The Land Surveyor

Political “clothes stealing” and a “fleet-in-being” theory of party politics

The UK Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, complains that Tony Blair has stolen so many Conservative clothes that it has become virtually impossible for the Conservative Party to carve out a distinctive message on which to campaign in the 2005 election. 

Conservatives are trying to play up “tax bombshell” fears about New Labour’s spending plans and also to tap “little Englander” sensibilities with agitations against the EU and immigration.  But the political leverage of these issues, for now, is not large and they make a sorry compensation for the grand levers of political differentiation which sustained the Conservative Party in its long Thatcherite hegemony.  These levers comprised strong commitments to industrial competitiveness, restrained taxation, low inflation, tough policing and, most tellingly perhaps, robust atlanticism in foreign policy.  And as Michael Howard correctly complains, New Labour has stolen all of these clothes, leaving the Conservative Party with only a few threadbare rags which it can truly call its own.

The implications of this for the Conservative Party are not happy ones in the short term, but should, I think, be consoling in the longer term.  The Conservative strategy must be to remain as a “fleet-in-being” which acts as a constant threat to New Labour.  During the century of British naval hegemony, the “fleet-in-being” of first France and then Germany was never a one-to-one threat to British naval dominance, but simply by staying in port it committed Britain to deploy equal or superior forces in proximity to it, severely curtailing the freedom of deployment for the backbone of the British navy.  Similarly, Howard’s Conservatives cannot take on New Labour in open conflict and win, but they can tie it down and be ready to strike the moment it is weakened.

It is in this context that I don’t believe in a transformation of British politics whereby the Liberal Democrats emerge as the main opposition party to replace the Conservatives.  The Conservatives have strong underlying political appeal based on their commitments to the political levers alluded to above, and the tension in the Labour Party is always to move to the left with respect to these levers.  It is when a Labour leader can no longer discipline the Labour Party sufficiently for it to remain “conservative” on these levers that the Conservative fleet will emerge from Wilhelmshaven-on-Sea to assert a new era in party hegemony.  When this happens, the Liberal Democrats will be tussling with a weakened Labour Party for the left-liberal crumbs.

This analysis means of course that there is not much the Conservatives can actually do at the moment, other than keep themselves in a good condition to assert themselves when the ripe moment comes.  They need to preserve their integrity as a “natural” alternative government, and that means not polluting their brand with rash “tacks to the right” or dangerous flirtations with anti-EU nationalism.  And to this extent there is a danger for Conservatives that in this period of political wilderness the brighter centrist stars desert Party activity for more rewarding activities, leaving the Party in the hands of the Redwoods, and dare I say, the Howards, who, for all his recent transformation, still brands the Party as leaning towards its right wing.

However, the current success of the Howards and Redwoods partly reflects the poor likelihood of the Conservatives winning power in current circumstances.  The Party Membership have been self-indulgent in their choices, and with no real election winning prospects at hand, the Parliamentary Party and other shadowy string pullers have been too enervated to put up a fight. 

But I think Michael Howard is wrong in thinking that the question comes down to one of merely clothes stealing.  New Labour is riding an extremely fortunate wave whereby it is able to offer expanded social services and still keep headline taxation down.  This wave cannot continue, and Gordon Brown’s hubris is already being taunted by the latest public borrowing overshoots, suggesting some unpalatable choices will not be far away.  Similarly the Labour Party is deeply hostile to the atlanticist policy pursued by Blair, setting the scene for a potentially fatal rupture during Bush’s second term. 

New Labour have indeed stolen some Conservative Party clothes, and they feel they look very fine in them in this warm weather.  Come some winter storms though, and they may be discarding those blue raiments for something more comfortable and familiar, ready for Howard, or whoever might replace him, to pick them up, put them back on and raise that anchor in earnest.

Reaction to the US election – my positive and negative spin

My reaction to the US election was, like for many people, one of depression and deja-vu.  I had gone into election night with the foreboding familiar to any supporter of the England soccer team in a major tournament – having written off their chances after a lacklustre qualifying campaign, supporters’ spirits are lifted by a sudden finding of form in the first rounds, only to be dashed and deflated by the inevitable defeat in the latter stages of the knockout contest.  So yes, things were looking promising, but the polls were showing Bush with a slight lead and plenty could still go wrong, which of course it did, and by the time CNN was showing urban precincts in Florida swinging to Bush and tradesports.com veered from betting 70% for Kerry to win to 80% for Bush, I went to bed, awaking on Wednesday to find the bad dream was for real.

There is plenty to feel negative and depressed about this result, and I detail my principal negative thoughts further below, but there are things to feel more positive about as well, which I will explore first.

The positive spin

• The poisoned chalice and the pendulum effect.  One can take the view that the election did not represent any kind of secular shift in US politics.  The US electorate saw Bush as committed to “seeing the business through” in Iraq, the troops were strongly pro-Bush, and Kerry’s message on Iraq was opaque to say the least.  The Democrats were never going to comfortably “own” the Iraq war, something the electorate will have sensed, and a Kerry administration would have been hamstrung from the start by the problems of Iraq and the deficit.  As a friend commented, “some races you wish you could just sit out.”  The reasonable hope would be that in four years’ time there will be intense Bush and Republican fatigue and the Democrats will have a good chance of across the board electoral successes.

• Republican over-reach.  The combination of Bush trumpeting his mandate, the majorities in Congress, and the zeal of Republican true-believers in wishing to forge new realities ahead of any political consensus supporting them, could well lead to Republicans pushing a moral, tax-cutting and pre-emptive foreign policy agenda beyond the ability of even Karl Rove to stitch together an electoral coalition in support of it.

• Secular liberal trends.  One could characterise the victory of “moral” politics in the election as a kind of “last hurrah” for those conservatives still morally indignant about the sexual revolution.  The trend towards sexual liberalism was not started by government and will not easily be reversed by government.  The realities of a sexually liberated society do not stack up with the fearful prognostications of conservative moralists and hence there is a hollowness at the core or their politics.  There just is no widespread appetite in the US for going back to the 1950s and any electoral advantage from flirting with this idea might be exected to be short-lived.  The fact that conservatives are only successfully fighting gay marriage, rather than acceptance of gay sex for instance, shows how far they have already lost this battle.

• Bush support was not “whacko”.   It has been too easy for liberals to characterise the Bush administration as malevolent, incompetent and corrupt and for anyone who supports it to be somehow venal or stupid.  But in fact plenty of intelligent, down-to-earth and astute people supported Bush, and it was always a fatal weakness of much liberal rhetoric that this was simply not possible.  I first thought the election would go to Bush after the Republican National Convention, where a powerful display of moderate Republican support for Bush just gave the lie to the idea that Bush was an incompetent tool of crazy neo-cons.  Too many respectable and patriotic Americans were supporting him for this to ring true.  A lot of credit must go to Giuliani and McCain for standing square with Bush to bolster this image of solid, sensible support, but there were intelligent and moderate Bush supporters the country-over who would have provided powerful reassurance to less politically plugged-in voters that Bush was not the crazy danger he was being caricatured as.  Bush has, and needs to retain, the support of intelligent, moderate conservatives, and this will be some bar on how bad things can get for liberals.

• Hard-assed approach to global security.  It just may be the case that the aggressive, pre-emptive use of US military force is the best solution to the current crisis in the middle east, with its simmering threats to the security of Israel and to global oil supplies.  The case for this cannot be “proved”, but it is the essence of the neo-con idea that by the time a threat can be proved satisfactorily to the “reality based community” then it is too late.  This hard-assed neo-con approach is susceptible to self-deception, into becoming nothing more than blood-soaked neo-imperialism, but it could also in retrospect be seen to have been boldly pre-emptive.  We may never really get to know the truth of this, but the latter interpretation cannot simply be ruled out, and a willingness to believe in this was a cornerstone of Bush’s electoral support.

The negative spin

• Mendacity and nastiness of the Right.  Those of us who follow politics closely are acutely aware of the nature of much of the punditry and politicking of the Right during the election, something which I think the vast majority of the electorate were unaware of.  There is a positive spin in this to the extent that voters were not endorsing this mendacity and dirtiness because they were not conscious of it, but there is a negative spin in that there is a real threat to democracy from the way in which certain conservatives are prepared to play politics in order to gain power.   Bush and his leading supporters were not “straight-up” with the public about all of the reasons for the war in Iraq (the security power-play in the region has long term implications which are just not touched on in the mainstream public discourse), about the deficit (a deliberate “starving of the beast” to outflank any Democrat spending initiatives), the tax-cuts (portraying them as benefiting the middle class and small businesses), the gay marriage constitutional amendment (which had no chance of being enacted), to give just some examples.  The Swift Boat smear campaign, the naked partisanship from evangelical pulpits, the dangling of gay-baiting and anti-abortion red meat with no hope or intention of delivering on a back-to-the-1950s moral agenda, all leave a sour taste in the mouth about the mendacity of a Rovian conservative politics which was cheered to the rafters by plenty of commentators in the mainstream media and the blogosphere who should have known better.  Democrats have to stand for civility, forbearance and respect in political discourse, and for them to follow the Republicans down the Rovian path would be for them to lose their rasion d’etre.  But if Rove’s is the elixir for winning elections in the current US polity, then Democrats have plenty to be depressed and afraid about.

• Sense of being a politically exposed minority.  The Democrat coalition has long been seen as fragile, tacking together as it does urban liberals, socially conservative Hispanics and African Americans and parts of the white working class.  Perhaps the combination of security, moral values and Rovian tactics might be sufficient to sunder the Democrat coalition to the extent that it has no realistic chance of power without a major transformation of the political landscape.  Urban liberals would become a besieged minority in an America perhaps increasingly succumbing to a politics based on an appeal to patriotism and “religious values”, a kind of demagogic politics akin to Franco’s Spain or Peron’s Argentina.  And while one could expect liberal Republicans to balk at these comparisons, there are ample warnings from history to make them ponder their complicity in the fruits of Rovian politics.

• The transformative Republican gameplan.  In the 2004 election the Democrats were already significantly outflanked by having to take a patriotic position on an ugly neo-con war and a tax-raising, limited-spending position due to an ugly Republican deficit.  This outflanking could be seen as part of a deliberate Republican effort to transform the political landscape in a way which would make it hard for Democrats to win elections or, more significantly perhaps, to have much room for manoeuvre if they did win them.  With the more ample mandate and control over Congress that the Republicans now enjoy, it can only be a source of fear for Democrats what new projects will be undertaken to outflank them still further come the next elections. 

Conservative pragmatism – abortion as a case study

I want to set out here some thoughts on how changing attitudes to abortion can be interpreted by conservatives as either something to be accepted as resulting from political pragmatism (phronesis), or as something to be reversed as resulting from a liberal assault on traditional values.

Abortion shifted over the course of the 20th century from being a medically prohibited act which carried enormous social stigma to something which is now widely seen, up to a certain point in a pregnancy, as a woman’s right.

Judging from the way the right-to-life debate is framed today, one might be tempted to understand this change as resulting from a reduction in respect for the sanctity of life of the foetus, and hence the launch of the current culture-war to reinstate that respect. But it is not at all clear that the relaxation of abortion law resulted from an attack on the idea of foetal-sanctity in the late-mid 20th century. What there was though was a rapid dissolution of the series of prohibitions and taboos around pre-marital sex (especially directed at women), of which denial of abortion was merely one of the more stringent.

The change in attitudes to sex had many different and inter-related causes, including the invention of the pill, the mass unsupervised congregation of young adults in armed forces and universities, widening economic opportunities, feminism, a music-inspired rebellious youth culture, and also I would say a loss of authority by an “old order” whose values and practices were tainted by fascism and two cataclysmic world wars.

What might be a conservative interpretation of this process? On the one hand a conservative could pick up on the cultural value of “individualism”, which clearly became a motif of sexual liberation, and invoke a conservative, anti-liberal catechism to the effect that “individualism” has been given too much salience at the expense of, say, “the family” or “self-restraint”. The change in sexual attitudes could therefore be painted as the product of a programmatic liberal politics that was engaged on a rationalistic crusade to promote individualism without due care to the social fabric or respect for other cultural values. And similarly, the permission of abortion could be painted as an over-reaching liberal attempt to extend a politics of “individual rights” against the value of the “sanctity of life”.

The socio-historical record shows, however, a myriad of forces at work engendering these changes, forces which were not the result of agency at the political level with the intent of changing sexual attitudes, but rather developments which would appear to fall under the description of “spontaneous” or “organic” change. This points to a duality in the nature of conservative engagement under Cahoone’s thesis. On the one hand conservatives are to resist liberal progressive “dogmatism” which attempts to cut through the grain of so-called organic social processes, but on the other hand conservatives are also to be active participants in the pluralistic encounter which Cahoone is calling phronesis. Conservatives emphasise the value of what has endured, and consequently they must resist any change which seems to move too quickly or which might be portrayed as threatening certain goods, whether “the family”, “civil society”, “prosperity” or “patriotism,” and this is irrespective of whether the change originates in liberal rhetoric or in “spontaneous” cultural development.

And with sexual liberation one can clearly see themes of “excess”, “hedonism”, “licence”, “irresponsibility” and “threat to the family” which set conservative alarm bells ringing, and so as this social process develops conservatives jump into the breach to weigh in for cultural values that appear to be being threatened. And if phronesis is the process of applying practical reason, then this has to mean holding this rhetorical engagement to some kind of account. I would argue that today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the experience in the developed world has been that sexual liberation has not led to the debilitation of society that conservatives feared. Of course there have been large increases in divorce rates and in the number single parent families, but, and, surely this is the litmus test, most children are growing up well-adjusted and contemporary society is broadly prosperous, stable and at ease with itself.

So while one can sympathise with an initial conservative engagement against sexual liberation, one now looks to conservatives to make an accommodation with this development as their negative prognoses have not materialised. And more or less this is what one sees. Throughout western Europe conservative parties accept the reality of sexual liberation and no longer oppose divorce and abortion legislation, gay rights, and support for single parenthood, and this marks a significant change from where conservatives stood fifty years ago. This is phronesis in action.

But what then do we say about the strain of religious conservatism, which is particularly strong in the US, but also is present in Europe, particularly evidenced by catholic and evangelical protestant churches? This strain of conservatism wants to assert that divorce, abortion and homosexual acts, for example, are all definitive cultural “bads”. For this kind of conservative, old prohibitions on these are not to be seen merely as protections of civic goods like the “family” or “prosperity”, but as having an intrinsic status as values in themselves. Any lexicon of the “incommensurable goods” which make up the cultural whole will inevitably be contested, and it is surely part of the historical process that “goods” will drop in and out of this lexicon over time. Conservatives reject any kind of utilitarian or consequentialist calculus and want to retain purely deontological goods, but if conservatism is to embrace phronesis as a mechanism of social change, it has to accept that there will come a point at which a certain deontological norm might be rejected from the value lexicon. Not so long ago one “ought” to be a Christian, or a wife “ought” to obey her husband, and these were seen as intrinsic values in their own right, but now are no longer such.

The BBC showed last night a very moving news item about a campaign by disabled people to fight against the discriminatory abortion of disabled foetuses, centering on the pregnancy of a couple with cerebral palsy and the hostility they received for wanting to carry their child to term. Society regards it as completely normal and acceptable to terminate a physically impaired foetus, but all of the arguments made in favour of this normality ring hollow in the face of the obvious capabilities that disabled people have to enjoy fulfilling lives. Nonetheless, there is an incommensurability between love and compassion for a severely disabled child and a culture which idealises “normality” and “achievement”, and which idolises images of health and capability. There is a powerful incommensurability between a religious conservative’s respect for unborn life and the disrespect for individual freedom entailed by the kind of political intervention needed to force a woman to bring up a severely disabled child.

It is almost an axiom of conservatism that the empathy aroused by a particular case should not be allowed to sway “policy”, something conservatives demonstrate every day in their hardness towards criminals and the destitute at home and abroad. The empathy aroused by the harshness of abortion cannot be translated into making it a deontological “bad.” The balancing of “goods” which lies at the heart of conservatism cannot put an infinite weight on any one value, even on life itself. And while it seems disproportionate to weigh the life of an unborn child against the freedoms of a woman to pursue a career, or even just to enjoy an unencumbered youth, it is no less disproportionate than weighing the enjoyment of the cosmetic pleasures of a western consumer lifestyle against the legions of easily preventable deaths from poverty and disease the world-over.

And it is conservatism above all which wants to wall the garden of its privilege against the overwhelming ethical claims which are unleashed by a rhetoric of justice and proportionality.

Conservatism and "progress"

I’ve been enjoying reading Lawrence E Cahoone’s “Civil Society – The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics”, which I think is a very honest and thoughtful attempt to articulate a philosophy of contemporary conservatism. I plan to post a series of thoughts stimulated by his book.

A key problem for theorists of conservatism is the phenomenon of political and social “change”, given that the essence of conservatism seems to be about preserving the status quo and resisting a liberal reformist agenda. In response to this there are famous Burke and Disraeli quotes as to how a good conservative society needs to embrace change, and the favourite conservative trope for this is the organic or ecological metaphor – namely that of course change and adaptation are necessary, but these processes follow a natural and spontaneous path. While the metaphor appears an attractive one it suffers from the fact that its central idea is to deny a role for overt or “designing” political intervention, whereas in human societies it is precisely in the political realm that the enabling or legitimising of change takes place. How can one differentiate between political action which merely formalises “organic” developments and that which seeks to intervene premeditatedly “against the social grain” ?

Cahoone tries to rescue us from this paradox by positing that conservatism recognises that in any society there is an “incommensurability” between goods and that political action comprises an ongoing rebalancing between these goods based on continual practical learning. So, for example, the good of “self-autonomy” needs to be balanced against “civic order”, and one can see how this balance will shift with new technologies and even with new discoveries in social science (e.g. better understanding of the causes of criminal behaviour). Hence conservatism can be seen to be fluid and responsive and not hamstrung by the need to defend outdated practices. And Cahoone is robust in asserting that changes in social values, which may have evolved from a distinctively liberal and non-conservative political rhetoric, need to be accepted by conservatives as "de facto" part of the incommensurable set of social goods which politics sets out to balance.

A key element of Cahoone’s definition of conservatism is the demotion of politics. Pragmatic political action based on practical experience (phronesis) is to be seen as only a small part of what goes on in the civitas. Society is too complex and multi-faceted to be understood or articulated by the political sphere and the prime conservative opposition to liberalism is what it perceives as liberalism’s wish to use political action to “redress” and “reshape” aspects of society based on a rationalistic set of premises. It is the consistency-driven application of liberal principles, the prioritising of a value like “equality” or “liberty” above, say, the value of “cultural continuity” that Cahoone’s conservatism is most resolutely set against.

I’m not sure how easy it will be to distinguish between a politics of progress based on phronesis from one based on more programmatic liberal reforming zeal, but I think it is a nice attempt to articulate how conservative politics can embrace progressive change. And it also admits the reality of conflict in society, which some conservative theorists seem to ignore.

Incommensurability between goods means that value conflicts are part and parcel of the social world and Cahoone’s acceptance of this leads him to talk of conservatism’s intrinsic pluralism. However, what I am sure that conservatism wants to reject is the notion of anything like, say, class conflict. Class conflict implies the kind of struggle whereby the social order is only held in place by the ongoing strength of one class relative to another, but that should this strength reverse, then the outcome of the struggle would be a wholesale remoulding of the social order. The conservative emphasis on the authority of inherited practical experience and on the organic, ecological metaphor means it has to reject any notion of conflicts latent in society which could lead to wholesale transformation. So it is I think a key premise of Cahoone’s conservatism, and it reverberates for me with what I have heard many conservatives say, namely that politics should be anodyne. Politics should be about economic management, incremental rebalancing, but emphatically not about anything one might call a political movement. And of course what Cahoone does not address, though it is the elephant in the room for any conservative theorising, is privilege, and how the notion of an anodyne politics and an organic social metaphor plays above all to defence of privilege.

Respecting conservative interests

Everybody has conservative interests. In a world of inequality and in which the individual and his circle of intimates are fragile specks in the long durée of history and politics, everyone has an interest in the defence of their particular privileges and in a political calmness that provides order against the potentially climactic tides of history.

Based on their inherent conservative interests, the populations of modern democracies share strong conservative political impulses, hence Tony Blair´s rightwing New Labour party and the conservative nature of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US. The basic list of these conservative impulses is obvious and barely needs enumerating: an attachment to property rights and to opportunities for private wealth creation, support for a strong economy, for relatively low taxation, for a strong state capable of behaving robustly in international affairs, an aversion to what one might call “government-knows-best social engineering”, and perhaps most importantly, the conservative impulse which wants to resist morally high-minded calls for ever greater social justice, either on a national or on a global level.

“Liberal” politics is distrusted, and very vehemently distrusted in some conservative circles, because the moral high-mindedness in which it frames its discourse is wide open to radical transformative agendas. And the one thing that conservatives know, their Berlin´s Hedgehog as it were, is that they don´t want things to change very much.

But importantly, there are also what we might call “social democratic” impulses too. In Europe especially, and you feel this tangibly in for example France, Spain, Germany and the UK as well, there is a strong attachment to the social democratic state, whereby education, healthcare and welfare are available to all, and that for all the inequalities that persist in these societies, some minimal “fairness” and redistribution is necessary and desirable.

However, I would maintain that part of the tension in the political circus that entertains us every day between liberalism and conservatism is an hypocrisy whereby social democratic affections are strongly felt and expressed, but that conservative interests remain paramount even in the minds of most self-professed liberals.

Conservatives as "guerilleros"

I want to say that any critique of conservatism should not be one that aims at its lack of consistency, at for example the blatant contradiction of its strong support for capitalism and its rhetoric of abhorrence at any “change” which might disturb communities and values (capitalism of course being the cause ne plus ultra when it comes to upsetting established social organisation).

Rather I want to say that conservatism is really a politics of attack, mockery and denigration of progressive politics per se, and that this is neither incoherent nor cynical.

It is a strategy born out of a belief that progressive politics contains an enormous capacity for unleashing volatile and unpredictable social change, and change based not on a sanguine appreciation of the benefits vs. the costs of launching such an effort, but on a moral high-mindedness, a wilfulness borne of its sense of its own virtuosity, and that it is very difficult to attack this progressive politics head-on, given the emotive appeal within political discourses of notions of justice, fairness etc. Hence, rather than engage directly with the progressive calls for greater social justice, conservatism acts to discredit progressivism on all sides, raising haunting spectres of social upheaval or conjuring nostalgic images of a god-fearing contented social order.

The key question for liberals is how to prosecute any kind of progressive agenda when the charge of Jacobinism against progressive rhetoric is, I believe, essentially a correct one. How far do progressives want to go, and what are the causes they will fight for and those they will surrender instead to a “gradualist” rhetoric of inertia?

Liberal/conservative asymmetry in a short attention-span world

A sizeable chunk of conservative latency within modern democratic populations rests on a disinterestedness in politics, a tuning out of the “bickering from the beltway”.

Against the backdrop of this disinterestedness conservative politicians have a more simple political proposition than liberals. They are able to trade on a “benefit of the doubt” principle, namely that they are hard-headed managers whose prime interest is the security and increased wealth of the nation, whereas liberals are always under a suspicion of being willing to sacrifice wealth and security in the name of a better conscience.

And there is a strong perception hanging over from the 1960´s and1970´s that pandering to the particularist interests of the liberal constituency – e.g. greater labour union power, higher taxation and welfare provision – is deleterious to the overall wealth generating capability of the economy, whereas pandering to the particularist interests of big business strengthens the economy overall. And it seems evident that there is some truth to this perception, especially as the magical “3rd Way” economy of Germany has stagnated in recent years. Again this predisposes a bias towards letting conservatives “just get on with it” whereas liberals can’t simply “be trusted” in case they give away too much to their constituencies, making conservatives the default option for a population with a short political attention-span.

Also militating against progressive politics is the sheer volume of claims on the good conscience of the people – domestic poverty and social mobility, childcare provision, nursery education, gay marriage, international poverty, the aids pandemic, third world debt, global terms of trade, israel-palestine, greenhouse gases, sustainable development, ethical foreign policy etc. The politically disinterested population tunes out from this frightening cacophony and retreats to the simple conservative message of a preservation of the status quo and the defence of the strong self-interest of the State.

The American Civil War – an exercise in conservative rhetoric

It is noteworthy how antipathy to Southern slavery in the North of the US and in England co-existed in those societies with thoroughgoing racism, imperialist exploitation, destitution based on cultural division (e.g. Ireland) and indifference to the manufacturing poor, and most tellingly, indifference to the plight of emancipated blacks after the Civil War. (Similarly, when slavery was abolished in the West Indies the UK exchequer paid vast fortunes to compensate slave owners and made no provision whatsoever for former slaves). Calhoun, a prominent Southern defender of slavery, had argued that even if slavery were abolished, blacks would still be in a position of economic vassalage in the South, which is in fact what turned out to be the case. The unwillingness of the North to spend equivalent moral or physical capital in addressing this adds to the strangeness of the antipathy of the North toward slavery. It is as though some Northern politicians, and Lincoln is a good example, developed a strong aesthetic distaste for the institution of slavery as an affront to their moral conception of the Nation, but they lacked a similar distaste for the more prosaic economic destitution of the emancipated slaves, and after the achievement of emancipation their moral wind was spent.

Calhoun did not deny the injustice of slavery but he attempted to portray it as intrinsically no different to the many other on-going injustices which were seen as acceptable at the time and he complained that the Northern effort to abolish the particular injustice of slavery was arbitrary and was also self-serving in respect of the emerging kulturkampf between the industrialising North vs. the old South. And in some sense one has a sympathy with Calhoun´s conservative critique, however self-serving it was itself. Taking moral medicine from the Yankees and the British as they were enjoying their most ascendant phases of subjugation of indigenous peoples the world over may have tasted somewhat bitter.

The American Civil War – defence of interests against moral intervention

Trying to put oneself in the mind of the average confederate in the American Civil War who fought so keenly in defence of the old order of the South and the slavery which underpinned it, it is so easy to condemn the confederacy as a bad as well as a lost cause, as one that stood against the progressive march of history. But I think today one could argue that a similarly “unanswerable” claim to justice is that which the deep impoverishment of the 3rd world can make against the West. But just as then, I think the vast majority of citizens of the West would resist a significant economic dislocation in answer to the justice of this demand, and would in fact fight hard to resist it, and dress their cause up in terms of defence of their liberties and rights of self determination. The West sustains itself at the expense of innumerable injustices, but will not willingly see itself even partially unraveled by the claims to justice of what in retrospect might seem an unanswerable historically progressive cause.

Thinking too how the conflict over slavery was put off for such a long time, essentially being avoided by a series of “gradualist” memes in political rhetoric, including famously Lincoln’s belief that the founding fathers intended that slavery die “a natural death”, even if it took 100 years. While of course awaiting the “natural death” in fact saw a new burgeoning of slavery with the shift from the sugar to the cotton economy.

And we have in our time the neat gradualist “failure of redistribution” meme, namely that the particular injustice of 1st vs. 3rd world can only be rectified by roots-up development, that sacrifice on the part of the West is not part of the equation and would all be “wasted”. So no bad conscience in the West, meanwhile the economic inequality “gradually” just gets bigger.