity?

It's Australia Day. On the positive side, that means a lot of family get togethers around a BBQ. On the negative side, the papers are full of liberal politicians busily redefining Australia's national identity.

The Financial Review has offered us two politicians: Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. In the interests of brevity I'll deal with Turnbull in this post and Rudd in the next one.

Malcolm Turnbull is on the left-wing of the Liberal Party, which is our right-liberal party. There are no surprises in his reflections on Australia's identity. He argues that Australia is special because it has a civic identity rather than a traditional ethnic one:

...unlike most other countries (the US being a notable exception), we do not regard national identity by reference to a common race, ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

Our national identity is defined by a common commitment to Australian civic values of democracy, the rule of law, respect for the rights of individual men and women, a healthy scepticism for authority and a deep intuitive sense of a fair go.
 

But what of the problems with a civic identity, in which it is a common commitment to liberal political institutions and values which is supposed to unite us?

One problem is that identity becomes indistinct. If being Australian means being committed to democracy and the rights of individual men and women, then how is that different to what it means to be American or Canadian or English or Swedish?

Turnbull tries to solve this issue in two ways. First, he pretends that the European nations still hold to a traditional ethnic nationalism and that Australia and the U.S. are somehow exceptional in being civic nations.

But that's Turnbull just making things up. All of the Western nations define themselves explicitly now in terms of a civic, rather than an ethnic, nationalism: the UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Sweden - the list goes on.

Second, Turnbull admits that the components of a civic nationalism are the same everywhere, but he thinks that there are other distinguishing aspects of society that define us:

There is no individual component in our civic values unique to Australia. But the combination is distinctly Australian – for example, we are much less deferential than the British, more caring, with a stronger safety net than the Americans.
 

But that is an exceptionally thin foundation for a national identity. It's like Canadians thinking they're different because they have a national health insurance scheme. What if the Australian and American safety nets become more alike? Does that then mean we've lost our national identity?

The rest of Turnbull's column is, as you would expect from a right liberal, focused on the ideal of individuals being self-made in the market and the need for freedom from state regulation of the economy. (Right-liberals believe that you can regulate society best through the market rather than through state bureaucracy.)

Getting Girls wrong

National Review Online is supposed to represent the conservative opposition in the U.S. But I hardly ever read it and when I do visit I'm inevitably disappointed.

I had a look at it this morning and read a review by Betsy Woodruff of a new HBO TV series called Girls. Betsy doesn't mince words when reviewing the show:

it’s impossible to tell whether Girls is reflecting or shaping culture. But given how popular the show is and how much scrutiny it has drawn, it’s worth speculating as to which is the case. And for the sake of Western civilization, let’s hope it’s the former. That’s because if Dunham’s vision is prophetic — if it’s helping to forward a larger cultural shift, rather than just depicting a self-contained subgroup — then I think it’s safe to say it’s all over for us.

So there's something in the show that is simply incompatible with civilisation - it's that bad. But what?

At first it seems as if Betsy is going to make a conservative criticism of the show. She notes that the characters are uninterested in morality and devoid of responsibility. And the characters really are living morally bleak lives. In an early episode one of the characters finds out she is pregnant, her friends gather at the abortion clinic but she misses the appointment because she's hooking up with a man at a bar. In another scene from the show the lead character is told she has HPV but a friend reassures her by noting that "all adventurous women have HPV".

But it turns out that Betsy is quite happy with the modern girl lifestyle. What worries her is not what the girls are doing but that they're not proud enough to finance it for themselves. It's that right-liberal versus left-liberal argument again. Both accept that the goal is to be an autonomous agent. For right-liberals like Betsy this means being self-reliant and not depending on the state. For left-liberals it means the state empowering people to live autonomously. Betsy seems to believe that civilisation depends on people taking the right-liberal option and financing their own abortions and contraception rather than expecting the government to subsidise the cost.

Let me give some examples, starting with the worst of the lot. Here is Betsy criticising Girls by comparing its "new vision of women" unfavourably with the vision pursued by second wave feminists:

Second-wave feminists lionized the independent woman who paid her own rent and busted through glass ceilings and ran for Congress. Being totally self-sufficient was the goal. The idea was that women didn’t need men, whether those men were their fathers or husbands or boyfriends or presidents. By contrast, Dunham’s new vision of women as lady parts with ballots is infantilizing and regressive.

What does that paragraph tell you about National Review Online? To me that's a radically liberal view of the world. The aim is to be totally self-sufficient (autonomous) even to the point of not needing fathers or husbands or boyfriends. Betsy thinks that this is an adult and progressive approach to life, because it makes women self-reliant and independent. A left-liberal would simply reply that if justice means women not needing men, then the state can promote justice by increasing the number of women not needing men. Otherwise some privileged women will live a fully human life (independent of men) and others will miss out - an offence against human equality.

And here is Betsy complaining that Girls is not feminist enough:

You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Again, there is no in principle disagreement with the philosophy of modernity here. Betsy is just upset with the idea that the left wants women to rely on the state in pursuit of their modern girl lifestyles. If they paid for it themselves, she'd be happy with it.

She makes the same criticism here:

In fact, for all practical purposes, the patriarchy no longer decides whom American women can sleep with and when. That’s great. But if you don’t want men in Washington telling you how to use your sexuality, you shouldn’t expect them to subsidize it. But Dunham seems to actually believe they should. Dunham makes tons of money, and I’m quite confident she can afford to pay for her own birth control. But she doesn’t seem to take pride in that...

Again, she has no problems with the decline of traditional morality - she thinks it's "great" that women can be promiscuous and can use their sexuality for whatever purpose they want. Betsy seems to be unconscious of the possibility that not all choices are the same when it comes to sexuality: that some choices might be elevating and others degrading; that some choices might prioritise love and a commitment to family whilst others might impair the ability to pair bond; and that some choices present risks to health and well-being.

The show itself is possibly a little wiser than Betsy in this regard. Girls does at least portray the more negative consequences of the sexual revolution. It doesn't pretend that if only people paid for their own contraception all would be well.

The thing is, I don't think we need to fear Girls. The lifestyle depicted in the show is so far gone that anyone who adopts it is simply lost to us. Girls portrays left-liberalism in such deep decay that it presents us with the opportunity to demonstrate something much better.

Which is why I fear Betsy a lot more. We are not showing the better alternative if the most right-wing criticism we permit ourselves is to complain about people not self-funding their modernist lifestyles. The opposition to left-liberal decay is, at the moment, a sham and that is what is really holding back a necessary response to it.

I did it from my own resources?

Here's another angle for looking at the differences between right and left liberals.

The right liberal parties tend to attract people who get psychological satisfaction from having competed in the market, earned their own money and raised their own family. These people can say "I did it from my own resources, through my talents and hard work. I can therefore count myself a success."

And so the right liberal parties tend to attract successful independent tradesmen, those working in private industry, small business operators, the married and so on.

The left liberal parties are more oriented to those people looking to state welfare as a guarantee of well-being, such as students, single women and pensioners. They also cater for those who use collective power to advance their interests (unionists) and who are therefore less likely to have that right liberal "I did it myself" mindset. The left liberal parties also appeal to minority groups by telling them that members of the majority group are not successful because of hard work and talent but because of institutional privilege and by promising the use of state power to transfer wealth and status to minority groups.

These differences are seen most starkly in the U.S., as in many other places in the West the right-liberal parties have adopted much of the left liberal point of view (someone like Thatcher stands out as an exception).

Obama is clearly on the left of the spectrum. During the recent election he used the "Julia" ad campaign, showing a woman who uses state welfare for support during the course of her life, and he was also criticised on the right for a speech in which he emphasised that people don't succeed through their own efforts and resources:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

So where do traditionalists stand in all of this? It would be easy for traditionalists to say "Well, we support the right liberal view, in which we think ourselves a success by working hard to earn our own money and raise a family. We reject the left liberal view that white men succeed through institutional privilege (racism and sexism)".

But leaving it at that would be a big mistake. The framework I described above excludes a traditionalist understanding of life. Once we accept the framework as it stands we lose. Our task is to take as many people as we can outside the existing political format.

For instance, where does the current format leave the issue of nation and ethny? The debate is between those who want to do it on their own and those who see whiteness as a form of privilege. So the right wing mentality tends to reject a concept of "white pride" on the grounds that we can't take credit for things we don't achieve ourselves as individuals, whereas the left rejects it as a defence of supremacy.

There is no place within the current format for the idea that a member of the majority might have a positive identification with an ethnic tradition of their own and feel a sense of duty to contribute positively to that tradition.

How would we create a place for such an understanding? We need to extend the idea of what a successful life means. It can include "I worked hard from my own resources to earn a living and support a family". But it should be much more than this.

What matters too is how richly we experience life. And this requires that we avoid being shut in to our own sense of self and losing our responsiveness to the outside world. If we manage to retain a sensitive response, then our individuality is substantially enhanced.

For instance, we might work hard as men and manage to support our families and that is certainly an achievement. But if as well we retain the responsiveness we have as men to our wives, and the paternal love we feel for our children, then we don't lose in individuality but we have a stronger sense of who we are as men and as fathers.

And it's the same when it comes to ethny and nation. If we have a sense of the larger existence of the ethnic tradition we belong to; if we recognise the good that the existence of this tradition represents; if we feel connected to past and future generations; if we feel a pride in the positive achievements of our forebears; if we accept the loyalties and the duties that naturally flow from membership of a tradition; and if we feel rooted within a place and a community associated with our tradition - then our individuality, our sense of who we are as an individual, is immeasurably enhanced.

I do often feel a pride in my Anglo-Australian forebears. Just this morning I stopped off at a suburban park with my family. I hadn't been there before and I was impressed with the care taken to create such a place. The gardens were made generations ago, so obviously I personally had nothing to do with their existence. But even so I felt a pride in my forebears for building so well.

We have to avoid, as the poet Sir Walter Scott put it, being "concentrated all in self". If we are limited to the satisfaction of being self-supported through our own resources, then we risk losing the kind of responsiveness I described and with it important aspects of self and identity.