Conservatives: Lost and confused

Western conservatives appear uncertain on how to respond to the radical progressivism from the woke left.

Conservatives around the world are losing their sense of conviction. By Nick Cater.

In May, Anthony Albanese became the second Australian Prime Minister to enter office by making an affirmation rather than swearing upon the Bible. The first was Julia Gillard who in 2010 pointedly omitted references to God and the Queen in the ceremony at Government House.

Fortunately, Albanese is unlikely to endorse the new Senate president’s call to abolish prayers at the start of the parliamentary day. He understands that while Christians are now officially a minority, and a persecuted one at that, Christian principles remain the bedrock of our public philosophy. Few voters would object to a prayer that obliges politicians to acknowledge their trespasses at the start of each day. The 1611 King James Version would arguably be even better in these fiscally promiscuous times: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Either way, the daily acknowledgment of sins is an important corrective to the pietistic proclamation that proceeds it, the Acknowledgement of Country, a parliamentary custom stretching back all of 12 years.

A prayer that begins by acknowledging a higher authority provides a counterweight to the hubris that frequently comes with public office, the hubris implicit in Senator Sue Lines’s proposal that Senate proceedings should conform to her own godless outlook.

This is not, as atheists like to claim, an argument of rationality over superstition. It is a contest between two world views, one that acknowledges its precepts are matters of faith and another that pretends its are not. The woke neo-Marxist world view performs the same sociological function as religion. It is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things that unites a moral community, the definition French sociologist Emile Durkheim applied to a church in his seminal 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

This is the church into which Lines is baptised, the church of woke neo-Marxism, which seeks not merely to reform institutions but to demolish them and start again. It is faith that forcefully denounces the arrival of the First Fleet as the start of “a destructive era of colonisation, genocide and dispossession”, to quote the Senate president’s words. It holds that Australia Day is a celebration of “white supremacy and the legacy of colonisation that is directly linked to the various ways we continue to fail First Nations people”. That legacy can be seen in “modern racist policies like the cashless debit card”. It holds as an article of faith that climate change is not just a policy challenge but an emergency. It condemns Israel as an apartheid state. It views history as a never-ending battle between the powerful and the weak in which existing institutions perpetuate the status quo and therefore must go.

In other words, the alternative to a Christian foundation is not nothing. It is a radical, godless faith that denies redemption and punishes apostasy with the zeal of a 15th-century clerical inquisitor. It rejects Gospel commandments to love one’s neighbour as oneself, internalise blame and treat every human being as possessing equal moral worth. Should it triumph, it will fragment common bonds, fuel bitter resentment and push Australia in a meaner direction.

If Western conservatives seem uncertain in the face of this cultural revolution, it may be because they too have been quietly losing their religion. Anglo-American conservatism has become so confused it is hardly capable of conserving anything at all. After decades of appeasement, equivocation and pulling punches, it has reached the point where conservatives are losing the argument on the distinction between a man and a woman. “Conservatives have largely become bystanders gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path,” says Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter to Ronald Reagan and host of the podcast Uncommon Knowledge.

On almost all the key political questions of our day, from environmental policy to religious freedom, conservatives around the world have lost the ability to persuade, perhaps because they are no longer persuaded themselves.

The direction of conservatism in the US is the subject of hot debate in the wake of the presidency of Donald Trump who, for all his strengths, was hardly Reagan, nor anything approaching what might have been classed as conservative a decade ago. Many conservatives were prepared to strike a bargain with him, however, because they were united in opposition to the woke neo-Marxism that has become the moral scaffold for the political left, the universities, corporate America and much of the mainstream media. Woke neo-Marxism is slowly edging out Christianity as the moral foundation for the nation in both the US and Australia.

US-Israeli political theorist and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony offers a challenging explanation in a podcast conversation with Robinson. The central argument in his recently published book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is that conservatism is adrift because it consciously abandoned its Judeo-Christian anchor, jumping on board with a twisted notion of secularism that offers religion no part in civic life. “Religion and nationalism are required in order to provide the guardrails that prevent the pursuit of economic growth from turning into licentiousness and undermining the capacity of the nation to continue to exist,” he told Robinson.

While conservatives have grown weaker, the progressive left has grown more radical. The woke progressivism pushed by the Black Lives Matter movement “seeks not to build on the past but to promote instability, to turn the world upside-down”, wrote Christopher DeMuth in The Wall Street Journal. Conservatives stick to their historical role as moderators pledging to repeal specific excesses that have stirred popular revulsion. For today’s woke progressives, however, “the excesses are the essence”, writes DeMuth. In such circumstances, the conservative instinct to seek compromise is futile. Woke progressives are not inclined to split the difference and meet halfway.

The implication is clear. Conservatives must stand by their values, defend institutions and traditions and oppose revolution. They must convince the nation and themselves they are grounded in something more solid than the sentimental pieties of the day.