Ship of Fools: British Toryism and American Republicanism

Thread: British Toryism and American Republicanism Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

I have just come across the following quote by British journalist John Casey, which rather intrigues me.

It carries on from a conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell shortly before the Falklands War, in which Thatcher had remarked that a strong military force was needed to defend Western values:

“Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government’. Thatcher: ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values’. Powell: ‘No, prime minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed’. Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.”

Does this exchange really set out the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism?

I would have thought that there were true conservatives and neo-conservatives amongst both Tories and Republicans.

And why are the “values” which neo-conservatives purport to believe in spreading, such as liberalism and democracy, described as conservative when they are in fact, historically speaking, recent and radical?

And what sort of conservatism is Powell supporting here?

Is it the conservatism of basic loyalty, as described in Byron’s line “with all thy faults we love thee still” (as opposed to Kipling’s “If England was as England seems…. ‘ow soon we’d drop ‘er”)?

Would it be possible to attempt to analyse the issues of political philosophy raised here, without the compulsion to affirm one's right-on credentials by saying yar boo sucks to Powell and Thatcher, and rehashing the justifiability of the Falklands War?

No? Well, I didn’t think so, but it was worth suggesting.

Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :

Point of question, just so I'm clear here.

quote:
“Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government’. Thatcher: ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values’. Powell: ‘No, prime minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed’. Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.”

Does this exchange really set out the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism?

Do you mean...

Toryism = fight for your country no matter what its values?

American Republicanism = fight for your country omly insofar as it espouses your values?

Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :

In any case, regardless of terminology, I have to wonder what Powell would have done if the UK had gone Comminist as a result of a Communist invasion, who then used its military to wage aggressive wars against other countries?

Would he fight for the UK, qua the UK, against the Communist invaders, but then fight on behalf of the UK(Communist government and all) after Communism became the government? After all, if his national loyalty is not dependant upon values...

Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on :

I think it is true that American identity is more closely bound up with accepting a series of values (freedom, aspiration, The American Way Of Life) than British identity. I mean the Constitution, which explicitly endorses certain values, is seen as sort of sacred in America in the way that no British document is.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
Do you mean...

Toryism = fight for your country no matter what its values?

American Republicanism = fight for your country omly insofar as it espouses your values?

Or the other way round?

The AmericanWay™ of oaths before the flag, national flag in classrooms etc. would suggest the My Country Right Or Wrong is closer to the American idea.

But then again it probably wasn't that, it is not the difference between US Republicanism and Toryism, rather than the difference between old and new Toryism.

Old Toryism, represented here by Powell, is the Toryisn of Empire, of the Raj in India. It has a tendancy to be racialist but not necessarily racist.

New Toryism, represented by Thatcher, is neither racialist nor racist. It is the values people hold that are important, not their colour or background.

Not a pond difference, just the evolution of British politics post World War II. US politics have had their own independent evolution.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

Ricardus:

Isn't the American ideology which 'is more closely bound up with accepting a series of values (freedom, aspiration, The American Way Of Life)' closer to the view of the Democrats than the Republican.

Although there are no direct parallels, could it be that the Republican/Democrat divide is similar to the Old/New Tory divide I mentioned above.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

I was thinking, more or less, what balaam has just posted. I suppose the difference is between an often well-intentioned paternalism and a "by your own bootstraps" approach.

Mrs T's Toryism seems to me to have been very much "by your own bootstraps", culminating in "there is no such thing as society". Which has some resonance with the neoconservativism of the Tea Party (rather than traditional GOP).

Interesting OP. It may indeed be comparing apples and pears, but there seem to me to be some resonances there.

Posted by mikey mikey (# 17383) on :

I wonder how Mrs Thatcher's sense of "the right cause" was bought into her personal and family life.

Well judging from her son's life...

Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :

The quote in the OP is a perfect example of the ignorance of the complexities of American politics so often exhibited by Europeans and Canadians. This particular view holds that the foreign policy of George W. Bush is typical of Republicans thought throughout history and traditionally opposed by Democrats. Anybody with a 10th grade knowledge of US history could explain why that is simply nonsense.

For a more complex explanation see this review of Walter Russell Mead's book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on :

quote:
Anybody with a 10th grade knowledge of US history could explain why that is simply nonsense.

Ah, Beeswax Altar, you have to remember that outside the US none of us will have anything like that level of knowledge. Although as I atypically studied US history for my O-level history exam I may be the exception. But mercifully I am now so old that I have forgotten most of it.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Surely "old" Toryism - or just Toryism really - is about values, but its about a different set of values from ones US Republicans are likely to hold? The Tories started as the party of old money, of landed interests, of the Church of England, and above all of the monarchy. What we used to call "High Tories". It detatched itself from the CofE over a generation ago, but it still has a sentimental attachment to the land (and specifically to England). It tends to be socially conservative, politically mildly authoritarian, and rather decentralist. But it is very, very nationalistic. And most of all it is profoundly monarchist and pro-establishment and paternalistic in a way that American conservatives rarely are (for obvious reasons when it comes to the monarchy).

"New" Toryism, which isn't really Tory at all, so much as a sort of right-wing liberalism (*) is less about values and more about business. For them the point of government is to provide an environment that promotes business. They are not anti-government, they want government to train their workers for them, and fix them when they get ill, and mend the roads, and be a lender of last resort - but then they want government to get out of the way when they have done their bit. In some ways they have more in common with the left than you might think. Like most of the left they look on government as a tool for getting things done, not the heart and soul of the nation. They just want to get different things done. And like a lot of the left they don't really care much about nations as nations at all.

All successful political parties are coalitions, and the more successful they are the more internaly diverse they tend to be. Both the British Conservatives and American Republicans are very successful and very diverse (or at least they were in the past - if as some people say the Republicans become less diverse then they will become less successful).

There are more than two kinds of Tories just as there are more than two kinds of Republicans. For example the Tories have had the old lower-middle-class and small-business wing who used to stand for elections calling themselves "Independents" or "ratepayers" (but we always knew who they were). And there were LIberal Imperialists and Liberal Unionsists they imported from the LIberal Party along with Chamberlain over a hundred years ago -pretty much extinct as a species since the 1950s, though the echoes of their train-wreck still poisons the politics of Ulster and Glasgow. And there are other sorts as well.

As for Enoch Powell, he was a very strange man, and doesn't really fit into any of those camps. He probably started somewhere near the Chamberlainites, but later moved in a High Tory direction - but never quite got there. He managed to hold and strenuously defend opinions that others regard as incompatible with each other - how many prominent politicians are in favour of low taxes, a completely free market *and* a strong welfare state? How many share Powell's fanatical, almost irrational, devotion to the monarchy? Now many other far-right Tories supported the decriminilastion of homosexuality and nuclear disamament?

(*) Yes there are such things as right-wing liberals, just as there are such things as liberal Tories. Margaret Thatcher was very near to being a right-wing liberal, and David Davis almost certainly is one. I once suspected David Cameron of being a liberal Tory, but he looks more and more like a hardline Tory as time goes on.

[ 14. November 2012, 14:44: Message edited by: ken ]

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

Ticks all round from me for that post, ken. Interesting how the word "liberal" functions in different ways depending on which side of the pond the word is used.

"Right wing liberal" = oxymoron in US!

Posted by Shire Dweller (# 16631) on :

<Liking Ken's tangent>

Powell indeed was a very strange man. He was one of those people who are said to have been born in the wrong era; that he should have been a Victorian.

He was a quite unsentimental conservative and a totally committed imperialist. However, once India became independent and no permanent military presence was kept 'East of Aden' he no longer saw the point of maintaining a rump of Empire and was happy to let it go (unlike more sentimental conservatives)

He was a brilliant intellectual who mastered many languages, was a leading Classics expert (indeed Professor by the age of 25) and rose to Brigadier in the Army.

His adherence to principles made him a peculiar politician (by modern standards), in that he would resign because he disagreed with policy and was willing to say and defend whatever he had decided was correct, regardless of who it upset.

Of course any popular memory of him comes from what is referred to as “The Rivers of Blood Speech”, but what Powell himself referred to as his “Birmingham Speech”.

I can only say this from reading a biography but I think he was the strangest and most misunderstood figure in British public life in the 20th century.

<end of tangent>

Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
Ticks all round from me for that post, ken. Interesting how the word "liberal" functions in different ways depending on which side of the pond the word is used.

"Right wing liberal" = oxymoron in US!

I think the tensions within our Liberal Democrats hint at the problem: there are social liberals and economic liberals. Social liberals seem closer to the US idea of a liberal democrat, economic liberals closer to republicans.

Posted by tclune (# 7959) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:

quote:
Anybody with a 10th grade knowledge of US history could explain why that is simply nonsense.
Ah, Beeswax Altar, you have to remember that outside the US none of us will have anything like that level of knowledge.

FWIW, most Americans are proud to say that they don't have that level of knowledge, either.

--Tom Clune

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
"Right wing liberal" = oxymoron in US!

The UK right wing is not as far to the right as the US right wing.

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

My first response was "It is Enoch Powell speaking and therefore any comparison is not going to work." He was weird, in the way only an individual who was unhappy that he had survived fighting in a war could be. That I recall from a Radio 4 interview 1989 Desert Ireland Disks.

Jengie

Posted by Yam-pk (# 12791) on :

My two-pennies worth:

Economic liberterians/neo-liberals predominate in shaping the economic policies in both the Conservative and Republican parties.

Social liberterians can be found in the Conservative Party - those people who believe that private morality & conduct, as far as possible, should not be regulated by the government - alongside the social authoritarians who believe that the state has a duty to preserve law and order, and promote certain types of moral conduct.

In terms of foreign policy, the neo-Cons in the Tory party seems to be of the view that the UK should support the USA in its policies, regardless of the merits of the case (Michael Gove - UK Education Secretary)....

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by tclune:

quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:

quote:
Anybody with a 10th grade knowledge of US history could explain why that is simply nonsense.
Ah, Beeswax Altar, you have to remember that outside the US none of us will have anything like that level of knowledge.
FWIW, most Americans are proud to say that they don't have that level of knowledge, either.

--Tom Clune

The bottom line is that in the last 70 years the Republicans and Democrats have more or less swapped ideologies. US political ideologies are much more fluid than in the UK.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
My first response was "It is Enoch Powell speaking and therefore any comparison is not going to work." He was weird, in the way only an individual who was unhappy that he had survived fighting in a war could be. That I recall from a Radio 4 interview 1989 Desert Ireland Disks.

Jengie

Just to continue the tangent, yes, he was very weird: tortured, indeed. He could sometimes be so staggeringly right- probably his finest moment was his speech on the killing of 11 rebels by the colonial authorities at Hola Camp in Kenya- and then so horribly, horribly wrong: you can say, for instance, that the Rivers of Blood speech was about a particular understanding of equality before the law and a horror of Indian-style communalism, but then you can't get past the gutter racist language that he used in it.

Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :

So, the parties have switched sides on foreign policy over the last 70 years?

70 years ago...that was...1942.

So, that makes Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama Republicans. They must be since each of them used the US military in an attempt to spread US values abroad. Eisenhower and Nixon could have cared less about spreading American values abroad. Robert Taft didn't even want to be involved in NATO. If your argument is that over the last 12 years, the Republican Party has foolishly embraced neoconservative foreign policy then that would be correct. However, Democrats have their own hawks who aren't opposed to military intervention.

Posted by Trisagion (# 5235) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
...Desert Ireland Disks.

Or perhaps Desert Island Discs.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

Freudian slip remembering his years in the UUP, no doubt. UK shipmates, at least (and possibly others) can hear the programme here- about a third of the way down the page, 19 Feb 1989 . Remarkable.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

Thanks for that Ken.

I would question just one or two points.

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
above all of the monarchy. most of all it is profoundly monarchist

There are, or have been, Tories who reject the monarchy as alien and "German" ever since 1714.

quote:
"New" Toryism, which isn't really Tory at all, so much as a sort of right-wing liberalism

Sorry, I stuffed up the editing and left out your comment about values.

However cynical one might want to be about Thatcher's values or lack thereof (her less than satisfactory attitude toward Pinochet, for example), there seems little doubt that she genuinely abhorred communism ( and not just for business reasons) and Argentine neo-fascism.

quote:
And there were LIberal Imperialists and Liberal Unionsists they imported from the LIberal Party along with Chamberlain over a hundred years ago

Surely Wellington and Peel had smashed any Tory homogeneity decades before Chamberlain.

[ 14. November 2012, 21:22: Message edited by: Kaplan Corday ]

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
above all of the monarchy. most of all it is profoundly monarchist
There are, or have been, Tories who reject the monarchy as alien and "German" ever since 1714.

The Tories have always supported the monarchy. It's just that they started out disagreeing with the Whigs about who the monarchy actually was.

quote:
God bless the King! (I mean our faith's defender!)
God bless! (No harm in blessing) the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King,
God bless us all! That's quite another thing!

John Byrom

Posted by Anglican't (# 15292) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
My first response was "It is Enoch Powell speaking and therefore any comparison is not going to work." He was weird, in the way only an individual who was unhappy that he had survived fighting in a war could be. That I recall from a Radio 4 interview 1989 Desert Ireland Disks.

Continuing the tangent, I'm afraid, but I understand that Powell lost a number of friends during the war. I think this unhappiness was an example of 'survivor guilt' (which I think is a recognised condition). According to Simon Heffer's biography of Powell, a number of servicemen wrote to him afterwards to say they felt the same way but hadn't felt able to express themselves.

It sounds odd to me too, but then again I don't know what it's like to see my mate blown to bits.

Posted by roybart (# 17357) on :

Interesting conversation. Just two points:

1) "Liberal" as understood in the U.S. has almost no relationship to the term as understood in Europe or, for example, by The Economist. A U.S. "liberal" in the Northeast, the Midwest, California, or Pacific Northwest is partial to Keynsian economics and is probably more like a European "social democrat." I call myself a "New Deal Democrat," though few Americans in these days know or care what that might be.

2) On a U.S. discussion board, this conversation would probably not be happening. Few of my compatriots -- even those with a university education -- seem to have the level of knowledge and interest about British politics that you in the UK have about the US.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

Well, to be fair, the relative power and influence of the UK and US being what they are, it's only to be expected that we'd know more about your politics than you would about ours, because yours affect us but not, I suspect, vice versa.

Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :

Shire Dweller wrote:

quote:
He was a brilliant intellectual who mastered many languages

Heh. In fact, I encountered Powell's name for the first time ever in this...

quote:
and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

[ 14. November 2012, 22:43: Message edited by: Stetson ]

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The Tories have always supported the monarchy. It's just that they started out disagreeing with the Whigs about who the monarchy actually was.

quote:
God bless the King! (I mean our faith's defender!)
God bless! (No harm in blessing) the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King,
God bless us all! That's quite another thing!
John Byrom

Yes, I'm quite aware of the divisions produced by 1688/9 and 1714, though it is interesting that even as rabid a Tory as Doctor Johnson came around to George III.

I seem to recall the "German" jibe (which might have been referring to Victoria rather than George I) from somewhere in Evelyn Waugh, but can't place it.

If it was in Waugh, it might well have been prompted not by ultra-Toryism, but by the residual Jacobitism of reactionary Catholics who had never forgotten the two Suspenders, or even G.K. Chesterton's favouring of Latin over Teutonic "races".

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