Though Cowards Flinch

Paul on these pages wrote a very long article on new conservatism that, among other things, mentioned and critiqued something that I had written on conservatism and epistemic closure recently. Because I am a writer on this blog, and because his entry spurred me to write a few words myself, I decided to put my reply comment up as a separate blog entry itself.

If I understand Paul in his entry correctly, he is saying that there are a certain portion of the blogospheric commentariat today, myself included but also Richard Seymour and others, who are seeking the creation and implementation of Conservative party policy in the wrong places.

Where those writers are looking at ideology, the shape of Cameron’s Conservatives are coming from elsewhere. Where? Paul very studiously looks to two places primarily; a small clique known as the “sofa cabinet” with its recourse from high Tory politics, and a kind of social policy set out of confused fashionable academic nonsense and “policy on the hoof”.

First of all, if we can substantiate claims that Cameron has beside him a small elite group informing the political vision of the Conservative party today then I’d be the first to congratulate a clique within a governing party that informed policy and not spin politics – though the bar for this has been set quite high – or low depending on taste – by the New Labour project, more of which in a moment.

I suspect the disgust we have with this clique is its political line – and if Paul is right this line is one of delegating off local politics and concerns of the working class, perhaps seen by these guys as a part of low politics, to concentrate on what we might consider “high politics” or specifically foreign and defence policy of the ‘court versus country’ traditions.

I can of course see the reason for reaching this conclusion: today’s politics is about brands, PR and soundbites. To be explicit about the aims of the Cameron “sofa cabinet” – if Paul suspects correctly – would not go down too well with the electorate, and even those within the Conservative party dedicated to market solutions into economic recovery or liberal conservatives keen to match traditional conservativism with social justice.

Perhaps big society is a mask to cover this political recourse, but at this early stage, which Paul has been explicit and realistic about, I think this is mostly conjecture – though I should say that I’m not ruling it out, nor would I be surprised ultimately to find out it is true.

Paul’s second reason is something I think we can hone in upon right now, and can be used to better explore the idea that the Tories are on the pursuit of a different set of ideas rather than being epistemically closed, so to speak. I needn’t repeat Paul’s notable examples, but he is right to talk down the mess of academic, fashionable nonsense that have come out of camps claiming the tag Conservative for themselves.

Additionally, though I think policy on the hoof – also a favourite of the New Labour project – will be a permanent fixture of our 24-hour political culture, Paul stresses that this has not put the brakes on the creation of a political narrative comparable to that written about by Jim Bulpitt.

Unlike how it has been perceived by many, particularly on the left, the Cameron government is not Thatcherism revisited. For the latter, a slim, stripped state was the order of the day, whereas for the former, in Paul’s opinion, a cabinet led by an upper class Oxford graduate, and informed by similar, has created a policy machine that seeks to further those class interests.

Where I’m very interested in Paul’s thought is of how this changes the way in which the left deals with the Conservatives. Class may be a weapon of attack by the so-called new Tories, but the Labour party had their fingers burnt early by displaying a couple of weak attempts to smear the “toff” presence in the Tory party – reducing all talk of class to gutter politics.

Thus Paul’s solution, since class is important a weapon (perhaps the best weapon) of the left, is to marry class politics with an understanding of what the Tories are and what they’re doing to us. That way we don’t just attack for attack sake, we show how class difference will create a government unable to govern responsibly (by which I think Paul means that since high politics delegates working class problems elsewhere, it is unable to function the primary role of government and that is make certain all citizens are considered democratically and its welfare ensured).

I have no problems with this analysis, and I imagine Paul will fill out his conclusion (“Exposing the Tories for where the[y] come from, what they are, and what they’re doing to us”) over the coming weeks and months. But, in my opinion, it is not addressing where conservatism sits with the Conservative party today, and how epistemic closure has somewhat occupied a portion of the party.

I don’t doubt for a second that Cameron, Osborne and the gang are cooking something up; whether that looks like the image described by Paul is a point I shall leave aside for one moment. But the point I tried to make by saying that the Conservative party is experiencing something akin to epistemic closure is to do with the party being unable to rid itself of ideas that are, not conservative, but, there to appease a moonbatty right wing mentality (the EU and immigration curbing Britishness, the pound as the last bastion of national pride, tackling gypsies, NHS tourism, reducing the abortion limit); it is this kind of thinking that makes up a tidy amount of the Tory vote base, and policy will undoubtedly have to be drawn towards that side because the Tories were not able to secure a majority last May, despite being in opposition for 13 years, and being there during an economic recession.

The epistemic closure in the Conservative party does not imply that Cameron himself is lacking in new ideas while keeping an eye on the conservative tradition (at least this was not the primary point I wanted to put across in my blog entry), but that what counts for conservative party thinking today is partly this redundant moonbatty right wing nonsense that one could expect to hear on the Republican shock jock radio shows (where epistemic closure gets its name from).

For this reason I’d want to add a third clause to Paul’s two suggestions for how Conservative party policy is made up today, and that is on what we might, for want of a better term, call the epistemically closed voting base of the Conservative party – whose influence on policy and on what MP stands where, Cameron’s liberal conservatives are unable to shake off by hugging hoodies and talking nice about foreigners and the NHS.