Paranoid seductions: Sir Roger Scruton and the rise of the hard right

Part 1: Genteel fanaticism

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From Jerusalem to Washington DC, whenever the far right threatens western democracy, its ideologues find support in the work of an apparently genteel English philosopher who presumed to place himself among Western civilisation’s foremost defenders.

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, and completes the job of dismantling the American republic, he will be defended by “national conservatives” inspired by that philosopher’s denunciations of a cosmopolitan left-wing elite.

Back in 2019, an unblushing Viktor Orbán toasted that same philosopher  as “a loyal friend of freedom,” at the very moment  when his corrupt and Putinesque regime was dismantling press  and academic freedom.

Across Europe, populist leaders quote the philosopher’s name as they damn the “cultural Marxists” who brainwash their young.  Our philosopher claimed to love his country. Yet he helped push England into needless decline by, in the words of the Brexiteer Michael Gove,  becoming “the preeminent intellectual supporter of our leaving the European Union” . 

As you should have gathered by now, the authoritarian right cannot get enough of the late Sir Roger Scruton. And if you want to take it on, you need to understand the darkness in his polite prose. For it is not hyperbolic to say that the legacy of a philosopher, who dedicated his life to defending Western culture, is misery in his native UK, subversion in the US, and brutalism in continental Europe.

The most self-deluding feature of English exceptionalism is the belief that extremism cannot happen here. Otherwise sane people maintain that you cannot possibly compare a well-spoken Cambridge-educated Tory, who enjoyed fine wine and high culture, with the brawling yobs who dominate less fortunate countries. Class and cultural prejudice mean that anyone who takes Scruton on must first clear away mountains of polite rubbish before they can state the obvious.

The usually astute English journalist Adrian Wooldridge said that Scruton should not be remembered solely as a courtier intellectual who bent the knee to Viktor Orbán. There was a time when he opposed rather than comforted East European autocrats. Scruton went to Czechoslovakia after the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring of 1968 to teach forbidden knowledge to students suffering under communism. He opposed the damage neo-liberalism brought in the 1980s and offered a bucolic vision of England in his nostalgic laments for the passing glories of its countryside and its fox-hunting squires.

“Scruton continued to make a case not only for national identity but also for traditional architecture and environmentalism at a time when most official conservatives had become shills for global corporations,” Wooldridge wrote.  “For him conservatism was always about making a home rather than renting a comfortable room in a global hotel chain.”

Every word was true. But Wooldridge’s words were not the last word.

Writing with the perception of an outsider free of English prejudices, Jonathan V. Last, an anti-Trump American conservative, broke through the sentimental waffle when he made an incontestable point. It was one thing for Scruton to criticise liberalism in the 1990s when neoliberalism was conquering the world, Last said. Quite another to cheer on illiberal autocrats in the 2010s when the thug right was threatening basic freedoms.

 The Critic, a usually thoughtful British magazine, exploded with rage.

Last’s claim that Scruton provided a “blueprint for 21st century fascism” was the work of a “fifth-rate scribbler,” it cried. Scruton’s legacy “will still be revered for ages to come”.  And the Critic was clear that legacy included Trump. He might attack American democracy, but who among Scruton’s followers cared about that? At least Trump had the guts to “deviate from liberal orthodoxy” and that’s all that mattered.

In one respect, Scruton’s defenders are right. Scruton was no more a fascist thinker than Orbán and Trump are fascist leaders.  There’s no need to transfer the politics of the 1930s to the present. Today’s authoritarians are bad enough as it is.   

Orbán presents Scruton with the Hungarian Order of Merit for “foreseing the threats of illegal migration and defending Hungary from unjust criticism.” (Photo: Zsolt Szigetváry/MTI)

Scruton sustained them with three arguments·     

•  “The people of Europe are losing their homelands, and therefore losing their place in the world”^[i]

• Elite intellectuals are flooding the continent with immigrants because their “Enlightenment creed makes it all but impossible for them to acknowledge the fundamental truth, which is that indigenous communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers.”

• Conservatives are not therefore engaged in the normal arguments of democratic political life but in a civilisational war against enemies who wish to destroy the West.

To put English politeness aside, Scruton was a far-right thinker who offered a respectable version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.