Liberalism’s dusk has descended

James Orr on national conservatism and social regeneration.

Bien-pensant neuralgia over nationhood has intensified of late on the part of British liberals. This is partly because, against all the odds, expressions of national sentiment have begun to puncture the cosy cosmopolitan consensus forged in the aftermath of the Second World War and crystallised in the civilisational struggle with the Soviet Union. There is panic over the stability of global supply chains, energy dependence on unscrupulous new empires, and the continued dominance of financial institutions that not so long ago were bringing capitalism to its knees. Widespread support for Ukraine’s resistance to the imperial ambitions of Russia has also brought even the most hardboiled internationalist to recognise that Ukrainians are fighting from loyalty to their land and home, towns, villages and families. The case for national retrenchment is inescapable.  

That, at any rate, is the perception that has catalysed an international movement of so-called “national conservatives” that has swiftly emerged from the most promising coalition of figures championing national self-determination in the West today. There was a conference of British national conservatives in May in Westminster, which drew together a range of politicians, writers and academics to talk through its implications.  

The architect of the movement is the Israeli-American academic Yoram Hazony, who, in a series of writings, has drawn on a series of unduly neglected English figures – Fortescue, Selden, Bolingbroke – to press the case that conservatism is not, as Sir Roger Scruton once put it, a hesitation within liberalism, but rather a philosophical temperament. It is an outlook that not only preceded liberalism but – in too many ways to enumerate – supplied the moral frameworks and social stability that were the enabling conditions of the achievements that liberals would have us believe emerged ex nihilo from the minds of Hobbes and Locke.  

Without the shared religious impulses, customs, norms and habits that prevented a social (as opposed to a constitutional) revolution, the sacralising of freedom would have been as bloody and catastrophic in Britain as it proved to be for France in the wake of its overthrow of everything that conservatism prizes and protected. 

For the so-called national conservatives, loyalty to nation is the weakest form of concrete attachment. But it is a commitment that remains for all practical purposes one that encompasses the widest feasible parameters to achieve and maintain the kind of solidarity at scale without which no complex modern society can survive. We love what is closest to us, which is why – as Robert Conquest observed – everyone is conservative about what they know best. From this, David Hume’s “concentric circles of our empathy” soon diminish to the point at which loyalty to our flesh-and-blood countrymen gives way to platitudes about human rights that no one can live for and no one would die for. 

National conservatives are also more committed than most modern conservative movements to using the power of the state to buttress social norms and insulate the institutional landscape – especially publicly-funded parts of it – against capture and corruption by the shock troops of woke progressivism. Social conservatism 2.0 may seem unthinkable in a nation as socially liberal as Britain. But insofar as it is conserving some of the most self-evident prerequisites to human flourishing, national conservatism’s strain of social conservatism today differs sharply from yesteryear’s.  

National conservatism is unambiguously committed to resisting the alarming proliferation of the strange new dogmas of a new public faith that has sacralised gender ideology and divinised sexual minorities. This has genuine electoral appeal across the old political divides. It is now routine for even the most liberally-inclined to express alarm at the rise of transhumanist technologies, the increasing indifference to human life before cradle and grave, the nation’s plummeting birth-rates, the continuing corrosion of the family, or the nationalisation of childcare. 

Indeed, across an array of cultural and biopolitical questions, national conservatives now find themselves in a coalition with unfamiliar allies ranging from Marxist or libertarian atheists to Mumsnet activists and gender-critical feminists. Despite their substantive ideological differences, this unlikely alliance is united in wanting to restore a qualified pride in our national history and heritage, to dismantling the Grievance Industrial Complex, to reducing previously unimaginable levels of migration that have brought few of the benefits that justified it in the first place, and to protecting children from indoctrination into new ideological norms and narratives that are as poorly evidenced as they are politically partisan. 

In sum, this new movement represents a rare convergence of theologically inflected ideas from before the dawn of liberalism, which could show a way forward now that liberalism’s dusk has descended. The febrile character of domestic politics today makes it hard to judge how much traction the national conservatives will achieve, but if the next election is as disastrous for the Conservative Party as many predict, the path they propose will be hard for the party to ignore. 

Dr James Orr teaches Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge.

(Photo: National Conservatism – Twitter)

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