Blimpish || a Tory

Cf. Tim Montgomerie. 

On the whole I don’t believe in them. I take the recently-departed Samuel Huntington’s view that conservatism is a positional rather than an ideational ideology; which is to say that it’s not a definable ideology in the sense that socialism and liberalism are, based around a core set of substantive ideas about the future and how to get there.  Huntington said that conservatism in this sense is “a rational defense of being against mind, of order against chaos.”

As such, specifying a conservatism to prove it’s just as coherent as liberal or socialist thought makes no sense to me; the points become either redundant (points 1, 3, 4, 8,10, 11, 13, 15, and 17) or highly questionable in application (2, 5, 12, 19).  Insofar as it can be done, it’s better to focus on sweeping rules for how we conduct ourselves rather than what we should believe; the thought all comes before and after them…  And being conservative, why try to innovate, why not just plagiarise?

Morally speaking, conservatism is “loyalty to persons” (Newman).

Politically speaking, conservatism is “a commitment to the maintenance of order and the cause of good government” (Peel).

Brutally speaking, conservatism says “don’t talk to me about socialism; what we have, we hold” (Brezhnev*, attributed).

Oh, and Montgomerie’s point 9 is both trivially true (i.e. politics only exists within culture) and yet misses the point spectaculary.  “Being against mind,” after all: conservatives should know that there is no set of ideas, however subtle, that can sidestep the nasty business of politics – of squaring our ideas with our interests, as “we sail a boundless and bottomless sea” (Oakeshott).

* and yes, I do actually realise, and bow to no one in my anti-communism; but the idea’s right.