Conservatism is a worldview that values tradition, belonging and place. Drawing on the writer David Goodhart, we may define it as a “somewhere” ideology. According to commentators from across the political spectrum, this ideology has a bleak future. The conservative journalist Ed West goes so far as to say that “conservatism is doomed”. I think West is wrong.
It may seem odd to talk about conservatism’s demise in today’s Britain. Arguably the most significant development our country has faced since the Second World War – Brexit – has been shaped in no small measure by conservative values. The Conservative party currently commands a large majority in parliament after more than a decade in power. And despite the challenges, errors and costs of the covid-19 pandemic, public support for the Tories has remained relatively stable, suggesting a solid social base. Meanwhile, the political left continues in its sorry state.
Yet West isn’t basing his argument on current electoral trends. He’s well aware that the Conservatives are on track for another decade in government. Rather, he thinks that conservatism will disappear because he agrees with Janan Ganesh, that politics is “downstream of culture”. Extant cultural trends, driven primarily by the universities, are leading us inexorably to a left-liberal, progressive destination, West maintains. That is why conservatism is doomed.
It is true that British universities are petri dishes of progressive values. Our faculty lean overwhelmingly in a left-liberal direction – particularly in the social sciences and humanities – and have done so for a long time. As the philosopher John Gray points out, this situation has helped make “progressivism … the unthinking faith of millions of graduates”. Moreover, while not every graduate enters into an elite profession, the elite is mostly made up of people with degrees. Progressive values thus predominate among those in the upper strata.
This proliferation of left-liberal values among the elite is crucial, says West. In his view, where the elite goes the rest of society eventually follows. Therefore, “in just a couple of generations” progressivism will have been universally adopted. Why this will happen is due to social prestige. West writes that, because left-liberalism is associated with “high-ranking and successful people”, ever more us will embrace it to achieve a similar standing. Conservatism, by contrast, will come to be “seen as low-status” and shunned. Politics will gradually catch-up with and reflect these shifts, resulting in a left-liberal hegemony.
West’s prognosis has some basis in reality. Over the last four decades, cultural attitudes in Britain have undergone what Goodhart calls a “great liberalisation”, particularly with regards to gender, race and sexuality. As Goodhart details in The Road to Somewhere,[1] this change has followed a top-down pattern, beginning with elites in the 1960s and then percolating through to the rest of society. And politics has to a certain extent followed these cultural trends. The current Conservative government has taken a progressive stance on a number of issues, for example making divorce easier and opening up British citizenship to the people of Hong Kong.
Yet, overall, West’s thesis is too neat and narrowly focused. Even if we accept that social status is a strong pull on our behaviour, we don’t all appraise prestige in the same way. The sociologist Albert Cohen long ago showed that what counts as prestigious can vary substantially across different social groups and alternative hierarchies of esteem can be formed to challenge norms of success. Cohen’s insight suggests a fluid and potentially contentious relationship between elites and ordinary people, which is more accurate than West’s top-down model. For while some progressive values have been widely accepted, aspects of the elite worldview have been rejected in favour of traditional ideals. Brexit was not only a popular revolt against the borderless, technocratic world espoused by elites, it was also a reassertion of the nation-state as the proper site of politics.
Additionally, West’s fixation on elites downplays the importance of other factors shaping our values. For instance, our interests – and how we calculate these – may result in us supporting certain ideologies over others. Take patriotism, currently a topic of much debate.
George Orwell defined patriotism as a “defensive” form of “national loyalty”. It isn’t about expanding the nation’s culture but preserving “a particular place and a particular way of life”. This doesn’t mean that patriots are wholly opposed to cultural change. They accept that this change is inevitable but as Orwell notes, they want it to happen in a way that connects “the future and the past”, that maintains a sense of cultural rootedness. Neither radical nor reactionary, patriotism entails a conservative disposition.
Why would anyone be loyal to a particular place and way of life? From the standpoint of elite progressivism, parochial attachments such as the nation are arbitrary prejudices that illegitimately exclude people and keep us from identifying with humanity at large. There can be no rational grounds for patriotism, in this view; it is crass favouritism pure and simple.
But things aren’t that straightforward. As the sociologist Craig Calhoun suggests, it’s much easier for elites to take this dim view of patriotism than other social groups.[2] With their high stocks of cultural and economic capital and their increasingly global networks, progressive elites can afford to admonish local ties and fellow feelings. The maintenance of these allegiances isn’t in their interest. In fact, their interest may lie in weakening these bonds, to bring about greater mobility and open markets.
Yet for those lower down the social hierarchy, loyalty to a particular community may make perfect sense. Those “excluded from or allowed only weak access to dominant structures of power”, writes Calhoun, “have especially great need to band together in order to be effective”. And in these circumstances, an abstract humanity is no substitute for the dense relations and means of social communication afforded by specific belongings. For Britain’s working classes, the dissolution of national frontiers may look less like an emancipatory project and more like a recipe for downward pressure on wages and heightened insecurity. Depending on your viewpoint, then, patriotism – the adoption of a conservative disposition – may be rational.
West fails to consider this social differentiation and the varying – and often conflicting – interests it gives rise to. Any political association “is a plurality”, Aristotle tells us in The Politics,[3] and so one set of values can never be universally triumphant. As I have shown here, the broader public isn’t likely to passively absorb elite ideals and many people have an interest in supporting conservative ones. For these reasons, conservatism isn’t doomed.
[1] David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin Books, 2017
[2] Craig Calhoun, ‘’Belonging’ in the Cosmopolitan Imagination’, Ethnicities, Vol. 3, No.4, 2003, pp. 531-553
[3] Aristotle, The Politics, Oxford University Press, 2009