Red Toryism: The Completely Unknown Foreign Political Tendency You Didn’t Know Mattered!

I always feel like a thoroughgoing mark for citing or linking to Andrew Sullivan’s blog; if the thing became even slightly more popular, it could crash the entire Internet. That, of course, would end the Iranian revolution, cut the collegiate porn supply and provoke a huge surge in USA Today readership—thus unravelling civilization as we know it. Still, sometimes I have to live dangerously. I found this post, largely cribbed from the late Henry Fairlie, particularly interesting, especially this succinct money quote:

The King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists, is the motto of the Tory. 

The vast difference between the British and American conservative traditions fascinates me. I even tried to write about a sterling piece of evidence of that gulf, the re-emerging “Red Tory” tradition, for Good not long ago. My less-than-fully-educated take is that it is possible to be both a Conservative and a Radical—that while free-market strands of ideology may dominate modern Conservatism, there are also very different tendencies embedded within the British movement. Even David Cameron, the current Tory leader and probable next prime minister, makes the odd Red Tory noise about protecting communities from the destructive power of the unfettered market. As I argued in Good, it might be something for the Republicans to look into.