Burkean conservatism, legibility and populism

ABSTRACT

Links have sometimes been drawn between conservatism and populism, but the radical nature of the latter, focused on change as a direct end, means that they cannot be connected so easily. This article argues that nevertheless, conservative thinking of the Burkean tradition can be used to understand, and possibly address, populist concerns. This is not because conservatism is biased towards the status quo – the conservative argues, on the contrary, that innovators, whether rationalist or populist, undervalue the status quo, and are therefore biased against it. Rather, the conservative values the legibility of a person’s society or culture to that person, and diagnoses many populist grievances as resulting from innovation making society less legible to the individuals within it.

Notes

1. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

2. M. Beckstein, ‘What does it take to be a true conservative?’ Global Discourse, 5(1) (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.933566; G. Brennan & A. Hamlin, ‘Conservative value’, The Monist, 99(4) (2016), pp.352–371, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw010.

3. E.g. K.L. Jones, S. Noorbaloochi, J.T. Jost, R. Bonneau, J. Nagler & J.A. Tucker, ‘Liberal and conservative values: what we can learn from Congressional tweets’, Political Psychology, 39(2) (2018), pp. 423–443, https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12415, and many papers in this tradition, where ideology is self-reported within a parochial US matrix.

4. The literature is reviewed in Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2017). Note that Müller also uses the word ‘conservative’ in the wider, looser sense discussed above. Hence his statement (p.109), ‘no right-wing populist has come to power in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites’, doesn’t contradict the thesis of this article. He makes his point with Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani in the context of Donald Trump, neither of whom would count as conservative in the narrow sense.

5. An example is a headline in the British Daily Mail, on 4 November 2016. Its front page report on a court ruling that the British government would need the consent of Parliament to give notice of Brexit to the EU, was headlined Enemies of the People, implying that both the judges and Parliament were part of the elite supposedly attempting to thwart the will of the people. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(headline) (accessed 30 December 2018) for a succinct narrative of the events.

6. E.g. G. Melleuish, ‘Pauline Hanson and Australian conservative populism’, Quadrant, 41(9) (1997), pp.25–29; N.C. Rae, The Return of Conservative Populism: the Rise of the Tea Party and its Impact on American Politics (SSRN, 2011), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903204; N. Saulnier, ‘The rise of populist conservatism and public service management’, Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management, 13 (2017), https://doi.org/10.5931/djim.v13i1.6935.

7. K. O’Hara, Conservatism (London: Reaktion, 2011), pp. 120–123.

8. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 1.

9. Notably of course J. Rawls, ‘The idea of public reason revisited’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 64(3) (1997), pp. 765–807; J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press 2005).

10. It may be, of course, that a conservative has no interest in the liberal, rationalist notion of public reason, but she may still recognize its practical value for persuading voters and convincing opponents of her policies’ legitimacy.

11. Cf. e.g. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 151–152; R Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 3^rd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 182–194.

12. Burke, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 194–195; Scruton, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 19–21; R. Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York: All Points Books, 2017), pp. 49–53.

13. J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

14. Brennan & Hamlin, op. cit., Ref. 2.

15. Brennan & Hamlin, ibid., p. 368, footnote 1.

16. D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allen Lane 2011), pp. 289–299.

17. Ibid., pp. 278–288.

18. S. Clarke, ‘A prospect theory approach to understanding conservatism’, Philosophia, 45(2) (2017), pp. 551–568, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9845-9.

19. Montaigne was one of the earliest commentators to make this point. Cf. ‘On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law’, in M.A. Screech (ed.), Complete Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 122–139, especially p. 135.

20. Thanks to Steve Clarke for making this point.

21. Burke, op.cit., Ref. 11, p. 280.

22. Quoted in J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, 2^nd edition, Volume the Third (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1839), p. 305.

23. OECD, Income Inequality (Indicator), https://doi.org/10.1787/459aa7f1-en (accessed on 16 December 2018).

24. A.O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991).

25. Burke, op. cit., Ref. 11, p.195.

26. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13.

27. Many conservative thinkers have defended a form of legibility using different vocabulary, with Burke most prominent but also Roger Scruton and Simone Weil. See Ref. 56 below.

28. K. Nyíri, ‘Conservatism and common-sense realism’, The Monist, 99(4) (2016), 441–456, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw015.

29. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 77, 183ff.

30. Ibid., pp. 51–52.

31. Ibid., pp. 91ff, and cf. A. Maude, The Common Problem: A Policy for the Future (London: Constable & Co 1969); I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 105.

32. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 80, 346.

33. Ibid., pp. 33, 83, 267, 299, and cf. B.-C. Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London: Verso, 2017).

34. Scott, ibid., pp. 279, 305.

35. Ibid., p. 301.

36. Ibid., p. 191.

37. J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

38. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 57ff, 79, 131, 225.

39. Ibid., pp. 286, 298.

40. R. Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (London: Sage, 2014).

41. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 93, 193, 286.

42. Ibid., pp. 134, 264, 288ff.

43. Ibid., pp. 246, 262; F.A. Hayek, ‘The use of knowledge in society’, American Economic Review, 35(4) (1945), pp. 519–530.

44. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 313; Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), pp. 5–42.

45. Jacobs, op. cit., Ref. 37.

46. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 144, 341, 349; Jacobs, ibid.

47. P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Freedom Press, 1923), p. 294.

48. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 334.

49. Ibid., pp. 31, 349, 352ff.

50. A. Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997).

51. H. Putnam, ‘The meaning of “meaning”’, in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers Vol.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 215–271.

52. Burke, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 183–184.

53. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2^nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 554ff.; Burke, ibid., pp. 194–195.

54. M. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

55. Burke, op. cit., Ref. 11, p.184.

56. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952); R. Scruton, Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

57. J. Conrad, A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), p. xxi.

58. L.M. Goldman, ‘Trending now: the use of social media websites in public shaming punishments’, American Criminal Law Review, 52 (2015), pp. 415–51, M. Kasra, ‘Vigilantism, public shaming and social media hegemony: the role of digital-networked images in humiliation and socio-political control’, The Communication Review, 20(3) (2017), pp. 172–188.

59. N. Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).

60. F.M. Pinkster & W.R. Boterman, ‘When the spell is broken: gentrification, urban tourism and privileged discontent in the Amsterdam canal district’, Cultural Geographies, 24(3) (2017), pp. 457–472, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474474017706176.

61. Roger Scruton (op. cit., Ref. 56, p. 86) coined the word ‘oikophilia’ to mean ‘the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with its personality’.

62. Cf. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 1.

63. Even this caveat can cut both ways. Scruton makes the reasonable point that global elites have to live somewhere, and so are in a sense parasitic on the creation of habitable environments by the less peripatetic. Scruton, op. cit., Ref. 56, pp. 83–111.

64. An anonymous reviewer was concerned that on this account conservatives might find themselves defending Nazis or other evil and/or extreme groups promoting a deeper form of legibility. The question of whether, and if so how, conservatives can avoid being or supporting evil goes beyond the scope of this article. However, as we are concerned here with conservative arguments consistent with public reason, it is not likely that a defence of a Naziish Volk could meet that condition.

65. Scott, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 54, 303.

66. D. Birch, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us (London: London Publishing Partnership, 2017).

67. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 155–157, 386–387.

68. J. Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

69. A. Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin, 2010).

70. M. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

71. D. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst and Company, 2017).

72. T. Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013).

73. E.g. C. Young & C. Jackson, ‘The rise of neo-nativism: putting Trump into proper context’, IPSOS Ideas Spotlight, 9 October 2015, http://spotlight.ipsos-na.com/news/the-rise-of-neo-nativism-putting-trump-into-proper-context/; S. Gaston, Citizens’ Voices: Insights from Focus Groups Conducted in England for the Project, At Home in One’s Past project (London: Demos, 2018), https://www.demos.co.uk/project/citizens-voices/.

74. Quoted in A. Sparrow, ‘Nigel Farage: parts of Britain are “like a foreign land”’, The Guardian, 28 February 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/28/nigel-farage-ukip-immigration-speech. Farage doubled down on his comments in a press conference afterwards, describing a recent train journey he had undertaken: ‘It was a stopper going out and we stopped at London Bridge, New Cross, Hither Green, it was not until we got past Grove Park that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage, Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes it does.’ Asked what was the problem with people speaking in foreign languages, he replied ‘I don’t understand them … I don’t feel very comfortable in that situation and I don’t think the majority of British people do’.

75. Taken from an interview with Volkskrant, quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn (accessed 1 May 2019).

76. F.H. Buckley, The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed (New York: Encounter, 2018).

77. Buckley provides such an account in ibid.

78. Müller, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 108–114.

79. Scruton, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 73–86; Scruton, op. cit., Ref. 56, pp. 113–140. Note that this does not entail that this is the only justification for the rule of law.

80. K. O’Hara, ‘Conservatism then and now’, Cosmos+Taxis, 6(3/4), (2019), 45–51.

81. M. d’Ancona, ‘Brexit: how a fringe idea took hold of the Tory party’, The Guardian, 15 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/15/brexit-how-a-fringe-idea-took-hold-tory-party, to which this account is indebted.

82. D. Carswell, The End of Politics: and the Birth of iDemocracy (London: Biteback, 2012).

83. The destabilizing effects of online petitions are analysed in H. Margetts, P. John, S. Hale & T. Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

84. Hilton is certainly a populist: S. Hilton, Positive Populism: Revolutionary Ideas to Rebuild Economic Security, Family and Community in America (New York: Crown Forum, 2018). For his legibility agenda, see S. Hilton, S. Bade & J. Bade, More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First (London: W.H. Allen, 2015).

85. D’Ancona, op. cit., Ref. 81.

86. P. Walker, ‘Dominic Cummings of Vote Leave named key Johnson adviser’, The Guardian, 24 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/24/dominic-cummings-of-vote-leave-to-be-named-key-johnson-adviser.

87. K. O’Hara, ‘The contradictions of digital modernity’, AI & Society (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0843-7.

88. Margetts et al, op. cit., Ref. 83.

89. A. Hamilton, ‘Safety in union’, in Russell Kirk (ed.), The Portable Conservative Reader (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 70–78, at p. 73.

90. M. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), pp. 43–69, at p. 57.

91. H. van der Dunk, ‘Conservatism in the Netherlands’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13(4) (1978), pp. 741–763.

92. S. Koenis, Voices of the People: Pluralism in Dutch Politics (1994–2014) (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2014).

93. D. Ost, ‘Regime change in Poland, carried out from within’, The Nation, 8 January 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/regime-change-in-poland-carried-out-from-within/.

94. Thanks to Martin Beckstein and Steve Clarke, and the two anonymous reviewers, for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.