This short piece from arch-Radical Orthodoxist John Milbank has generated a bit of buzz in the theologican blogosphere. Milbank seems to be calling for a socially conservative/economically leftist (or perhaps agrarian/distributist is a better description) “Red Toryism” to combat the hegemony of what he deems a failed neoliberalism (i.e. social liberalism plus relatively unregulated corporate capitalism or what Europeans call liberalism and Americans know as conservatism):
Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters – the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science – it is on the side of “progress”.
Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.
An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.
On the one hand, the article Milbank is responding to is virtually a shrill parody of go-go liberalism that allows for absolutely no limits on exploiting human embryos for scientific and medical purposes, and sees the dark specter of theocracy (especially Catholic) in any opposition to unbridled Brave New Worldism. Her article reads like a mirror version of some conservative writing you get over here: forget about war, poverty, the criminal justice system, etc. – it’s all about abortion!
Still, Milbank’s “new sort of politics” strikes some odd notes. For instance, what is he referring to by “hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites”? Sounds a bit like “traditional values” boilerplate we get a lot of from Bill Bennett types. Moreover, and granting that what I don’t know about British politics could fill a library, who is the constituency supposed to be for this rather odd amalgam of religious traditionalism, culutral elitism, and economic egalitarianism?
I actually see some kind of social conservatism/economic liberalism combination having more promise here, but that’s partly because our version of social conservatism tends to be much more populist (see: Huckabee, Mike) and thus has a natural constituency. By contrast, an elitist, aristocratic conservatism combined with economic anti-capitalism has usually been the preserve of intellectuals (Coleridge comes to mind) and often seems to involve a rather dreamy picture of sturdy traditionalist yeoman farmers and artisans happily tending their fields and workshops. Appealing as that is in some ways, it’s hard to see it gathering much of a following on either side of the Atlantic.
For what it’s worth, the one really interesting recent example of genuine Red Toryism that I can think of is the Canadian philosopher George Grant, who was a Christian Platonist, an economic egalitarian, a sometimes-anarchist, a staunch opponent of war and empire, and a Jacques Ellul-style technophobe. But again, not exactly the basis for a mass political movement. The American political thinker Christopher Lasch also has some affinities with this outlook. While I think both can make valuable contributions to a sound political perspective (especially when it comes to criticizing the excesses of liberalism), I’m not convinced they can provide the whole package.
A Thinking Reed 