Thread by @GrayConnolly

Further to the above, there has been disquiet expressed by some as to the use of ‘barricades’ and ‘bayonets’ below. My usual policy is never to explain tweets but as knowledge of the Ancien Regime vs the Revolutionaries is sorely lacking, here we go. Welcome to a very Tory🧵

https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1395145249647828992

As many but clearly all do not know, our modern Right & Left descend from various sources, most commonly cited is the French Revolutionary aftermath, when the King’s party sat to the Right of an assembly president & those opposed, the liberals as well as the Jacobin, to the Left.

For those of us who are Anglophone, our modern politics really starts with the British Civil Wars of King vs Parliament (Celts/Gaels vs Anglo) from the 1642 attempt by King Charles to arrest parliamentarians (who fully deserved this) until, really, the defeat at Culloden in 1746.

The term Tory was a derogatory word for the, often but not exclusively, Celtic loyalists of the Stuart cause. It later became applied to those who supported legitimism, the ‘old ways’, and the non-jurors. The Jacobites ie the allies of the various King James.

The Tories enemy were the Whigs: the Whigs were the liberally minded English, the modernisers, the rationalists, the 'situationally principled', the easily influenced, the apparatchiks of new orders - whatever they were. As Dr Johnson said, Lucifer was the first Whig.

Whether in the British Isles or on the Continent, our modern political conflicts descend from older fights, often extraordinarily bloody ones, over duties to throne and altar vs rights to an undefined ‘freedom’ (esp a right to flaunt morals) & the trashing of throne and altar.

The ideology of Conservatism (ie those who sat to the Right of the King) was to conserve an established order that saw saw in their Whig or liberal challengers not just obvious error but also a certain moral indifferentism. One man’s ‘freedom’ was, after all, another’s ‘licence’.

At the core of Tory vs Whig, Right vs Left, in this context, was what duties and responsibilities did you owe? Did you owe any? Much of this was religiously based: God was, really, a Tory, always demanding a stern account of us. The Whig made his own deity in his own likeness.

Conservatism until the cold war (at the earliest) had little use for ‘freedom’. It had some time for an ordered ‘liberty’ but Conservatives believed in the nation-state and empire, and in limiting the individual’s freedom as s/he had duties to family, nation, the moral good etc.

Hence, Conservatism always believed in States imposing military conscription, censorship & promotion of the moral good etc. The individual’s obligations to the moral order meant that males had no natural right to object to conscription for war nor rights of females to abortion.

Similarly, Conservatism abroad meant realism and protectionism. You did not get involved others squabbles unless they touched on you - Kings fought limited wars (cf 'endless wars for democracy'). You also protected your workers & farmers as part of that extended national family.

Thus the Conservative Party in the UK becomes the party of Empire, welfare & imperial preference tariffs. Similarly, the Republican Party in the US becomes the party of Union and the protective tariff to grow the United States. And then there is Bismack in Germany.

Enter the libertarians….from stage Left. It is hard to quite place when the Libertarians came along. Descended from the Roundheads at Putney Bridge, as well as the Levellers and John Locke, their existence is on the fringe of the fringe until well in to the 20thC.

Liberalism generally and libertarianism grow out of the critique of the Ancien Regime that the Right zealously defended. Where the Right saw moral chaos, the Left saw 'freedom', even where freedom became indistinguishable from harms to morals and obligations owed by rich to poor.

The 1789 revolution in France was welcomed by many liberals unable to see what obviously came next. Concerned by the King’s occasional erroneous use of power, liberalism, generally, missed that tyranny & then chaos will be, at best, the replacement for throne and altar.

From France and then Europe in the 18th/19thC onwards, liberalism is always revolutionary, a brutal presentism – and pitted against the Ancien Regime, ie the old order. Liberalism is secular, individualist, libertine, free trading, hostile to the order that Conservatism defends.

Then comes Marx, thence comes the World Wars, then comes revolutions and the growth of the State. Libertarians became recently a very late ally to the Right against an overriding threat – but in the sense the Mujahideen were an ally against the Soviets, with attendant blowbacks.

It is a failure of especially Anglo Conservatives that the Whigs won, at all, and then wrote so much of the history, even to the point of purporting to put their own Whig, Edmund Burke, as some sort of hero for the Right! Edmund Burke was for similar disasters – but just later.

The Right’s true intellects were resisters, of the kind that Joseph de Maistre or Karl von Clausewitz were, both going to fight for Russia's Tsar than make their peace with the new revolutionary order. Or a Juan Donoso Cortés who refused likewise to bow to liberalism's pieties.

In his own way, Abraham Lincoln was a quintessential conservative hero: asserting a vast executive power as head of government & state to hold his political union together. Not for nothing did Tsar Alexander II of Russia, almost alone among Europeans, admire and support Lincoln.

Given this, it is time for we on the Right, to, as politely as we can, encourage the Libertarians to head home back to the Left. They will make their new comrades more sensible on economics. They will allow we on the Right to be much more sensible on a vast array of issues.

Thus we Conservatives need to be honest with our libertarian friends. We can be amicable, 'hang out', and enjoy each other’s company, at least until the libertarians start vaping or smoking weed etc. But deep down, we really have nothing in common, anymore, if we ever did. FINIS