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- The Guardian,
- Thursday January 18 2001
Bless. Psychological empathy is perhaps the most useful tool, as we crouch by the Tory on the couch babbling of green fields long ago. How did it come to this?
It is now a Tory axiom that England groans under an army of occupation. Mr Hague's excoriated "liberal elite" is in charge. Columnists spread their poison, broadcasters insert their not so subliminal messages. Teachers and lecturers went under a long time ago. But Tories have also distanced themselves from most other professional groups. The liberal chief constable has now been joined by the left-leaning general in that spacious pantheon which accommodates the Tory demons.
In the depth of its phobias the Tory party has now become at last an authentically European party - one of the reactionary right. It has cut loose from its roots in the English political tradition and is locatable somewhere in inter-war Europe. With its talk of "give us back our country" it recalls early Mussolini and the Spanish Falange of Primo de Rivera. The rhetoric fits easily into the fascistic Action Française tradition of invoking the nation and the forebears, "la terre et les morts". It is the party of offended virtue and angry patriots, of the misunderstood and permanently cross. Alienation is the daily rationed bread.
Tories hate "Europe" of course but, although they talk about it all the time, they don't really think in much detail about the institutional mechanisms of the European Union. "Europe" for them has symbolic value. By that term Tories mean the modern world with its anarchy of tastes and the individualism of minorities who threaten to become a majority. It means the alien in their midst, the refugee at the door and the deviant who threatens to jump into bed. It is the "threat to our way of life".
It is all pure reaction - and as such escapes conventional left/right distinctions. Much as fascism did. This new Tory league wants to represent the "petit peuple" and the resentful, those who just want to be up and at 'em. Conspiratorial and suspicious in temperament, they jeer at plotting liberals in high places.
Nostalgia is not a conservative prerogative - nor is it necessarily noxious. The left, after all, has had its own useful myths of trade union solidarity and pleas for "community values".
English conservatism has offered its own series of last ditches in which the fearful could recline. But the point is that they were always receding. The protests over two centuries against the emancipation of Roman Catholics, Dissenters and women faded away. The changes were accepted and then another lost cause could be embraced. No cause has been truly won in social reform until the Tory party secured its inevitable victory by rejecting it.
But this darkness is something new. This is Arcady turned nasty. It has always been an important function of the Conservative party that it should contain and control some very unpleasant people. A "liberal elite", from Harold Macmillan to Edward Heath, gave the local curs just enough red meat and conference rhetoric to stop them going somewhere else and becoming dangerous as well as nasty. Now, however, the curs are at the controls. The European continent supplies analogies but the explanation for the take-over lies further west.
Recently there died one of the eloquent giants of American political liberalism. John Lindsay, former mayor of New York, typified the liberal Republican tradition. He was a gracious tribune of the poor and dispossessed at a time when his party had been taken over by Nixonianism. The division between Lindsay and Nixon was not one of economic management. Lindsay was a classic welfarist. But then Nixon was also a big spender whose presidency was marked by the greatest extension of federal powers and government agencies since the days of FDR. The difference was rather one of temperament, between the open and the closed society. Nixon's was the paranoid style in American politics. And it is this which earns him his place in history as the most influential 20th century conservative.
Nixon's "silent majority" spoke with a "quiet voice in the middle of the shouting". They were "the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They're good people. They're decent people. They work and they save and they care." The language had been around in American politics for a long time. As a vision of non-metropolitan virtue it had started at the end of the 19th century when it had been liberal and progressive rather than reactionary. Rural America was being displaced by the urban experience - hence the nostalgic appeal for a democratic order of the self-sufficient.
This American pastoralism opposed the huge European immigration whose political traditions were those of the peasantry - innocent of self-reliance and dependent on hierarchy. For these masses politics was a question of personal obligations - of mafia politics and family values. The Progressive movement had its own vicious kicks - but although so arcadian in tone it was well named. It opposed the new world of large corporations, the values of plutocracy and the city boss manipulation of immigrant votes.
Nixon perverted this language and turned it into something different - a cold-gospelling scream against the educated. His legacy split the Republican party and created the taste for Pat Buchanan. It was Nixonians who pursued Clinton for his eight years in office - and never accepted the legitimacy of a liberal presidency. Our own Conservative party is a Nixonian entity in its hatreds and cultivation of paranoia.
Here too there has been an earlier pastoralism of tone. Who among us can forget those Majorite maids cycling to early communion? And here too the tone has turned vicious, Thatcher's patronised C2 voters were Nixon's silent majority in English guise. Now the imitation is complete with William Jefferson Hague using liberal in its American sense of an upstart left.
The opposition leader is an enthusiast for American politics with a prodigious recollection of the occupants of state governorships and senatorial office. But this Anglo-American conversation goes beyond such feats of political obsession. His language is Nixonian and the recent case of Damilola Taylor showed the same readiness to manipulate. This is a very conservative Anglo-American relationship - special only in its darkness, its myths and its cruelty.
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