In Rome this week conservatism triumphed over authoritarianism
Irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, or will be good or bad, the cardinals’ choice of pope is an act of defiance unique in our time. We are encouraged to believe that the papal conclave was authoritarian. In reality, with its choice of Cardinal Ratzinger, it defied authority. Authority, in modern conditions, is invariably liberal. The power of that conclave was puny compared with the power of the world’s grand newspapers, universities and swarms of officials in Brussels, the UN and the IMF. The power of those institutions exists all the time; that of a conclave just for a short time after a Pope’s death. For once, authority was unable to impose the centrist candidate. It was as if the British Conservative party had elected Mr Redwood to lead it or Labour had chosen Mr Galloway.
It will be said that John Paul II appointed nearly all the cardinals who made the choice. They were therefore conservative. Therefore they were bound to elect a conservative pope. But electorates do not as a rule act in so literal a way. Only a few weeks before the conclave elected the conservative John Paul II in 1978, it had chosen the short-lived John Paul I whose election was not assumed to be that of a conservative.
Admittedly, it does not follow that a nonliberal appointed to high office remains a non-liberal. Eisenhower chose the emollient former California Earl Warren as Supreme Court Chief Justice because he assumed that Warren would not do much that was liberal about civil rights for southern blacks and about related matters. But Warren began the abolition of southern segregation. There are some offices which are so lofty that the people who appoint to them, no matter how lofty themselves, cannot control what the appointee then does. Those offices include American Chief Justices and Popes.
Liberals would deny that the great offices tend to go to their kind. They like to depict themselves as being in opposition to those who run the world. What of President George W. Bush? they would ask. But Mr Bush, when first seeking the Republican presidential nomination, did not campaign as the right-wing candidate. He campaigned as the ‘compassionate conservative’ — itself a phrase in which he defensively conceded that compassionate is what conservatives normally are not. Otherwise it would not be so important to precede the noun with the adjective. September 11 gave him a better chance of being re-elected as a right-winger than as compassionate. Safely re-elected, he is moving back to the centre like most presidents do, as, for example, Reagan did in his second term. They know that the centre is the place from where the history books tend to be written.
I share the liberal view about the malign consequences of John Paul II and the Roman Catholic Church in such matters as abortion, contraception and Aids in Africa. But I am not a Roman Catholic. I would hesitate to impose my own run-of-the-mill liberalism about such topics on a force so distant from it as the Roman Catholic Church. English Tories should understand. I realise that the Tory is often but Economic Man. But there must still be a residual Toryism shrinking from an arid world in which we were utilitarian and rational about what should be numinous. Otherwise we might just as well all be Blairites. It is the aridity, and lack of a sense of the world’s mystery, that is depressing about, say, the liberal press or the otherwise informative Channel 4 News. There, every public figure or institution is judged according to how he or she conforms to the average London media figure. ‘Did many faces fall?’ Channel 4 News’s presenter Mr Jon Snow asked the programme’s man in Rome just after the identity of the new Pope was disclosed to the world. Not ‘Did many faces rise?’ For Media Person, faces do not rise at news of conservative triumph.
So, for at least one glorious moment, and in the middle of a British election campaign in which much of the Conservative party is privately assuring the liberal press that it has nothing to do with its leader’s conservatism on immigration or whatever, a blow was struck against the tyranny of the centre. Somehow an electorate was found which was oblivious to focus groups. We can have no doubt as to what kind of a Pope a focus group would have urged on the cardinals: Ratzinger not caring enough, someone like Chris Patten, much more inclusive. Those cardinals, evoking a higher power, defied the powers that be.
Every now and again, including in this British election campaign, Mr Blair or another Labour politician denounces the 1990s. Left-liberalism has again stolen a decade.
It did it to an extended version of the 1950s — ‘the 13 wasted years’ — one of the most successful decades in the history of Britain and the Western world. For the first time in history, it had to be conceded that the majority was much better off than the minority and that the minority was declining all the time. The best by way of an adversely critical description which Galbraith could devise for the decade was ‘the affluent society’. The Left also appropriated ‘the low, dishonest decade’ — Auden’s 1930s.
We cannot go back to the Tory 1990s, Mr Blair and the others say; back to unemployment, housing repossessions, high interest rates. We could not go back to the Tory 1930s, an earlier Labour generation said after 1945; back to unemployment and appeasement.
The British 1930s and 1990s had something in common. Labour and the Left were at least as complicit as the Tories in the decades’ defects. Labour, to show the middle class that it was now respectably ‘European’, urged the Tories to enter the ERM long before the Tories did so, and never advocated withdrawal, despite the unemployment and repossessions.
Just after Hitler’s first great adventure the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 the left-winger Cripps wrote, ‘Every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the armed services.’ Labour under Attlee voted in the Commons against conscription after Hitler’s seizure of Prague in April 1939. The Transport and General’s mighty Ernest Bevin said in 1942, ‘No party comes clean out of pre-war policy.’ But he was in every way exceptional.
It should also be pointed out that the ‘affluent society’ began under Baldwin and Chamberlain in the 1930s and that in 1947 the Tories could show that even the 1930s unemployed had a better diet than the 1947 employed. Since no one else will, the Tories should be better at protecting the truth about our decades.
Previous page
