A Plague of NatCons

Who Will Save Us from the March of the Strawmen?

Many years ago I stayed at a hotel in Varanasi overlooking the River Ganges. Most days, if you sat out on the terrace, you could see the corpses of animals floating down the river, and some people said that sometimes you could see human too, though I never did. Watching the National Conservatism conference unfolding in London this week felt a little like that.

For those that don’t know, these conferences are a rolling event, put on by the Edmund Burke Foundation over the last few years, which aim to gather speakers who many people outside these events would consider to be on the radical right/far right fringe. Boris Johnson’s government once did anyway, back in 2020, when it criticised MP Daniel Kawczynski for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome, along with the likes of Victor Orbáns, Matteo Salvini and Giorgio Meloni.

Times change, and so do failing governments. And this week’s conference was attended by Conservative Party backbenchers and cabinet ministers, with the tacit approval of a supine premier who either didn’t know or didn’t care.

I didn’t follow the conference in granular detail, because life really is too short, but it was impossible to avoid the stream of half-baked ideas, dank straw men, shibboleths, half-truths and semi-truths and general hysterical craziness that floated through my Twitter feed on a daily basis.

First up was the Home Secretary, clearly on manoeuvres and looking to outflank the hapless Rishi Sunak from the right, with a typically infantile speech declaring that ‘white people should not feel guilty’ about their history and inviting her audience to ‘venerate our past’ instead. Then there was Miriam Cates warning that the country was not having enough babies.

And Douglas Murray delivering a talk in the Natural History Museum under the skeleton of a whale, in which he said that national pride should not become obsolete just because Germany ‘mucked up’ nationalism in the 20th century.

The very least that can be said about this is that is an extremely questionable notion, but not nearly as much as David Starkey’s suggestion the Left feels ‘jealousy’ towards Jews, and wants ‘to replace the Holocaust with slavery in order to wield its legacy as a weapon against Western culture.’

Wrap your head around that one if you can. And while you’re at it take a look at Matt Goodwin declaring that ‘The Left pushed for hyper-globalisation, which prioritises the interests of Big Business & urban graduates, over the interests of the national community.’

Faced with such idiocy, you can’t wondering what ‘the Left’ could have done if it had had even a smidgeon of the power on a national and global scale that these grifters say it has, but these are not people to allow reality to intrude on their ‘NatContalk’. After all, as the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley astutely observed ‘If we’re going to go to war on anything which does put the word “national” in its name, we’re also going to have to crackdown fast on the National Trust, the NSPCC and the NHS.’

Genius.

Elsewhere, you could find David Frost or ‘Lord Frost’ as he has become inexplicably known, describing ‘the spirit of Brexit’ as ‘ the spirit of nationhood’. It’s probably a sign of the times that Frosty the NoMark seems to think he is a man for the times. But no more absurd than Lee Anderson delivering a keynote address in which he told his audience to be ‘incredibly proud to live in this great country, and I’m incredibly proud to have been born here.’

Yeah, kudos to Lee’s parents for having sex and giving birth to him. No wonder he’s proud. On and on it went, like a carnival of the damned, an opening of the British hellmouth, a walpurgisnacht in which all the sweepings and shavings of the last three dire decades came together in one place. There were blue labourites, pseudo-leftists, hard liberals and freezepeachers dancing naked and smearing themselves with hard-right woad while the likes of Melanie Phillips scattered them with psycho-dust.

There was Darren Grimes, the perpetual minnow in his charity shop shark suit, swimming desperately with the big guys. There was David ‘people from somewhere’ Goodhart, Frank Furedi and Nina Power. There was Toby Young insisting that the ‘priests’ of the ‘woke morality’ are totalitarian because they ‘refuse to assume robes of office.’ And a priest called Benedict Kiely comparing a ‘Christian nation without its foundations’ to ‘an IKEA pre-made building, ready to collapse.’

Inevitably there was Katherine Birbalsingh, ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ delivering a remarkably shrill and more-than-a-little unhinged speech in which she called on her audience to show their love of their country by taking their children out of ‘woke schools’ or tweeting under their own name, even though she doesn’t do that herself.

Birbalsingh even invoked Russell Crowe from Gladiator - a great film which didn’t deserve this - in calling on her audience to ‘hold the line’ against the massed forces of wokedom.

I don’t know what was worse, the conceptual incoherence or the megalomaniac self-importance, but Miss Snuffy wasn’t the only one to exude these qualities.

The Paranoid Style

In his classic essay on rightwing US politics, Richard Hofstadter referred to ‘the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ that defined what he called the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics. And on the evidence of last week that ‘style’ is well and truly over here, and taking our men as well as our women.

As Hofstadter put it, the proponent of the paranoid style sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.’

These words could have been included in the ‘about’ section on the London conference, in which the apocalypse was always just around the corner and may even have started. Wokedom, ‘cultural Marxism’, the left, godless secularism, ‘globalists’ cultural relativists, Black Lives Matter, trans people - all these barbarians were beating the gates of ‘Western civilization.’

What to do about it? In a wild and yet quite revealing speech, Danny Kruger, the backbench MP and former speechwriter for David Cameron, had a go. Kruger gave a speech on psilocybin in parliament yesterday, and he must have been taking some of it earlier in the week. He begins his speech with a discussion of Brexit, and the drug must have just been coming on, because it’s the usual whining victimhood and self-deception that we have come to expect from Brexiters in recent years, and which has grown louder as the Brexit water gurgles noisily down the plughole.

According to Kruger, the UK set out in 2016 to ‘renew the basis of our politics’, only to be thwarted by the EU, which refused to ‘make Brexit work for both sides.’ Instead ‘we were pushed about like a child in the playground encircled by bullies, unable to break out’, until Boris Johnson finally had the courage to stand up to ‘Parliament, the judiciary, and the civil service’ and forced the EU to ‘take notice’ of us. As a result, ‘we broke free. We crashed through the ring of bullies and made it to the people and forced an election.’

So all good then? Not really, because the promises to ‘the people’ have still not been met. After a not entirely unreasonable account of the UK’s longterm economic failures, and his own party’s role in them, the drugs must have kicked in suddenly, because Kruger then veers off into uncharted Tory territory as he turns his attention to ‘the weird medley of transgressive ideas that is now threatening the basis of civilisation in the West.’

What are these ideas? You guessed it. Or did you?

We have overseen the radicalisation of a generation. In the name of a new ideology - a mix of Marxism and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship all wrapped up in revolution.

Paganism, you say? And lock up your daughters, because these Marxist narcissistic pagans are trying to ‘build their new Jerusalem - their pagan city on a hill.’ And in order to do that

first the old one must be destroyed. Everything must be undermined. Dismantled. Swept away. Everything must conform at last to the imagining of John Lennon: No countries. No families. No religions (except this one). Nothing to live or die for. No history, just a bland progressive present. And over all of it -benign, omniscient, omnipotent - the progressive state.

I’m not sure if this exactly what John Lennon was singing about. Some readers may have wondered where this ‘progressive state’ has been the last thirteen years, but Kruger insists that this ‘dystopian fantasy’ is a real possibility, and he urges those who doubt it to ‘remember Covid’.

Was Covid part of the pagan narcissist conspiracy then? Kruger doesn’t say, but he knows what is necessary to stop it.

So what is the solution to these horrors? Well, for a start, there is ‘the normative family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – this is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society. Marriage is not all about you. It’s not just a private arrangement. It’s a public act, by which you undertake to live for someone else, and for wider society; and wider society should recognise and reward this undertaking.

Imagine there’s no woke, it’s easy if you try

Kruger might want to have a word in his hero Boris Johnson’s ear about these commitments and obligations, but he wasn’t the only speaker to evoke the ‘normative family’ as a pillar of the ‘national conservative’ order. This is one of the key ideas in the national conservatism project. As its website’s ‘statement of principles’ makes clear:

The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations.

I see. But the traditional family cannot thrive on its own, because

No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike.

Blimey. And what kind of government should we have? Well, a small state, in general, but not too small:

We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.

However ‘energetically’ the national government may be forced to act in such circumstances, the statement of principles insists that:

necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.

If you think that all this sounds just a little bit authoritarian and even fascistic, you would not be wrong, though its more immediate goal is probably closer to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey than Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. The signatories consist of a plethora of rightwing and paleoconservative luminaries and up-and-coming stars, including Christopher DeMuth from the Hudson Institute, the Spectator’s Amber Athey, Victor Davis Hanson, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and Peter Thiel.

Its ideology reaches into that space vacated by ‘traditional’ conservatism, which has been taken over by the likes of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene… and Suella Braverman. On one level we should be grateful for the fact that it has been so fervently embraced by so many individuals who have floated in and out of these politics for so many years without overtly declaring them.

When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time. Too many people didn’t, and now we know, or should know, if we didn’t before, who they are and the political company they want to keep.

The London conference is almost certainly a sign of things to come within a Conservative Party shattered by its embrace of the ruinous Brexit project. This week, no less than Nigel Farage admitted that ‘Brexit has failed.’

Naturally this was not his fault, nor will it ever be his fault, or the fault of the project itself. But none of the politicians responsible for that failure will ever acknowledge it without bringing about their own political ruin, so it’s entirely natural that so many Brexiters should be seeking to avoid scrutiny of that failure though culture wars and the invocation of the ‘national community.’

The problem is that the Conservative Party had already shifted to the radical right as a result of Brexit, and driven out out moderates or more traditional One Nationers from the party during the Johnson ascendancy. Now, the presence of so many Tory luminaries at this conference suggest that they are prepared to go even further rightwards, to that dark place where Christofascism, Trumpism, ‘wars on woke’ all overlap with the prospect of a ‘civilisational’ war at home and a war with China.

It’s tempting to assume that they won’t succeed, without splitting the party, which would not be a bad thing for the rest of us. But no one, after the last seven years, should take that outcome for granted, let alone assume that there is something in the British national character that is somehow impervious to the national conservative siren song.

The National Conservatism website includes a speech on ‘God, homeland, and family’ from Giorgia Meloni at the 2020 National Conservative Conference in Rome. Meloni is now the Italian Prime Minister, and there clearly those, like Braverman and Frost, who dream of repeating that journey over here, at least further down the line.

This is not likely in the short-term, but in the longer term this movement is in it to win it. If - and it still is an if, unfortunately - Labour wins the next election and fails after one or two terms, and the Tory Party fragments, we can expect to see and hear a lot more where this came from. And the challenge that British society, and so many other societies face, is to come up with a different set of principles and values around which to organize, and a different story of what the country might be, to counter the fearful exhibits in the National Conservative shop of horrors.

And only if we can do this, can we hope that the ideas we heard over the last week will become one ideological skeletons, exhibits in a historical museum that are as remote from the present as the whale bones and dinosaurs that hovered over Douglas Murray and his audience.