Misnaming conservatives

From Lawrence Auster (of View from the Right):

One of the great confusions today is that anyone who is anti-left is called a conservative. It would be as though, during the Cold War, anyone who was anti-Communist was called a conservative ... The misnaming we have today not only creates intellectual confusion but is substantially harmful to conservatism, in that (1) it makes real conservatism impossible by defining conservatism as liberalism, and (2) another way of saying the same thing, it defines conservatism as opposition to the hard left, rather than as opposition to liberalism."

This is well put. If we allow right wing liberalism to be defined as conservatism, then what is there to pose any challenge to liberalism? Politics just becomes a contest between the left wing and right wing forms of liberalism. Typically, real conservatives then identify with the right liberal party and their politics become a confused and ineffectual hybrid between the right wing liberalism of the parties they support and their own conservative instincts. In the past, this has always allowed liberals to carry the day.

So, the first step for the conservative movement to progress is for conservatives to more clearly distinguish themselves from right wing liberalism.

Germaine Greer: A Political Portrait

Over the years there has been a shift in the politics of the famous Australian feminist Germaine Greer. Early on she was every inch a liberal individualist; later, though, her politics became more mixed, even including some traces of conservatism.

One example of this change is in her attitude to the family. In her influential book The Female Eunuch, published in 1971, Greer argued for a type of family arrangement which would still allow her to have complete individual autonomy.

Her idea was that children should grow up on communal farms, which the parents would visit when "circumstances permitted." Some parents might even "live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to." For Greer, it wasn't even necessary that her child should "know that I was his womb-mother."

In later years Greer changed her attitude. For instance, in 1991 she wrote that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child," and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year."

There is an obvious shift here from a radical individualism, based around complete individual autonomy, to a more conservative recognition that the social framework, the "fabric of society", is important for the well-being of the individual.

Greer's views on sex also underwent a dramatic conversion. Early on, Greer took an "anything goes" attitude to sex, even declaring at one stage that group sex was "the highest ritual expression of our faith."

Her promiscuity, though, seems to have soured her attitude to sex, because she eventually turned to the opposite extreme of denouncing sex altogether. For instance, she claimed that sexual love was "riddled with hostility and insecurity," and that she was beginning to think that "sex was really disgusting and that we shouldn't have anything to do with it".

Neither of these opposing attitudes to sex is very helpful, and Greer has done little to explain the transformation in her outlook. Perhaps this is because of her stated belief that "human beings have an inalienable right to re-invent themselves". Greer believes, in other words, in the liberal idea that individuals are blank slates who can endlessly form and re-form themselves in whatever direction they choose.

In reality, though, we cannot simply invent who we are, since what we become is influenced by our own inborn nature, by necessary social roles, by the larger consequences of our actions and so on. For instance, Greer's early desire to be a kind of absentee mother was never going to work, because the bond between mother and child is, by nature, too strong to be kept casual and anonymous, and because, as Greer later admitted, it is better for mother and child to be supported within a stable social framework.

For all this, conservatives are likely to find Greer an interesting variety of liberal, with her outpourings being an unpredictable mixture of gloom and grumpiness, personal invective, wayward liberalism and, struggling through it all, fragments of conservatism.

(First published in University Review 1998)

Maternal attachment

Dr Penelope Leach is a leading child psychologist. She is quoted in today's Herald Sun as follows:

The security of an infant's attachment to mother and the sensitivity of her care go together. Stress, including stresses that lead to insecure attachment, damages an infant's capacity to learn.

That is to say, if a baby lacks a sensitive response from Mum it becomes stressed and it's mental development is slower. The baby, in this view, needs to feel securely attached to its mother.

I've highlighted this quote because it is so out of step with modern day liberalism. Liberals like the idea that gender is something to be overcome, and so they tend to see men and women as being interchangeable within the family.

But in Penelope Leach's view, babies have a particular need for their mothers. It is a secure attachment between mother and child which is important. Mothers, therefore, can't easily be displaced by either fathers or professional child care workers in the lives of their infant children.

Pity Norway

Norway has a new "conservative" leader, a woman by the name of Erna Solberg. What great plans does she have for her country? To erase it, by leading it into the European Union.

Obviously, Erna Solberg is not a conservative. She is probably a right liberal, who believes first and foremost in the free market. I expect that she sees the European Union as breaking down impediments to free trade and the movement of labour.

It's interesting to note, by the way, that the Norwegians and the Swiss do not seem to have suffered economically by staying out of the Union.

How sad though that the Norwegians don't have a real conservative party to defend the independent existence of their own country.

A model Mum?

The Melbourne Age newspaper decided to highlight in its Mother's Day edition a woman called Donna Muller.

Donna Muller is an officer in the Australian Navy. This year she is serving in the Solomon Islands, though she is based in Cairns. Her young daughter lives thousands of kilometres away in Canberra.

You wouldn't think this was the ideal arrangement for a mother and her young child. But Donna Muller and the Age reporter are quite upbeat about the situation. We are told that,

Commander Muller says visits to Cairns, where she is based, every few months, frequent phone calls back home and email correspondence have kept the disturbances to family life to a minimum" and that "Her maternal instincts have been put to use elsewhere, in charge of the crew aboard the HMAS Labuan" and that "Commander Muller says she is a good example to other women that it is possible to be a mother and hold a highly demanding job.

I don't buy this. For a young child to only visit her mother every few months is not a minimum disturbance to family life; running a ship is not putting maternal instincts to use at all; and Donna Muller's situation is not a good example of successfully combining motherhood and a career.

Donna Muller says her daughter is resilient, and you can only hope that this is so.

A policy pitfall

Suad Almad came to Canada from Somalia 12 years ago. She says of her experience as a Somali migrant that "We come to Canada and we become lost."

This is one of the pitfalls of liberal refugee and migration policies. Liberals believe that ethnicity shouldn't matter, as our identity should be self-created and not defined by unchosen, inherited things like ethnicity.

Therefore, for liberals discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is wrong: it offends the liberal idea that ethnicity should not define who we are or how we are related to each other.

And so, millions of non-Western migrants are brought into Western countries even though they are effectively stripped of their ethnic identity in doing so.

Liberals believe that they are being high-minded in doing this, and it is true that they are being "principled" in carrying out their own philosophy. But their philosophy is misguided and does harm. It does harm to the migrants like Suad Almad who become "lost" and it does harm to the host population whose own ethnic and cultural identity becomes harder to sustain.

And there do exist better alternatives. There is no reason, if you think things through carefully, why refugees couldn't be resettled securely in countries with similar ethnic traditions. The financial costs of doing this could be met by international aid from wealthier countries.

But again, to the liberal mind, this is "discrimination" in a negative sense, and so is forbidden as a public policy, no matter how sensible it might seem to non-liberals.

Female conscripts

Less than a year ago I predicted that women might one day face military conscription. That day might come sooner than I thought. The chief of the U.S. Selective Service System has proposed registering women for the military draft.

I guess this wasn't a difficult prediction to make. In order to justify putting women into combat, liberals have argued that there is nothing about womanhood which prevents women taking up combat roles. Logically, though, this means also that there is no reason why women shouldn't be conscripted into the army alongside men.

When I have raised this possibility with ordinary, feminine, non-feminist women I have met with either an unwillingness to even register the possibility ("I'm not even going to think about this, it could never happen to me") or else, especially from younger women, a laughing "it's a man's role to do this, not a woman's, they would never make us do that".

Tragically, I think that they might. That is unless rank and file conservative men retain enough of a protective instinct toward their wives and daughters to fight this aspect of liberalism. We'll have to see.

(Item via Jim Kalb)

The confusion of right liberals

One of the mistakes conservatives make is to trust too much to the so-called conservative parties, such as the Liberal Party in Australia, the Conservatives in Britain and the Republicans in the US.

It would be better if we thought of these parties as being right liberal parties, as opposed to left liberal parties like the Australian Labor Party or the American Democrats.

The right liberal parties typically have three different elements to their politics. The first element is a core belief in liberal individualism. John Brogden, as NSW Liberal MP for Pittwater, identified himself with this core belief by stating that "Liberalism encourages progressive policy and creates equal opportunities for and removes barriers to individual success." Similarly Professor Peter Baume, in writing about the Australian Liberal Party, declared that:

For the philosophical liberal the individual is the focus, the individual is the basic unit and it is to effects on individual people that philosophical liberals look to see the consequences of any proposal.

If right liberals remain at this first, core level of right liberalism, they are typically called (in Australia) "small-l liberals". They are not averse to state intervention to provide the conditions for individualism to succeed. John Brogden, for instance, is happy to announce that "State government must ensure community safety, justice, health, education, economic advancement and environmental protection."

Peter Baume, in his turn, claims that "liberals welcomed measures, and continue to welcome measures, which empower people. Free education empowered young people... Anti-discrimination legislation empowered people otherwise powerless ... legislation to remove gender bias empowered women ... provision of age pensions empowered those who are elderly" and so on.

These small-l liberals are closest to the left liberals, and it isn't surprising that the Australian Democrats, a breakaway group of small-l liberals, moved gradually into the left liberal camp.

Most right liberals, though, add a layer of economic liberalism onto this core belief in individualism. They believe that individuals acting unimpeded within the free market is the best mechanism for meeting human desires and needs. Therefore, they focus heavily on the individual as an "economic unit" and tend to support economic deregulation. They are not as keen on state interference as small-l liberals.

Mark Birrell, as Liberal leader of the Victorian Legislative Council, neatly summarised the view of these economic liberals when he announced that "I enter this Chamber as a Liberal, committed to a philosophy that emphasises the freedom of the individual, acclaims the value of the free enterprise system and champions the rights of the citizen over the state." Notice that the core belief in individualism is still there, but is joined together with a belief in economic free enterprise.

Henry Bolte, the longest serving Liberal premier of Victoria (from 1955 to 1972) also fits into this "second camp" of economic liberals. He stated in 1955 that "We are going to prove to the people of Australia that fewer controls will mean greater advancement" (anti-statism); in 1959 he showed the tendency to view people as economic units by saying of his large-scale immigration policy that "We have many critics against the policy of attracting capital, in migrants and investment to Australia." As for economic deregulation, he extended bar trading hours with the claim that he was proud to be part of "the progressive Liberal Party" rather than "an old-fashioned Conservative mob."

Then there are those right liberals who add on a third dimension to their politics: an intellectual or conservative liberalism.

Sometimes this kind of "conservative" right liberalism seems to develop from the "anti-statism" belief of economic liberals. The idea is that if you want the state to be small, you have to protect the institutions of civil society and also uphold ideals of individual responsibility. Therefore, these kind of conservative right liberals might defend the idea of the independent family, or talk of civic responsibility or of ordered freedom.

It is also possible that some "conservative" right liberals are genuinely influenced by a conservative instinct or personal preference. However, this conservatism is rendered ineffectual because it coexists in a confused way with the first two layers of liberal individualism and economic liberalism.

A good example of this confusion is found in a speech given by Tessa Keswick to the British Conservative Party conference in 2000 concerning women and conservatism.

The speech begins with an enthusiastic endorsement of the development of feminism from the French Revolution to the present day. Tessa Keswick endorses this feminist progress because, like all right liberals, she believes in the ideal of liberal individualism: that what matters is that we should be autonomous and independent and able to choose for ourselves according to our own individual will and reason.

Therefore, she talks glowingly of the achievement of female economic independence; of the advent of birth control which enabled women to "make their own decisions about that central aspect of their lives" and by which women "became no longer dependent on men physically"; and of "liberated divorce laws". And she quotes approvingly the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir who proclaimed "I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty."

Tessa Keswick then goes on to demonstrate her economic liberalism. Her commitment to free enterprise and a small state is clear in her claims that feminism is unleashing "entrepreneurial talent" and that the Conservatives should criticise "the Labour Party's commitment to overregulation" and the "smothering, nannyish [approach] of the Blair Government, letting women make their own life decisions."

Then we get to the third layer of right liberalism. The logic of anti-statism comes out in her comments that the Conservatives have to uphold "the notion of obligations and duties" and "the Conservative sense of community based on the Burkean notion of the importance of locality and the small platoons", and must "attach more value to the family."

The terrible confusion of this kind of "conservative" right liberalism, though, is revealed in her final remarks. She is willing to confess that "central to all our fears is the very clear decline of the family."

Talking about the balance between work and family she goes on to note that:

"The horrible irony is that, in many ways, the female quest for independence has made it more difficult for some women to find that balance. In certain sections of society we are not finding a mature and sustained sharing of the burdens of parenthood by men and women, but, remarkably, an impulse to go it alone. Some are rejecting, it seems, the stable structures which would have made much easier an attempt to have elements of both worlds in our lives. The altogether admirable determination of women to stand on their own two feet too often seems to leave them reluctant to use marriage or even partnership as a platform for a life balanced between family and work."

What did she expect? If the aim is individual autonomy, then why would women forsake their independence by marrying? If young women are taught that history has been a march of progress of women toward independence, then why wouldn't they cling to that independence for as long as they could?

You can start to glean here why right wing parties like the British Conservatives, or the Australian Liberals, or the American Republicans have been so ineffective in opposing the progress of liberalism: whatever element of conservatism does exist in these parties is hopelessly compromised by a core commitment to liberal individualism and economic liberalism.

If conservatism is to be more successfully applied it needs to be carefully distinguished from right liberalism, and rank and file conservatives need to trust less naively in the right wing political parties.

(First published at Conservative Central, 12/05/03)

Is communism liberal?

A reader of Conservative Central has raised the interesting question of whether communism can really be a form of liberalism.

In his letter the reader claims that communism can't be a form of liberalism as communists believe that people are social by nature, whereas real liberalism is based on individualism.

But is communism really based on the view that people are social by nature? Or does it set out to create, just like other forms of liberalism, a society based on individual autonomy?

If you read through the communist literature, you find that most of the ways that people express their social nature are to be outlawed under communist rule. For instance, there are to be no countries, nor are there to be any families. There are to be no churches, no group identities based on gender, nor are there to be distinct social classes. All that is allowed to remain is the individual and the state (with the state "withering away" at some unidentified point in the future).

It might be true that communists talk at times about people helping each other. But so do mainstream liberals. There is nothing within liberal philosophy to prevent expressions of altruism. The key thing is that liberals don't recognise aspects of human nature which give us a necessary and particular connection to other people.

For instance, communists don't believe that we might be obliged by our moral conscience to help others, since morality is viewed simply as a creation of class interests. Nor do they believe that a man's masculine nature obliges him to fulfil his responsibilities as a husband or father, since sex roles within the family are viewed by communists as an oppressive social construct.

Communists are ultimately individualistic, just like other liberals, because they start out with the view that the individual comes into the world as a blank slate, with no inborn qualities to limit or give a particular direction to an individual's behaviour.

This doesn't mean that there aren't significant differences between communists and more mainstream forms of liberalism. Communism is a kind of left liberalism rather than right liberalism: it is openly statist and doesn't aim at preserving individual economic enterprise. More strikingly communism is a radical rather than a gradualist form of liberalism: it aims to achieve all its aims immediately through a revolutionary programme, rather than working gradually through existing institutions.

Communism, in other words, is at one extreme end of the liberal spectrum: it is a radical form of left liberalism.

(First published Conservative Central 12/05/03)

Women aren't men (II)

Ever wondered why women don't earn as much as men? Feminists would like you to believe that it's because of a glass ceiling, or male domination or sexist discrimination. But part of the reason for a difference in earnings is that many women enjoy motherhood and choose to scale down their commitment to paid work when they have young children.

Mary Costello is one such woman. She relates, in the current issue of Melbourne's Child, that

Expectations of women have never been higher ... But women are wising up. The cost of doing it all is ultimately the woman's quality of life. I for one couldn't hack it. When I found myself hanging out of the 7.20 a.m. city train every morning, crying and waving goodbye to my howling baby, I realised I couldn't 'have it all'. By that stage, I no longer even wanted it all. I wanted to be with my child ... So I gave up the best job I ever had and stayed at home for ten years. They were the best and shortest years of my life - interesting and satisfying in a way that handling a boardroom of middle-aged men never was. (Melbourne's Child, May 2004)

And if this means that Mary Costello wasn't earning as much as her husband, so what? It's not as if her husband was out earning money as a plot against women - his earnings were for the benefit of his family, male and female.

In short, it would be a strange thing if we ever really reached the point where women earned as much as men. It would mean either that women were no longer taking time out of the paid workforce to raise their children, or that men were no longer striving to provide for their families.

The goal of "equal earnings" is not a worthy one to aim for.

Revealing stats

I can remember in the mid 90s a major campaign by feminists on the issue of domestic violence. The feminists claimed that 1 in 3 women would be victims of domestic violence and that it was just as likely to happen to women in well-off homes.

At the time I found this hard to believe. Growing up in the comfortable south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne I wasn't aware of a single case of wife beating amongst family or friends. In fact, it seemed to be a culturally unacceptable thing.

On Angry Harry's site yesterday I saw a graph which strongly suggests that the feminists of the time were wrong. The graph shows the incidence of domestic violence in Britain in 1995.

Revealingly, among the wealthiest 50% of Britons the risk of domestic assault for women was 3%. The incidence of domestic assault against men among this group was actually higher than against women, being 4.2%

It's only among the poorest quarter of the population that the rate of domestic violence against women rises to 10%, as opposed to 4.4% for men.

Conclusions? Firstly, the feminists were wrong to claim a 33% rate of domestic violence against women. For most women the risk in the 90s was a little over 3%.

Secondly, the feminists were wrong to claim that women in middle class homes were just as susceptible as the poorest of women. Poorer women, on the British figures, faced three times the risk of domestic violence.

Thirdly, the feminists were wrong to see domestic violence as something in which men are always the oppressors and women the victims. For most of the population, the risk of domestic violence was rougly similar for men and women.

The feminist campaign of the 90s did some damage - it contributed to the unnecessarily fractured relations between young men and women. And it was based on hopelessly false and exaggerated claims about violence in relationships.

False alarm

We are sometimes told that high rates of immigration are necessary because we aren't having enough children and won't be able to support the elderly.

A University of Melbourne economist, Professor Ian McDonald, doesn't believe this is true. According to his research, living standards in Australia are likely to double over the next 50 years, even when the costs of supporting an ageing population are factored in.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the low birth rate is OK: it's a sign of a breakdown of family life in the West. But there's no reason to believe that we need large scale immigraton to support the elderly in years ahead. Economic growth will allow us to do this, and still enjoy higher rates of (material) living standards.

Women aren't men

Angela Pulvirenti has this to say in today's Herald Sun:

I will be the first to admit that whenever I see the television advertisement in which a mother cries in joy as her perfect, smiling baby strokes her face with his tiny finger, my biological clock not only ticks - it positively erupts. Then I spend a full day with a friend who has a real baby.

I expect that at most a young man would respond to the ad by thinking "that's nice". It would never enter a young man's mind to rush off to a friend's place to spend a day with a real baby.

Just one more small example of how different men and women are, especially in our instincts toward motherhood and fatherhood.

Not so independent schools

In today's Herald Sun the following news:

Private and public schools would be forced to take students who cannot afford to pay fees under radical changes being floated by the State Government.

If such a policy goes ahead it will violate the independence of private schools. Such schools should be able to select students according to their own standards and values.

As it is, most private schools do offer scholarships to academically gifted students who can't afford to pay full fees. They do this, though, on selection criteria they think best, and not under government directions.

Orania

Orania was in the news yesterday because of the launch of its own currency. Orania is something unique in the West, a town of 600 Afrikaners trying to preserve their own culture within their own small community.

They have a website with a photo page (you have to click "Fotoalbum" on the left). According to the site, three aims they have set themselves are the building of community; economic independence; and ecological sustainability.

Even if it is on a small scale, at least the Oranians are connecting their life work to something important, namely the furtherance of their own traditional culture.