Can Compassionate Conservatism Win In Britain - Road to the Middle Class

GEORGE W. BUSH ran for president in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative.” Annoying to conservatives, his campaign was an attempt to tackle the reality that most people do not think of the welfare state as a bureaucratic government monopoly but as society’s compassionate attempt to help the less fortunate.

Now David Cameron, new leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, is trying the same approach. He is dealing with the reality that, however clumsy and bureaucratic and monopolistic Britain’s government health service and government schools may be, people still think of them as “their” schools and “their” National Health Service.

In a speech to the British think tank Demos Cameron has laid out his strategy in broad terms. He calls for the revival of “civil society” between the two extremes of government and the individual. And so he and his colleagues are working out policy

to establish clear borders of responsibility, by working out… …what is best done by the state, what is best done by civil society and what is best done by the individual.
But, in seeking that balance, we start with an instinctive desire to put more trust in civil society and in the individual, rather than in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.

So he is clearly attempting to define the Labour Party as the party of clunking and insensitive bureaucratic apparatus.

In the London Spectator Matthew Parris is trying to think forward from Cameron’s speech to the actual battle for the hearts and minds of the British people. What will happen when the Labour Party starts to talk about “Tory cuts” in welfare state provision? Civil society is all very well when there is no alternative. In Ethiopia there is no welfare state. That means that civil society in the form of

family and village are all a needy Ethiopian has to turn to, and family and village know it.

That is why Brownites [supporters of Labour leader Gordon Brown] suspect that a Tory party which argues for a bigger role for civil society may secretly contemplate cutting state welfare. This is what Labour will argue. The Conservatives need an answer.

The answer probably is that conservatives need to make a new argument, an argument they have up to now been afraid to make, that state welfare is not compassionate and kind, but cruel and oppressive. We need to argue, and convince the voters throughout the Anglosphere, that the government welfare state is not a nice cuddly thing, but the proximate cause of all the wrongs of society, from angry young gangbangers to healthy middle-aged people drawing government disability benefits and to senior citizens cruelly dependent upon the state for their welfare in their old age.

Until we can make that argument, and persuade the political center of our argument (and let us be frank here, “political center” means non-political middle-class mothers), then the “cuts” argument will continue to work for the parties of the left.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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