The problem with socialism, the saying goes, is that it takes up too many evenings. Well in London, the National Conservatism Conference, or NatCon, is currently detaining “delegates” for twelve hours at a time, for three days in a row. We’ve had long agonized debates about protectionism versus free trade, communitarianism versus individualism, Ukraine support or NATO skepticism.
When did the right get so sincere? NatCon is an American import to Britain — and it feels like it. The program uses the language of “plenaries” and “keynote addresses.” It has that American feel of “movement conservatism” — mixing the over-intellectual with the underwhelming.
The problem for a lot of conservatives today is that they can’t decide if they should be angry or not. Michael Gove, the UK “Levelling Up” secretary said on Tuesday afternoon that conservatives needed to have “the self-confidence that means we do not have to be strident.”
Yet there was Katharine Birbalsingh shouting lines of encouragement from Gladiator: “Hold the line! Stay with me! What we do in life echoes for eternity. Will your life echo hollow with cowardly hypocrisy?”
She says she “regularly” plays that clip for her staff.
Go! Now! Fight! I loved Roger Scruton! That’s the vibe, here at the otherwise genteel Emmanuel Centre in Westminster. The audience is quite reluctant to clap. But the people really go wild on one thing only: not Black Lives Matter, not “woke” history, but the madness of the trans stuff. It’s something people can really feel angry about, but how widely is this sentiment shared? Last summer in Britain, an Opinium poll of Tory members found trans issues were twenty-sixth on their list of priorities.
I’ve heard little so far on crime, nothing on the cost of living, nothing on health at NatCon. We’re dealing in abstractions here: some POLTHEORY Module 001.
This never-ending sincerity means the right is now doing what it used to accuse the left of: talking to itself. Becoming bores, in other words. Orwell said that:
When the ordinary person hears phrases like “bourgeois ideology” and “proletarian solidarity” and “expropriation of the expropriators,” he is not inspired by them, he is merely disgusted… How many a waverer has halted on the brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched self-conscious socialists dutifully addressing one another as “comrade,” and then slid away, disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar.
On Monday, we heard — from a right that should know better — that “liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism.” And that “the movement formerly known as ‘the left’ is one of a radical libertarianism of the body underwritten by a ballooning biotech industry demanding the rights of individuals to pursue total biomedical self-mastery.” And “the mad person is the apex individual.” This language is close to becoming like the rote-learned HR speak of “wokeness.”
But the people talking seem to think this is all hot rhetoric. Really, the audience spend a lot of the time consulting their phones. The moment of Tuesday was when the foreign-policy panelist Gwythian Prins started doing the Skeleton Dance at the podium. No one knew why: ten seconds later he was talking about the Wagner Group in Sudan. The dance was a merry moment of distraction.
If the right had one thing going for it, it was flippancy in the face of earnestness. Maybe the battle of ideas isn’t the point, and this conference is just about some national conservatives hanging out. But it doesn’t look like much fun.
This “New Right” supposedly likes the people. But do the people like — or even know anything about — the New Right?
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
