O conservadorismo britânico vai continuar existindo no século 21?

Can conservatism survive the 21st century? é o tema desse interessante debate realizado em 2011 que reuniu Steve Davies (diretor do Institute of Economic Affairs e autor do The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought), Greg Lindsay (fundador e diretor-executivo do Centre for Independent Studies), Tim Montgomerie (editor do ConservativeHome), Kieron O’Hara (pesquisador da Universidade de Southampton e author de Conservatism) e James Panton (professor).
As pertinentes questões apresentadas nas intervenções podem continuar alimentando as discussões sobre o pensamento conservador britânico, a defesa de seus princípios e valores e a sua aplicação política:

Conservatism can be defined as belief in traditional social values, the nation and a natural order of things. Typically, though, this has been qualified by an awareness of, as Edmund Burke put it, the occasional need ‘to change in order to conserve’. This pragmatic approach was a reaction to the French Revolution in 1789, strengthened further by the Russian Revolution in 1917. It has often led to tensions within conservative thought, however, such as an enduring ambivalence about the desirability of free markets. Nonetheless, the defence of the existing order and traditional institutions was the driving mission of conservatism in the West, and made the Britain’s Tories ‘the natural party of government’ for much of the 20th century. Today, however, many conservatives feel uneasy with both the market and traditional morals. A belief in the organic society, deference and authority has been replaced by the managerial society, inclusion and relativism. The old insistence on traditional family values has given way to support for civil partnerships and gay couples adopting. A Thatcherite championing of the free market, prosperity and growth has been replaced by green restraint, austerity and measuring ‘happiness’ rather than GDP. 

For many liberals and radicals, the marginalisation of conservative values in mainstream politics is to be welcomed, as Britain finally becomes a progressive and inclusive society. But are they kidding themselves? If conservatism was so despised, why was it so successful for so long? Has something more fundamental to politics and society been lost with the demise of conservatism? And are today’s new establishment values really any more more progressive than old conservatism?

E aqui uma lista de leituras recomendada no próprio site:

- The Future of Conservatism: values revisited
- The birth of the non-political party
- I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right
- The death of the Tory Party is announced at Glasto
- The Conservative right wing squares up to fight for the party's soul
- Cameronism: a wholly new conservatism
- The strange death of Tory England

"Como era gostoso o meu Obama"

A esquerda americana foi tão eficiente na apropriação do termo liberal que convenceu analistas políticos profissionais e amadores no Brasil e em vários outros países. A falta de rigor no uso de palavras, termos, conceitos e expressões não é artigo raro na imprensa nativa e é um tanto pior, mas de forma alguma surpreendente, quando se trata de profissionais na linha de comando das redações a cometer tais equívocos.

Na Folha de hoje, Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, que já foi editor do jornal e é doutor e livre-docente em comunicação pela Universidade de São Paulo, faz uma defesa um tanto constrangedora do governo Obama diante das revelações escandalosas das gravações de jornalistas e editores da Associated Press e do, digamos, tratamento diferenciado dado pelo IRS (a Receita Federal americana) a indivíduos e grupos ligados aos conservadores e Tea Party.

A começar pelo título (Ato seria normal para Nixon, mas choca no caso de Obama), a análise (sic) é tão pró-Obama que até o que poderia ser tido como uma crítica ("a decepção dos que esperavam ver em Obama um agente de mudança") é, na verdade, a ratificação de uma defesa.

O ponto alto do texto é o seguinte trecho:

A notícia de que o Departamento de Justiça monitorou ligações de jornalistas não seria surpreendente no governo Bush ou Nixon, mas é impressionante na administração presidida por um liberal professor de Direito.

Não seria surpreendente no governo Bush ou Nixon porque do Partido Republicano ou pelo que efetivamente fizeram durante os respectivos mandatos?

E onde se lê "administração presidida por um liberal professor de Direito", leia-se "administração presidida por um esquerdista professor de Direito Constitucional".

Considerando as violações à Constituição Americana expostas nos casos em evidência é de se questionar se se trata de um agravante o fato de Obama ter sido professor de Direito Constitucional ou de questionar a qualidade das aulas ministradas por ele aos alunos da Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Chicago entre 1992 e 2004.

PS: O título do post é uma referência ao nome do tenebroso filme dirigido por Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

A traição dos tories

No jornal The Guardian, Roger Scruton ratifica a crítica feita em 1981 no livro The Meaning of Conservatism (cuja tradução será publicada em breve pela É Realizações com um prefácio de minha autoria) contra os políticos conservadores que traíram os valores conservadores:

Identity, family, marriage: our core conservative values have been betrayed 

Tory leaders have forgotten what Edmund Burke understood: true conservatives are driven by more than economics 

Roger Scruton 

As the Conservatives strive to heal the divisions in their party it must surely have occurred to them to wonder what the word "conservative" really means, and why it has had, for so many British people over the past 200 years, such a positive resonance. The important lesson of the local elections is not that the party is losing appeal for marginal groups and floating voters – to whom it never appeals for long in any case. The important lesson is that the party has jeopardised the allegiance of its core constituents, those who willingly describe themselves as conservatives, and live according to the unspoken norms of a shared way of life. 

Such people are not all middle class, not all prosperous, not all brought up to think that economics is the only thing that matters. When politicians address them with questions such as "How do we repair the economy?", "How do we reform our educational system?", "How do we ensure a fair deal for pensioners?", there is one word in all such questions that stands out for them, and that word is "we". Who are we, what holds us together, and how do we stay together so as to bear our burdens as a community? For conservatism is about national identity. It is only in the context of a first-person plural that the questions – economic questions included – make sense, or open themselves to democratic argument.
Such was the idea that Edmund Burke tried to spell out 200 years ago. Burke was a great writer, a profound thinker and a high-ranking political practitioner, with a keen sense both of the damage done by the wrong ideas, and the real need for the right ones. Political wisdom, Burke argued, is not contained in a single head. It does not reside in the plans and schemes of the political class, and can never be reduced to a system. It resides in the social organism as a whole, in the myriad small compromises, in the local negotiations and trusts, through which people adjust to the presence of their neighbours and co-operate in safeguarding what they share. People must be free to associate, to form "little platoons", to dispose of their labour, their property and their affections, according to their own desires and needs. 

But no freedom is absolute, and all must be qualified for the common good. Until subject to a rule of law, freedom is merely "the dust and powder of individuality". But a rule of law requires a shared allegiance, by which people entrust their collective destiny to sovereign institutions that can speak and decide in their name. This shared allegiance is not, as Rousseau and others argued, a contract among the living. It is a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead – a continuous trust that no generation can pillage for its own advantage. 

It is with a great sigh of relief that I read those ideas, delicately expounded by Jesse Norman in his recent biography of Edmund Burke. For Norman is a rising starin parliament, and inspires the hope that the Tory party might be waking up to the need for a believable philosophy if it is not to lose its real following. 

Our situation today mirrors that faced by Burke. Now, as then, abstract ideas and utopian schemes threaten to displace practical wisdom from the political process. Instead of the common law of England we have the abstract idea of human rights, slapped upon us by European courts whose judges care nothing for our unique social fabric. Instead of our inherited freedoms we have laws forbidding "hate speech" and discrimination that can be used to control what we say and what we do in ever more intrusive ways. The primary institutions of civil society – marriage and the family – have no clear endorsement from our new political class. Most importantly, our parliament has, without consulting the people, handed over sovereignty to Europe, thereby losing control of our borders and our collective assets, the welfare state included. 

In its attempt to address the economic legacy of Labour's spendthrift policies and the widespread abuse of the welfare system the party has the full support of its traditional constituency. Nevertheless, it seems unaware that in the hearts of conservative voters, social continuity and national identity take precedence over all other issues. Only now, when wave after wave of immigrants seek the benefit of our hard-won assets and freedoms, do the people fully grasp what loss of sovereignty means. And still the party hesitates to reverse the policies that brought us to this pass, while the old guard of Europeanists defend those policies in economic terms, seemingly unaware that the question is not about economics at all. 

In other matters, too, it is not the economic cost that concerns the conservative voter but the nation and our attachment to it. Not understanding this, the government has embarked on a politically disastrous environmental programme. For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways. Conservative voters tend to believe that the "climate change" agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals. But the government has yet to agree with them, and meanwhile is prepared to sacrifice the landscape if that helps to keep the lobbyists quiet. 

Conservatives believe, with Burke, that the family is the core institution whereby societies reproduce themselves and pass moral knowledge to the young. The party has made a few passing nods in this direction, but its only coherent policy – sprung on the electorate without forewarning – is the introduction of gay marriage. Sure, there are arguments for and against this move. But for the ordinary voter the family is a place in which children are produced, socialised and protected. That is what the party should be saying, but does not say, since it is prepared to sacrifice the loyalty of its core constituents to the demands of a lobby that is unlikely to vote for it. 

Many readers of the Guardian will not worry that the Tories are alienating their core voters. But they will be interested by Jesse Norman's take on Burke, since it shows exactly how, and by what kind of thinking, those voters might be reclaimed. And with Norman's recent appointment to the policy advisory board of the party, the opposition will have to take his thinking seriously.

As conferências do H.L. Mencken Club

Já está disponível no site do imprescindível The Mencken Club os áudios da conferência realizada em 2012 (clique aqui para ouvir ou baixar na iTunes Store).

Recomendo especialmente as seguintes palestras:

- Was the Conservative Movement Destined to Go Bad? Part 1, with John Derbyshire

- Was the Conservative Movement Destined to Go Bad? Part 2, Response by Peter Brimelow

- Was the Conservative Movement Destined to Go Bad? Part 3 with Paul Gottfried.

- Was the Conservative Movement Destined to Go Bad? Part 4

- Rethinking the American Founding: America's founding was more complex than most people think.

- Rethinking the American Founding: American exceptionalism is a result of immigration

- Fascism and the Right: The Master Spirit Takes Charge

- Fascism and the Right: Fascism as a Counter-Revolutionary Imitation

- Fascism and the Right: The Authoritarian Right: An appreciation of Francisco Franco

- Revising Key Historical Turning Points: How Unique was American Slavery?

- The Student as Dachshund

Dentre os áudios da conferência realizada em 2011, recomendo as seguintes palestras:

- Paul Gottfried: Up From Liberalism?

- Jim Kalb: Liberal Values and the Seduction of the American Right

- Peter Brimelow: The WFB Myth

- Keith Preston: Carl Schmitt and the Nomos of the Earth

- E. Christian Kopff: Real Virtue - Lessons from the Ancients

- Henry Harpending: Missing the Genetic Link

- Thomas Bertonneau: Spengler and the Reaction to Democratic Equality

- Richard Spencer: The Other “Old Right” - The WASP Elite

Aristocracia, segundo T. S. Eliot

Carta do poeta T. S. Eliot ao editor do jornal inglês The Times:

Sir. 

The traditional use of the word [aristocracy] implies, I believe, an emphasis upon inheritance: not merely the inheritance of property, however important that may seem to some, but the inheritance, partly through biological trans­mission and partly through environment, of, other less tangible values. In other words, the unit of aristocracy, in the sense in which the word has been used in the past, is not the individual but the family. In the new sense of the word (and the phrase “the new aristo­cracy” is acquiring currency) inheritance is ignored, and the family implicitly depreciated. We are to have an aristocracy, not of families, but of individuals; and those individuals will have been turned into aristocrats, not by their parents, but by their schoolmasters, employing some system of selection to be elaborated. I suggest that this may be a more violent mutation of meaning than any word ought to be required to undergo. It will not do to appeal, behind the back of tradition, to the etymological sense of the word: for govern­ment by the best men is surely the aspiration of every society, whatever its social organiza­tion. I am, Sir, your obedient servant.

Sobre o tema, recomendo o livro A Aristocracia e os seus Críticos, do professor português Miguel Morgado (aqui, uma boa resenha da obra).