For the 20th-century Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis, conservatism was a purely historical phenomenon. A Marxist from a distinguished military family, he was lauded as “one of the great conservative thinkers of our age” by the paleo-conservative, Paul Gottfried. Kondylis came to the conclusion that conservatism is not, as its adherents claim, an eternal intellectual or moral tendency, but a specific phase like the Reformation or the Enlightenment, representing the unsuccessful defence of the power of the landed aristocracy against the rising challenge of bourgeois industrialists.
As such, Kondylis wrote, it was already dead: for “outside this social and intellectual historical framework, conservatism can only be referred to metaphorically or with polemical or apologetic intent”, or indeed as “the epitaph of a process that has already (essentially) run its course”. With the 19th-century victory of bourgeois liberalism — and its replacement, in turn, by “mass democracy”, of which both fascism and Soviet Communism were extremist sub-categories — conservatism was left a meaningless husk, a rhetorical flourish to distinguish one form of liberalism from its electoral rivals through the mere narcissism of small differences.
Kondylis died in 1998, and therefore only partly witnessed the total intellectual collapse of Britain’s Conservative Party as a vehicle for Right-wing politics. Yet had he survived to observe the last flailing days of Europe’s oldest political party, still squatting in office to no discernible purpose, even he would surely have been shocked at the vacuousness and self-defeating liberalism of the faction which in Britain bears conservatism’s name. We can only hope that the party’s coming crushing electoral defeat will herald not only its ejection from power but its total dissolution: for even at the modest task which Kondylis assigns conservatism, the temporary preservation of yesterday’s liberalism, the Tories are abject failures.
Last week’s redefinition of political extremism by Michael Gove, the party’s sole intellectual and most competent administrator, is a case in point. While the 2011 definition brought in by Cameron’s government was unnecessary and objectionable in itself, its notional appeal to “fundamental British values” could at least have served conservative ends if applied by a competent Right-wing government. Yet Gove’s redefinition strips out even that one marginal good, declaring that extremism is “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance”.
Leaving aside the question of political violence, which the law already adequately proscribes, it is not difficult to foresee how the technocratic liberal managerialism of the coming Starmer administration will interpret its vague definition of “intolerance”, defined as “creating a permissive environment” to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”. Like the 2011 Prevent definition, its 2024 replacement is a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived Islamist threat that, through moral cowardice at defining its opponent clearly, will instead disproportionately fall upon the political Right. That the liberal Left’s initial reactions to Gove’s tinkering centred on whether the party’s donors could be defined as extremists, or whether Gove’s chosen reading material defined him as one himself, highlights the inevitable direction of travel.
In an attempt to make short-lived political capital at the disquiet over recent pro-Palestine protests, Gove has created a powerful weapon against the Right. Just as Blair’s Human Rights Act enshrined progressivism into the state’s essence, the new definition will shrink conservatism’s space for querying or opposing the most sweeping progressive innovations. It is of a piece with the Online Safety Act, a hurried piece of legislation brought in as a response to a Conservative MP’s murder by a jihadist, which instead functions as a muzzle on “harmful” Right-wing discourse. None of the alleged “culture war” dividing lines on which the Conservatives have rhetorically sought to distinguish themselves from Labour — on mass immigration, the ECHR, gender politics or progressive activist judges and civil servants — will survive the expansive interpretations of “the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” that will surely follow. If the Conservative Party is to be judged on its actions, and not on its rhetoric, it is not a vehicle for the implementation of Right-wing politics but for its suppression. In its last days in the Westminster bunker, the Conservative Party has chosen suicide as its final act.
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