My problem with social conservatives
Relentless moaning and whingeing limits their attractiveness
For me, perhaps the only positive change in our political firmament over the past decade or so has been the emergence and consolidation of a tendency variously called “post-liberal”, “communitarian” and ‘social (or small “c”) conservative’.
In Britain it originally gathered around a couple of loose groupings, Philip Blond’s ‘Red Tory’ and Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’, in the early 2010s. There was genuine intellectual energy to it, gathering around neglected ideas of community, solidarity, family, the nation (generally the United Kingdom, but also England), while rejecting the excesses of progressivism and especially progressive identity politics.
Some of its champions like Blond, Glasman and David Goodhart, even myself here and there, have received a hearing at the top level of politics. However the weakness of this tendency, this ‘moment’, has always been political, in its lack of enduring presence in the halls of power. It’s always been an outsider’s movement, something for intellectual types, relatively new and interesting to chat about but then dismiss or forget when the time comes for weighing up political interests.
As I said at the top however, this tendency has consolidated itself over time. It now has a few institutions which press its instincts like the website Unherd and the new incarnation of the Social Democratic Party. It has a small following in the Conservative Party, based around new ‘Red Wall’ representatives like Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen.
In the mid-2010s I was dreaming that it might develop a language, a set of articulations and arguments with which it could progress in political life. This has now come to pass.
However, I have started to find it increasingly unattractive. Why?
I think some of the reasons are personal, related to my own contrarianism and role as a writer. The current stage of consolidation involves a hell of a lot of repetition of things that are now old hat for me, not least on the idiocies and dangers of progressive identity politics. The ideas are so familiar now that I often struggle to read them from others. This can make me a bad colleague.