Easier to Make Vague Noises

Conservatism Without Doctrines

We were intrigued recently to read this description of the Conservative Party in the UK.

Most Conservative politicians have little grasp of policy or its importance, but are captivated by the prospect of office.  It is also because most political Conservatives are rich enough to be immune from the rougher parts of the state school system, and from any regular contact with the officious insolence of local authorities and other government agencies.  A large income can and does buy exemption from many of the worst aspects of the New Britain.  So most Tories have no real idea of what it is like, and no burning desire to reform it.

They camouflage this lack of political understanding by pretending to be Edwardian country squires and roaring with fake masculinity about how Toryism is a "disposition and not a dogma".  This may have been true, when Tories truly were rubicund, weather-beaten, port-soaked countrymen but it is not true of their pasty, suburban successors.  [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning  (London: Continuum UK, 2009), p. xv.)

The UK elites long ago lost their faith.
  Christianity became cultural, not a fervently held belief in Jesus Christ, Son of God as the only Saviour of mankind.   The elites became secular.  So what is left is a vague sentimental loyalty to Christianity as a kind of nostalgia for one's roots, without hard doctrines or precepts.  As a consequence conservatism, having been cut off from its roots,  has become an ideological fast-follower of the secular Left.

As has been observed in countries like Australia and New Zealand, when conservative governments are elected following Labour government stints in power, the mien is to "conserve" all that the Left had accomplished.  But in the mind of so-called political conservatives such unprincipled plasticity is justified by an elitist belief that whenever "the good guys" are advocating for bad policies the bad magically becomes good, smart, intelligent, sophisticated, modern, and enlightened.  This is the hallmark of all elitist vainglory.  Just as the Soviet Communist elites told themselves that they were "the vanguard of the proletariat" (and therefore deserving of their Black Sea dachas and their GUM shopping cards), so the modern secular conservative sees himself or herself as a modern reformer, at the cutting edge, but in reality serves as a useful idiot for the progressive advance of  socialism. 

Since the arrival of serious, utopian socialism in Britain in the form of Fabianism, the non-socialist parties have had to choose between two responses.  Either they must oppose the Fabian dogma in thought and deed, in which case they will need to be dogmatic about what they prefer to it.  Or they must accept the arguments of their opponents, while making vague noises of protest to comfort their voters.  They have, unsurprisingly, chosen to make the vague noises.  It is much easier.  [Ibid., p, xv, xvi.]

Conservatism, without doctrines,  is just another front for secular humanism, and its political manifestations, namely statism and Marxist materialism.  This will not change until the UK is re-Christianised, or the secular parties are swept away in a rising tide of Islamism.