Paranoid seductions: Sir Roger Scruton and the hard right (Part 2)

Nostalgic nightmares

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The Child's Brain, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

Greetings, this is the second of two pieces on the dismal influence of Sir Roger Scruton. The first was on how racial fears run through today’s populist movements. Today I look at the accompanying cultural paranoia. I will return to commentating on contemporary events soon, I promise! But I hope you think it is worth me taking the time to step back occasionally and look at how we found ourselves in our current mess.

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All the best,

Nick

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On a May evening in Paris a woman came to the apartment of Roger Scruton. Springtime in Paris. Piaf on the radio. Warm breezes blowing through the Latin Quarter and carrying the promise of summer. What could be more romantic?

Alas, the young Scruton was not in the mood for love. For this was 1968, the year Enoch Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech and the Soviet Union crushed dissent in Czechoslovakia. By Scruton’s telling, 1968 was also the year that sent him cartwheeling off to the right.

In the narrow street below his window, he saw revolutionaries digging up cobblestones and hurling them at the cops. The May student uprising was underway. And Scruton’s sympathies were with the French police, who were, though he forgets to mention it, astonishingly violent. You can feel his horror at the breakdown of order in his lurid prose.

"The shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds.”[i]

When his guest arrived, she told him she had been a part of the protests. An angry Scruton asked her what she proposed “to put in the place of this ‘bourgeoisie’ whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades?”   (Incidentally, this strikes me as a suspiciously well-formed sentence to utter in the middle of a revolution. Does anyone use “whom” in a crisis? But I’ll let that pass.)

Her answer was to quote from Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the work of a philosopher Scruton regarded on reasonable grounds as a nihilist, who justified any revolt against an omnipresent power structure. (Foucault ended up sympathising with the Shia reactionaries who brought the Iranian revolution of 1979. They might be the enemies of every freedom,   but, hey, at least they shook things up,)

You can see how the attempt at revolution might push Scruton into counter-revolutionary politics. And yet revolution never came. The student protesters and working-class trade unionists of the 1960s and 1970s got nowhere. The most striking feature of the late 20^th century is the defeat of the socialism they advocated. The rage of the modern right that has led it to threaten the American constitution, send the UK into decline by ripping it out of the European Union, and pushed eastern Europe towards dictatorship comes from well, what? Surely not the threat of the red menace.

Indeed, Scruton acknowledges the radical left’s failure. He ends his account of his confrontation with the soixante-huitard by noting with a sniff that “she is now a good bourgeoise like the rest of them.”

Just so. The Paris uprising and the other attempted student revolutions in 1968 were an irrelevance. They did not herald the start of the radical left’s takeover of Europe. General de Gaulle returned to office in France. When the French socialists finally won power in 1980, they flirted with a left-wing economic model before returning to financial orthodoxy. The 1968 generation’s foremost representatives in Anglo-Saxon politics were Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who made a point of being tough on law and order, and in Clinton’s case, incarcerated extraordinary numbers of young black men.

Far more than any conservative government, the Clinton and Blair administrations represented the triumph of a type of economic conservatism. The Democrats and Labour accepted that the neo-liberals had been right all along. When neoliberalism collapsed in the great crash of 2007-2008, the left did not fill the void. Instead, right-wing demands for austerity and a revival of nationalism followed. Instead of challenging power, left-wing politics at its worst has followed Foucault. The belief that oppression is everywhere has led to obsessive concerns about small slights – microaggressions – and the fanatical policing of language. As the left fiddled with words, the big picture remained unchanged.

Given all this, what the hell are conservatives angry about? Everything as it turns out. The history of the modern right shows that the only thing worse than defeat is victory.

By the early 1990s, all the Conservatives' enemies were dead. The Soviet Union had fallen. Thatcher and Reagan had broken the power of the trade unions.  The IRA had given up.  The conflicts that had given meaning to conservatives were over.

If you turn to the liberal American press or, most influentially, the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole for an explanation of why the radical right flourished in the UK, theyexplain its success by imagining that a deluded nostalgia for the lost British empire propelled it. Even on the left of Britain, it’s hard to find anyone who agrees. We are in a state of amnesia about our empire – and that amnesia suits the British very nicely when it comes to forgetting its crimes

Compare the UK with the former USSR. Russian nationalists want to restore their empire by invading Ukraine. English nationalists have no desire to reconquer O’Toole’s Irish Republic. Indeed, during the Brexit wars Conservative party members told pollsters that, if the price of Brexit was losing Northern Ireland and Scotland, they were more than happy to pay it. They would rather destroy their country than stay in the European Union.

 Many working-class voters supported Brexit because, given the chance to slap authority in the face, they gladly took it, as working-class voters would gladly take it in any European country. The leaders of the Brexit movement said they wanted to make the UK an imitation of the tiny state of Singapore – hardly an imperial ambition.

The nostalgia that moved them was not for empire but for a lost England where men like them mattered. It drove them into an inchoate rage. The radical right or populist right or far right – the fact we do not have an agreed label points to the absence of a political programme that might define it – is an anarchic force.  It destroys but cannot create because, while it knows what it is against, but doesn’t know what it is for, as the example of Scruton’s UK proves.

Take a look at the state we are in and how we got there.