Why populists are inevitable but flawed
A crucial fault-line explains why conservatives are failing to defend the west
A fascinating book published last year helps explain why, in the face of the overwhelming attack on western values by the left, western conservatism is so fractured that it cannot adequately respond.
In A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, Matthew Rose argues that various right-wing thinkers now much in vogue in certain supposedly conservative circles — but which might more appropriately be called the radical right — disdain Judeo-Christianity and socially conservative values, situating virtue instead in the bonds of nation and land.
Yet the Biblical values of universal human dignity, the consent of the governed and constraints on power are fundamental to the democratic and truly liberal nation-state.
These are strongly argued in the Hebrew Bible, where such ideas were revolutionary for their time. They are well known to religiously well-educated Jews, but are rarely alluded to in contemporary western culture's degraded wider discourse and instead are often disdained, whether from profound ignorance, anti-Jewish prejudice or animus against all religion.
Yet they were part of the reason that Davidic rule in ancient Israel — the first known example of a limited monarchy with a deliberate diffusion of powers and under the rule of law grounded in the consent of the people — was the template for the British Crown, was much admired by Puritan thinkers and was also an important influence over America’s founding fathers.
The centrist position is therefore to support the western nation and its Biblically-grounded values. Yet this not understood by many conservatives, for whom this should be their cause of causes in the defence of the west.
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