I SPENT this week doing conservatism, not ‘performing’ it. Not at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC), but at home with my grandchildren. Even with an invite and £1500 to spare, I couldn’t have gone.
Why? Well, it was half term and, like lots of grandparents around the country, I’m the main helping hand. More than that, I wouldn’t give up time with my little grandchildren for all the tea in China. Working late into the night to get TCW ‘done’ after they’ve gone to bed is one thing; joining Jordan Peterson et al striding up and down the stage, telling me what I suspect I know already, is another.
I’ve been living out what my late husband called ‘tri-generational unity’, which is what conservatism means to me. Giving and creating that sense of belonging we all need which Roger Scruton identified as at the root of what it meant; intrinsic to that all important family identity which Richard Morrissey wrote about so brilliantly last week.
His analysis of the catastrophic impact of family collapse is spot on. If you haven’t read it, please do. It’s one of the most important articles we have published on TCW. It’s why children, left rootless and vulnerable, seek ‘that belonging in artificial digital communities’. It’s also the prime reason for the frightening deterioration of civil society. You wouldn’t think it needed explaining, but after the onslaught on family perpetrated by three decades of Conservative and Labour administrations, it does.
So do the contents of a ‘revelatory’ article I came across in the Epoch Times last week. Titled ‘Empathy: A trait that three generations will inherit’, it reported ‘new research’ that shows ‘parents pass down qualities that safeguard their children and grandchildren from loneliness in our increasingly disconnected world’. ‘Well, I never!’, I thought. But I was wrong to mock; basic, intuitive survival knowledge was thrown under the bus long ago.
This brings me to the fast-changing events of the last few days – ones that will possibly prove to be some of the most momentous of my lifetime. While I was busy with my family rituals – preparing lunch at one end of the table, supervising painting activities at the other and a toddler around my legs demanding ‘help me’ – in the wider world a gulf was visibly opening between the old and the new. A line drawn in the sand, not by ARC, as Paul Collits explained, but by Trump’s blitzkrieg on the other side of the pond.
A Substack that my son sent me called ‘American Strong Gods, Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’ explains it all. ‘I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it,’ its author, N. S. Lyons writes. ‘More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.’
Starting with the post-war impact and influence of Karl Popper, and his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Lyons shows how liberal dreams went wrong. Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, he writes, ‘the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management […] in short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.’
It did, we have long noted on TCW. Some of us, as Frank Palmer reports, were shouting the alarm over 25 years ago, only to be vilified or ignored.
Just as I was giving up hope, the epoch-changers – Trump, Vance and the rest of his team, men who ‘can do things again’ – have taken action andcalled a halt. Men, at last, who are taking no prisoners, hitting out at liberal platitudes head on.
This is what JD Vance did this week, just days after his Munich truth bomb drop and another defining moment of ‘sharing’. He told Niall Ferguson, the Conservatives’ darling historian, that his ‘history lesson’ response to Trump’s peace deal with Putin was moralistic garbage. In fact, he spelt it out point by point, to Ferguson’s outrage; just as Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, took on the White House press corps at Thursday’s press briefing.
Epochal change in action. ’For eight decades now the old elite, left- and right- wings alike, [have] been unified by their shared prioritization of the open society and its values.’ No more. Be they Neo-cons or Soros-style leftists, N. S. Lyons is right. Trump’s new men are not having it anymore. The choice is clear. The doubled-down Prof. Ferguson and Douglas Murray will find themselves on the wrong side of history if they are not careful.
Kemi Badenoch will too. Over at ARC, she pronounced, ‘It’s not liberal values that are the problem. It’s weakness’. The Critic’s Ben Sixsmith asked where this weakness came from. Quite so. ‘Let’s remember what we are defending here,’ Kemi went on. ‘Not just our wealth but our culture — a culture built on … classic liberal values.’
Umm. The same ones that spawned those social liberal ‘values’ like drug taking and single parenthood that she has said elsewhere ‘there is no point in trying to reverse’?
It’s not Kemi, Niall or Douglas – not even Jordan – I am afraid, who are ‘the embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s now overturning the old liberal world order and its ‘weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality’.
It’s Trump’s advance guard – Vance, Miller, Musk, Rubio and RFK Jr and co. ‘If you are not with us, you’re against us.’ They have put down their marker on corrupt indefensible Ukraine and its killing fields. Farage is doing a fine balancing act, but soon he’ll have to choose which way he falls – forwards with MAGA and MEGA into the 21st century or back into Paul Marshall’s‘long twentieth century’ Spectator/Telegraph feel-good liberal conservatism.
I know which I’d choose. The one that spells hope; that gives the best chance of protecting and rebuilding the country, our families and homes, the one that my grandchildren’s future security, safety and happiness depends on. I am all the way with JD Vance: Christian, Dad, Vice President – in that order, as his personal Twitter page spells out.
