WITHOUT having moved an inch away from the political centre-right, or having changed any of my core beliefs or ideas about objective truth or the immutability of human nature, I now find myself on what liberals and progressives, the legacy media and Sir Keir Starmer, and most especially the grizzly BBC and the horrendously awful National Public Radio here in the States, like to call the ‘far right’. I realize it’s but a slur, yet another example of the Left’s extraordinary ability to weaponize language, but I’d be lying if I said I did not find it somewhat disconcerting, nonetheless.
I very much doubt I’m alone in finding myself unwittingly on the far right. I suspect it happens to the very best of people – honest, liberally minded men and women who have spent their lives rejecting bigotry and intolerance of any kind. It can happen effortlessly and take place almost overnight. All one has to do is to hold on to a set of beliefs and ideas that have held sway over a majority of people of good sense and decency in the West now for decades, not to mention since the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and probably even earlier. They are ideas and beliefs predicated on the civilizing agency of Christianity.
With this in mind, and not wishing to seem too self-indulgent, allow me to describe my own very personal journey to the outer edges of the far right. Vanity tells me it is a journey taken by many others.
As a very young man, I was attracted to the radical left because it seemed edgy and to complement my own rebellious nature. At age 14, I bought a copy of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels as a way of standing out in my tiny, but in retrospect excellent, Roman Catholic secondary modern school. It worked, and I earned a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. As a consequence, I was suspended twice for a week at a time, but I never told my parents on either occasion, leaving for school dressed in my uniform in the morning, spending the day wandering around town, sitting by the river watching the kingfishers catch their breakfast, or watching young women playing netball at a nearby girls’ grammar school, before returning home in the afternoon. My parents never knew, and no one at my school thought of telling them.
Embarrassingly, I also recall buying a copy of the New Statesmen and waiving it around ostentatiously, pretending to read it. I found it unreadable then and still do. I even ran my fake leftwing politics by my conservative mother and father, who belonged to a socio-demographic that probably no longer exists, what was once called ‘the respectable working class’. I have felt nothing but shame when I remember these sophomoric antics, especially for the disrespect I showed my parents.
At 15 or thereabouts, I began my journey to the political Right, or at least to the Labour Party of Dennis Healy, Peter Shore, and Shirley Williams. Hard to believe now, but I even voted Labour once, in the local elections of, I think, 1973. I voted for a chap who lived on a nearby council estate and used to walk by my father’s shop. He was an ambulance driver, had a big family, wore a three-piece suit, and was a Methodist lay preacher to boot. My goodness, how the Labour Party has changed.
I’d like to say I had a Roger Scruton moment when, watching from his apartment window during the riots in Paris in 1968, he observed highly privileged middle-class protesters destroying cars and smashing shop windows, and he realized, as most true conservatives do at some point in their early lives, that he was on the side of order and of those who wished to preserve things rather than destroy them. But alas, I did not experience such an epiphanic moment.
I do recall, however, in my very early twenties meeting an old friend for a drink, a young man for whom I felt a great sense of affection, and telling him of my enthusiasm for the writer, W. Somerset Maugham, whom I had recently discovered. My friend, who had recently become a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party – I think he had a crush on Vanessa Redgrave – said he would never read Maugham because the author celebrated British imperialism, which I don’t believe he did, but that’s beside the point. Still, my friend taught me a lesson I will never forget: artistic merit is not determined by the ideological commitments of the artist, although sadly, my friend seemed to think it was.
I also remember, on another occasion, expressing my admiration for the painter L. S. Lowry, who is remembered today for painting scenes of the industrial working class in the North of England, the factories where they worked and the streets where they lived, to my beloved older brother, a lifelong socialist. He answered by saying he liked the artist’s politics due to the subject matter found in his paintings. Lowry voted Tory all his life, but that, again, is beside the point. The bone I have to pick with the Left, including people who are very close to me, is that they are unable and unwilling to assess artistic merit unhindered by the ideological baggage that is always in tow. It is the Left’s inability to embrace objective truth that drove me, and continues to drive me, to the political Right.
Well, here I am, an elderly man, much, much closer to the end than the beginning, having voted, after some hesitation, for Trump twice, residing not entirely comfortably in the benighted land of the far right. Even so, most of my core values remain what they were in my early twenties.
I still detest racism and antisemitism, and believe, as did Martin Luther King, that men and women should be judged by the content of their characters not by the pigmentation of their skins or the idiosyncrasies of their facial features.
I continue to believe that women are equal in dignity to men in the eyes of God, that a woman is best described as an adult human female, and despise their oppression or mistreatment wherever it is found.
I despise injustice, the abuse of children, and cruelty to animals. In keeping with the late Lord Kenneth Clark, ‘I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction [and] I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta.’
Like the Renaissance French political theorist Jean Bodin, I believe that nations are defined by sovereignty and secure borders, and that the nuclear family, with a mother and father living in the same house as their children, remains the foundation of liberty and civilization.
I believe in the sacredness of the individual, made in the image of God, and reject the tendency to essentialize individuals as members of racial and ethnic groups.
To the consternation of some of my conservative friends, I continue to oppose capital punishment, as I did as a child when the British state was still hanging those found guilty of premeditated murder.
I believe that homosexual men and lesbians deserve the same rights as I do and any other law-abiding adult man or women but deeply object to being compelled to celebrate someone’s fetish or the mutilation of small children as we are asked to do at these dreadful Pride Marches that take place every June in cities around the world.
A lifelong Zionist, I support the continued existence of the state of Israel and the right of the Israeli people there to defend their nation against those who would destroy it if they were given the chance.
I believe that life begins at conception and that hastening the deaths of sick, disabled, or very elderly people is an abomination redolent of Nazi Germany.
Above all, I believe that any state worthy of the name should enact policies – or better still, not enact policies – that maximize the area in which free men and women are able to exercise their individual agency, and do all in its power to guarantee the rights of free speech and the autonomy of the individual.
That these views are now considered problematic, even far right, does not augur well for the continued stability of the American body politic.
