What we can learn from the Red Tories

Daniel Larison writes:

Even if one holds that “Red Toryism” is itself incoherent and leads to adopting a grab-bag of policies, the genuine Red Tory concern for the adverse effects of state capitalism on society is important and absolutely necessary right now. Such a view is rarely tolerated in Republican circles, unless it is harnessed to another centralist initiative, and it is never seriously adopted by party leadership. What is most striking is the degree to which so-called “Red” Tories are far more supportive of the decentralization of power and wealth than their ostensibly more right-wing Republican counterparts.

I tend to agree, even if I have come to the conclusion that Phillip Blond’s theories are right in principle and wrong in policy. It’s easier to fix that than it is the reverse. The twin focus on a more morally centered politics and one which is decentralized and communitarian is far better than the hyper-individualistic social conservatism of contemporary American politicking.

America is fast becoming all at once a much more centralized nation – politically, culturally, economically – and one that is far more atomized both structurally and socially. This odd dichotomy is the perfect soil for snake-oil salesmen, whether they’re politicians, pushers, or preachers. We are no self-reliant creatures, after all, however much we value our ‘individualism’ or our autonomy. The less we learn how to rely upon one another, the more we find ourselves relying upon the state, or upon the radical promises of this or that movement or product or what have you.

Two things to preface all of this with:

First off, I don’t want to come across as alarmist or as one of those old cranks bemoaning modern times and harking back to the good ol’ days. I’m fine with modern times, though I think we could take a little from the past and incorporate it into our modern epoch. For instance, we could do away with all this nonsensical nutritionist voodoo and go back to eating sensibly. We could do with a good deal fewer self-help books, and a major decline in the population of self-appointed gurus and experts, and instead look to our elders and the common sense wisdom which fueled much of how we parented and lived prior to the rise of corporatized self-help (a symptom, I might add, of cultural hegemony or centralization – Americana being replaced with cookie-cutter ‘American culture’). We could start building our towns in ways which kept us closer to one another, to our places of business, and didn’t rely so much on cheap gasoline.

Second, I don’t want to sound as though I’m being an alarmist. I’m anti-alarmism. The world is neither ending nor in some irreversible decline. We may have made some foolish choices, or perhaps we’ve just been born into a world comprised of various degrees of foolish choices, but we’re hardly worse for wear than any of our predecessors. We could do better naturally, and that’s the point of this sort of piece or of espousing decentralization or localism or ‘new’ urbanism or what have you.

In a culture which preaches the empty promise of self-reliance on so many levels – politically, economically, spiritually, socially, culturally – is it any wonder we turn to politicians or self-help writers to scrape together some semblance of wisdom? If there is one thing we should take from the Red Tories, it’s their focus on decentralized, more communitarian society. Leaving aside Blond’s rather dubious economic prescriptions (which would be too statist even for many American liberals) I think we can garner something valuable and good from Blond’s vision of a radically different society.