THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Understanding national conservatism

Understanding national conservatism

National conservatism sounds suspicuously like Trumpism, particularly on trade issues. "Free trade" has always sounded good to conservatives but Trump showed that it should not be an all-powerful consideration.

And Trump was not really being unorthoox in his trade restrictions. Economists have always recognized exceptions to the desirabiity of free trade: "Infant industry" and the "Australian" cases for instance. And the "supply-chain" difficulties presently besetting trade rather vindicate that

The Economist, the British magazine well-known for its particular metropolitan liberal worldview, had a pearl-clutching cover piece last week where it bemoaned ‘the growing peril of national conservatism’.

‘It’s dangerous and it’s spreading,’ the editorial warned its readers – making it sound like some new Covid variant.

What exactly is national conservatism?

Australians could be forgiven for being a little in the dark, for while there have been national conservative conferences in Washington DC and Florida in America, and in London, Brussels, and Rome in Europe, there has been nothing similar so far here. There are no mainstream Australian journalists who describe themselves using that label. Nor, unlike elsewhere, are there leading politicians or any groupings in any of our mainstream parties who march under that banner. I have found it a struggle to get those involved in the think tank world and in centre-right politics in Australia to even understand the concept properly.

The Economist labelled national conservatives as those ‘seized by declinism’, ‘the politics of grievance’, and those who see the ‘state as its saviour’. But that is unfair and does not do this intellectual movement justice. National conservatives have a deep philosophical critique of the assumptions held by policymakers in the capitals of the West. As some of the leading intellectuals of the movement, like Yoram Hazony, have explored in great depth, they are critical of aspects of classical liberalism and the dominant worldview which over-emphasises the sovereign individual, rather than the family, the nation, and our religious traditions as the source of our prosperity and freedoms. They believe the focus in centre-right circles has, in recent years, gone awry. In the words of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, it is time to ‘put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity’.

Perhaps the most obvious areas where national conservatives differ from the current centre-right are in relation to immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

First and foremost, national conservatives reject the long-standing consensus on immigration. They believe that mass immigration perhaps poses more of an existential threat to the West than Soviet missiles ever did. Nations like Poland and Hungary recovered from years of communist domination. But it is far less clear whether parts of Western Europe and elsewhere will survive the ethnic conflicts and other threats to social cohesion that have been carelessly imported into their homelands. This is not simply about ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘building the wall’ – although many Western governments struggle to do even that. It is emphatically also about legal immigration. There needs to be a reassessment from first principles as to what level and what type of immigration, if any, makes sense for Western nations and our peoples going forward. In the Howard era, there was an oft-repeated line that because the government was able to control illegal immigration Australians welcomed higher levels of legal immigration. If that was ever actually true, it is not true now.

National conservatives also recognise that the trade and investment policies of the West need a serious rethink. They reject the idea that the end goal, beau ideal, should be open borders trade and investment between nations, without regard to their differing economic, social, or political circumstances. To be clear, this means large numbers of Australia’s existing trade and investment agreements, including but not limited to, the one we signed with China, will need to be torn up or at the very least significantly redesigned. Our trade and investment policies have created boom towns in places like Shenzhen and Bangalore and rust belts in places like Stockbridge, Elizabeth, and Youngstown. They have gutted our national industrial capacity and destroyed communities. They have turned us into exquisite connoisseurs of imported goods, rather than producers of anything other than primary produce or overpriced housing to sell to foreigners. The idea, so beloved by The Economist, that it should be as easy to import manufactured goods from China to Australia as it is to import the same from England to France needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history.

National conservatives also believe that our foreign policy needs to change. The reckless evangelicalism that has characterised Western military adventures for well over the last quarter century needs to stop. What is needed is a new prudence that is focused instead on our vital interests (narrowly defined) and which is far more selective about the conflicts we allow ourselves to be dragged into. Large numbers of our people are simply sick to the back teeth of endless and pointless wars in places like Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. These are places that they do not really care that much about, but which they or their children have been expected to die for. These interventions always seem to follow a similar storyline: some bad guy is the ‘next Hitler’, a particular incident is the ‘new Munich’. Unless we get involved and offer unlimited economic or military support, we are Neville Chamberlain-like appeasers. Certain politicians then get to globe-trot around the globe pretending they are the next Winston Churchill. Inevitably what then follows, many years later, is a loss of blood, treasure, and national prestige, the destabilising of entire regions and a flood of refugees, and all manner of second-order unintended consequences. In nearly all cases these are not grand ideological struggles, but messy intractable ethnic disputes where there are no pure actors on either side.

There are other areas of policy where national conservatives have new and constructive things to say, including on social policy – where a reconstitution of family structures and traditional ways of life is going to be as important as the reconstruction of our national borders and identity. But if there is one theme that unites this movement, it is that they are anti-Utopian. The left was in the past the utopian ones, the ones who liked to ‘imagine there is no countries’. But since the great victory in the Cold War the centre-right has also become increasingly un-moored from reality. It has ignored the importance of the nation-state when it comes to trade, immigration and foreign policy and many other issues. All national conservatives are asking is that we get real again.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/understanding-national-conservatism/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Understanding national conservatism

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