Meet the Red Tories

At Georgetown University last week, one of the contenders for conservatism’s future made a splash in a way that it never has before.

Current American conservatism is becoming untenable as the debate has been ceded to the loudest, angriest voices on the farthest right - voices who care much more passionately about inciting angry mobs than they do about governing well. The cycle of being dismissed because you’re angry and angry because you’re dismissed is ultimately self-destructive for conservatives.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and the US is still, at least compared to the rest of the developed world, a remarkably conservative place. When the current right-wing composition – which, like the left forty years ago, increasingly resembles a shrinking core of true believers held together with slogans, anger, and duct tape – finally crumbles, what might replace it? A true libertarian party? A conclave of unabashed theocrats? A kinder, gentler, “socially-liberal-yet-fiscally-conservative” center-right coalition?

At Georgetown University last week, one of the contenders for conservatism’s future --already a force in the Tory parties of Britain and Canada – made a splash in the US in a way that it never has before. Invited by Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, a panel including author Ross Douthat, conservative blogger Rod Dreher, and The American Conservative Senior Editor Daniel McCarthy discussed a political philosophy known as “Red Toryism”. Red Toryism is an interesting hybrid that’s ill-suited to our love of pigeon-holing ideologies into a neat conservative-liberal spectrum.

On the one hand, Red Toryism is a reactionary conservatism. Distrusting the “atomized individualism” of the last half-century as leading ironically to ever-greater government as local civil society broke down, Red Tories emphasize the importance of local institutions – church, family, school boards, etc. – as a counterweight to excessive intrusion from an ever-prying state.

However, Red Tories can also espouse traditionally leftist shibboleths like anti-corporatism with a fervor that would make Michael Moore blush. Red Toryism’s greatest modern proponent, British author Phillip Blond (who was also present at Georgetown) seems convinced that the neoliberal economic consensus of the 1990s hasn’t done much for the little man except restrict his ability to exert any economic power for himself. According to Blond, neoliberalism “has created a new serfdom”. Indeed, said Blond, “Obama and Alinsky aren’t nearly radical enough” – they are still in support of the statist status quo.

What to make of such an amalgam? Is this a movement that simultaneously advocates a greater role for religion in public life while exhorting consumers to protest the construction of new Wal-Marts? It’s difficult, to be sure. They certainly have important insights, as Dreher, Douthat, and McCarthy all readily agreed. Republicans and conservatives have, even as they claim to defend the rights of the individual against the state, always been vulnerable to the charge of abandoning workers and consumers to the tender mercies of private corporations. Conservatives need to offer an economic program for the average worker that goes beyond “taxes bad, freedom good” and this communitarian emphasis can be a boon.

Unfortunately, there is no doubt that local governments and associations can be just as nosy and intrusive as faraway ones. Indeed, anyone who’s ever dealt with a petty bureaucrat knows, the smaller someone’s power is, the more zealously he generally guards it. Local government is much more susceptible to provincialism, corruption, and the like than the bureaucratic and professional federal and state governments. The virtuous small town is great if you’re one of the folk – if you’re an atheist or a homosexual in rural Alabama, then not so much. In conversation after the speech, Blond, and Dreher acknowledged the importance of legal protection for freedom of conscience and individual rights.

Red Toryism is a fascinating undercurrent of conservative thought. It’s not a panacea, but in a Republican Party in the dying throes of its current security-fiscal-social conservative alignment, frankly, we need all the help we can get. There are good things we can learn from Blond and other thinkers, and we as conservatives would do well to open our ears to them.