Tories by Chance

In James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the following comment is attributed to Johnson: “He would not allow Mr David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, ‘Sir, he was a Tory by chance’.” Boswell elsewhere records Johnson as having said, “Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance, as being a Scotchman; but not on a principle of duty, for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist.”

Johnson dismissed Hume’s brand of Toryism far too swiftly and glibly. I say that not just because I myself am something of a “Tory by chance”, but also because that brand has a great deal of staying power. Any sketching out of such a version of conservatism would start by explicitly emphasising that it will not rely on, indeed it will reject, any religious foundations. This is part of why Johnson scorned Hume’s political principles, of course. Hume was an atheist, perhaps the best-known one of his day. Long before Richard Dawkins wrote about God and delusions Hume had written a masterpiece, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which exposed the feebleness of one of the main, and long-standing, props or supports for theism, namely “the argument from design”. Hume demolishes this support, and does so a century before Darwin provided the theoretical tools needed to think about how minuscule changes over enormous periods of time can produce effects that seem to have been the product of deliberate design.

The point is that a modern-day “Tory by chance” conservatism, like Hume’s, is not dependent upon there in fact being a theistic Christian (or, indeed, any sort of theistic) God. Whether any such God exists is, of course, a question of fact, not of one’s preferences or druthers. I, myself, just don’t believe it. The facts point against it in my view. I seem not to have a religious bone in my body.

That said, I have read the King James Bible cover to cover. I did that during the back-and-forth commuting to work the year I was articling in Toronto at the start of my legal career. In parts that reading was magnificent—Ecclesiastes and Job in the Old Testament spring to mind. And as an aside, if you ever want to ensure that you have plenty of room to yourself on a train or subway, take it from me that nothing gets people to clear away from you as if you’ve got the plague more than pulling out the Bible and starting to read!

An outline of Tory-by-chance conservatism would go on to note that this strand of right-of-centre politics values what we have, the established order, not because it meshes with some utopian blueprint or with the plans and designs of those deemed society’s finest minds or most cultured commentators but simply because it is likely to be better than any alternative involving wholesale change—it is the least bad option going.

The main goal of this article, however, is not to flesh out and defend what some such “Tory by chance” variant of conservatism might look like. Instead, the goal is to adopt just that vantage of a Tory-by-chance conservative to consider some of the factors that will be involved in achieving success for the Tory side of politics in the main English-speaking democracies. These are the countries where the right-of-centre Tory parties have just recently won elections in Canada and New Zealand but lost in the United States. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom the prospects for the Tory side of politics at the next election in a year or two are good to very good. Only here in Australia are they notably less promising (at the Commonwealth level, I hasten to add, not at the state level).

As I have already hinted, there are two things that lie at the heart of this Humean Tory-by-chance conservative vantage. One is that we should be cautious of throwing away what we have. Hume was sceptical of the motivating power of reason. Morality, and moral evaluations, argued Hume, were a function of human sentiment and feeling. Reason is inert. That means that the social institutions that have grown up slowly over time ought seldom to be jettisoned in favour of some grand scheme that reason suggests may work better. Experience shows that is rarely the case.

Second, even for those, like me, who don’t believe that a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God actually exists, it in no way follows that Christian traditions and values aren’t on balance a force for good in society. Whether such traditions are, or are not, is a question quite distinct from whether the factual claims made as to the existence of such a God are true or false.

Making that sort of distinction, implicitly or explicitly, can make the Samuel Johnsons of the world think you have no principles. But that is only the case, if at all, if they are correct on the question of fact about God’s existence.

That vantage, and those outlooks, may constitute a rather roundabout or unusual perspective from which to consider two of the crucial issues facing conservative political parties in the developed English-speaking world. But bear with me. Both sides of politics are “big tent” or broad-church groupings. That is as true of the conservative movement as of its left-of-centre opponent. How to keep that conservative movement electorally competitive, and better still successful, is highly debatable. I think the Tory-by-chance conservative is in a position to offer an interesting perspective on that question.

The two issues to which I am referring are these. There is the issue of how to reconcile the interest of social conservatives and of economic conservatives. And there is the issue, a separate issue in my view, of how to balance the demands of tradition and the need for reform.

To have a plausible prospect of winning elections, Tory parties need to strike some sort of working arrangement or modus operandi between (1) people who favour limited government, are fiscally conservative, and are rather laissez-faire or live-and-let-live tolerant on sexual and personal responsibility issues on the one hand and (2) people who are socially conservative, not least on issues related to personal responsibility such as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia and the centrality of the family, on the other hand. For the sake of convenience we can call these the economic conservative and social conservative wings of any Tory party. And obviously some individuals will be both—they will hold views broadly in line with those of both wings. In addition, some issues will fall outside the core concerns of each wing but will tend to garner the overwhelming support of those in both wings—opposition to political correctness springs to mind, as does pushing for a return to teaching basics in schools and for jettisoning from them as much postmodernist, “everything is implicitly as good as everything else” cultural relativism as possible. Support for independent schools, though for starkly different reasons, may be another such issue.

Still, however much there will be easy cases where both wings of a Tory party will tend to have their views align, there will be others where the two wings take opposite positions. Deregulating labour relations, protectionism, gay marriage, lowering taxes across the board and gun controls may be examples of issues where the views of those in the two wings tend to be opposed. Call any such instances hard cases.

One key issue for Tory parties, then, is to reach some sort of working arrangement on enough of these hard cases to keep the support of both these wings.

How to balance the demands of tradition and the need for reform is a separate, though overlapping issue. No political party can win elections on a platform of zero change. As I have indicated, Hume thought the inherited practices and customs of society were not to be jettisoned lightly. This was not because they could pass some reason-based test of what is best or perfect or near perfect. It was because they were the product of an evolved system that could be seen to work. And one toyed with what worked gingerly and not in haste.

Notice that this was not a plea for no change at all. It was a plea to reform in a piecemeal fashion and never on the basis of some utopian blueprint. Fiddling and tinkering and trial-and-error are the Humean way to go when it comes to reform, possibly with an eye on what appears to work elsewhere.

Again, any broad-church Tory party is going to have a rough-and-ready divide between traditionalists (understood as those who want to proceed with change on the slowest of bases) and reformists (understood as those who are much keener on updating and changing social and other practices). These two camps do not necessarily map in any one-to-one fashion onto the social conservative and economic conservative wings, though we would expect economic conservatives generally to fall more on the reformist end of the spectrum.

Non-Tory parties of the Left—and we are obviously dealing in fairly sweeping generalisations now—tend to cater more to identity politics. This group or that group just needs to get their people into government, goes the thinking, and some or all of their grievances can be redressed. In that sense politics for those on the Left is less limited in its aims. It is more agenda-driven. It is more inclined to discount personal responsibility in favour of abstract cultural and social forces, and to favour an ongoing extension of rights only reluctantly limited by an unfortunate scarcity of resources. It is more susceptible to thinking government can go some way to creating heaven on earth. And that being the case, there is less of a sense of humour amongst those on the Left—with the notable exception of union leaders (or rather union leaders from the private sector) who are immune to all the politically correct guff and who may have the best senses of humour of all.

That is something of a digression, however, as this is meant to be about Tory parties. And my rather obvious claim thus far is that such parties cannot win elections without both social conservatives and economic conservatives and without both traditionalists and reformers.

In the United States, and possibly also in Canada and the United Kingdom, I suspect that the social conservatives will form the bigger block of those who actually vote for the Tory party. Australia is probably the same, though here we have compulsory voting. And that raises the question of what drives the voting choice of those Australians who vote Tory but who would not vote at all in a non-compulsory system like those in Canada, the USA and the UK. Is it social or economic issues?

Of course any attempted diagnosis of what right-of-centre Tory political parties need to do to win elections must always start with an explicit acknowledgment that people simply disagree about what the wisest course of action is when it comes to politics, and morality too. And by that I mean smart, reasonable, well-informed and nice people, people you’d be happy to have a beer with, just disagree across the whole spectrum of contentious issues—immigration, a republic, the value of multilateralism, gay marriage, how to structure labour relations, what to do about the appalling social statistics of Aborigines, and on and on and on. It is virtually never the case that people who disagree with you are wicked, stupid or in need of re-education (though it does seem to me in an anecdotal and highly generalised sense that those on the political Left are more prone to lapse into such a Manichean worldview). And if that is true across the whole political spectrum it is just as true within a political party grouping.

The point here is that within any Tory party there just will be some issues over which the social conservatives differ from the economic conservatives, and the reformists from the traditionalists. Here, too, these differences of opinion cannot be put down to the foibles, mental weaknesses or moral failings of those who happen to hold differing viewpoints.

Humean “Tory by chance” voters are well placed to see both sides of these intra-party disputes, and perhaps to push for positions or compromises both sides can wear. Tories-by-chance think that what we have should not be discarded lightly. They are not utopians and have no desire to implement schemes that claim some “rational” genealogy. What matters for them are likely future consequences. Given human nature, those aimed-for future good consequences will far more often be realised by inching, gradual reform than by starry-eyed, abrupt overhauls to the status quo, whether that overhaul be in the name of “social justice”, “fairness” or anything else. So Tories-by-chance understand the appeal of the status quo, and more so still when even the most cursory glance at arrangements around the world shows one to be lucky enough to be living in just about the most successful system going. (That goes for Australia’s constitutional arrangements too, as an aside.)

Similarly, given the focus the Tory-by-chance outlook puts onto likely future consequences, the appeal of free markets is also plain. Such institutions can be seen, based on experience, to be by far the best system yet developed for allocating resources—far, far better at it than teams of highly intelligent civil servants or even than the advice that would be offered by those attending one of Mr Rudd’s 2020 Summits. Humeans would understand what is described as the free market as the least-bad way of pricing scarce resources; they would see it as a powerful tool for delivering beneficial material outcomes—not as some pseudo-mystical good that, along with, say, property rights, had some claim on us independent of the consequences it generated.

In this sense Tories-by-chance can also easily identify with economic conservatives. They can see the implausibility in claims the managerial class regularly makes to being able to “outsmart the market”; they can see, at the same time, that this market-based way of allocating resources will create winners and losers and hence dissatisfaction amongst some of the latter and amongst others who think a central plan of some sort could do better; and they can favour policies that help the losers, not through protectionism and tariffs and “picking industrial winners” but through safety nets, emphases on education, and more effective corporate regulation; they can even note that consumers almost always fare better under a least-bad market arrangement than under more left-wing planned or bureaucratic alternatives.

In addition, Tories-by-chance may possibly be better placed than other economic conservatives to point out to other Tories that government spending just about never goes down in any of the countries I’ve mentioned. Even conservative governments increase spending, though usually at a slightly slower rate. In the United States federal spending (in 2007 inflation-adjusted dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. And those increases are pretty much uninterrupted and linear ones across those four decades—up, up, up and up, whichever party is governing. Against a backdrop of governments that grow and grow, one could be forgiven for thinking few voters really want slimmed-down, limited government. The middle classes appear to enjoy all the middle-class welfare and tax churning that goes on.

That means that if economic conservatives are ever going to reverse this trend they will need the votes of social conservatives. And it is implausible in the extreme to think those votes will be forthcoming without reciprocal support on issues important to social conservatives.

One concern for any Tory party led by a politician in the mould of Malcolm Turnbull, a politician representing one of the wealthiest and most socially liberal constituencies in the country, is that it will struggle to keep the traditionalist and social conservatives on board. This is the more so the more Mr Rudd and the centre-Left party can plausibly maintain the image of being some sort of socially conservative option itself. Yes, it is possible for Tory parties to win elections on economic platforms alone. But this almost always involves garnering the support of the social conservatives too.

Related to this concern is the drift of those who are in the credentialled classes towards voting for the left-wing alternative. Certainly in the USA there appears to be a trend for ever more of those who have done well at school and university, and who treat IQ as the best gauge of leadership and decision-making abilities and just about every other desirable trait going for that matter, to vote Democrat. That trend may be less visible here in Australia and in the UK, Canada and New Zealand—but only marginally so. For any Tory party ignoring or downplaying its traditionalist and social conservative wings, that trend signals a looming problem.

Finally there is the question of the extent to which the larger world is seen in Hobbesian terms—as a potentially dangerous place in which one needs to be prepared to defend oneself. Humean Tories-by-chance, as Johnson himself made clear, are more inclined to this “balance of power”, Hobbesian worldview than to one which sees multilateralism and multinationalism and any other “multi” or UN-sponsored organisation as reliable protectors of freedom and prosperity. Many, though by no means all, left-wing politicians are not Hobbesians in this sense. They are “multis”. Former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand is an obvious example.

I think it was true in the past that most economic conservatives could be relied upon to be Hobbesians. These days, I’m not so sure.

My claim in this short article is not that the future of right-of-centre political parties lies with Tories-by-chance. However attractive that might be to me personally, it’s clearly not true. What is true is that the success of Tory parties depends on some sort of modus operandi between economic conservatives and social ones, and between reformers and traditionalists. In a world where political and moral disagreement is inevitable, including within political parties, it strikes me that Tories-by-chance are in a good position to help forge these compromises that Anglo-American Tory parties need to reach to succeed, or at least to see both sides and help broker the differences.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.