Can Conservatives Be Rebels?

Exploring a paradox.

A short while ago I wrote a seminal piece for The Daily Sceptic called ‘Confessions of a Conservative Rebel’, which I may expand into a book if I can be arsed.

Or I might just put it all here on Substack, because who needs or even trusts books anymore? Gary Linker reads books and he’s an idiot. Hitler read books too. He also wrote one, but let’s not get into that (bit too conservative LOL…just kidding, we all know he was a leftist).

I have now named this page The Conservative Rebel (TCR, to gentlemen) because the phrase kind of describes me, and because I am fascinated by this apparent paradox.

In a culture dominated by the left, a conservative is by default a rebel. And yet conservatism means not rebelling but protecting and preserving our heritage.

Tricky.

Look into it a bit further, however, and one finds that even our great conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton was something of a rebel. Exiled by the other men of letters, kicked out of the universities for not bumming Karl Marx.

Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism, but his views emerged only in resistance to the insanity of the French Revolution. Were the revolutionaries the rebels, or was Burke?

Hard to say without reading lots of big books.

What’s even more disturbing about conservatism is that it might not even exist.

Some of its greatest exponents, like Scruton, found it hard to pin down. Hence his 200 page book, How To Be a Conservative. We could all use such a handy guide at this stage, especially if we happen to be a Conservative Party MP.

Conservatism relies on charming concepts like the family unit as the building block of society. This modest idea is then forced to go out and compete against impressive sounding left wing utopian ideals of humanity redefined from scratch.

The strength of the latter is in their clarity. The leftists have an answer and a policy for everything, because they have made it all up anyway. This makes their schemes rhetorically powerful in the political realm, even though they always fail in practice.

Conservatism, on the other hand, relies on inductive reasoning, i.e. going off what seems to work, and drawing conclusions accordingly.

And also what doesn’t work, as with Burke’s response to the French Revolution. Conservatism sees a mad leftist agenda, says ‘not that’, then buggers on doing the same old things it seems to like.

Although even the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, which also date back to the French Revolution, may be misleading.

I can’t necessarily prove it, but life experience and the current culture war lead me to suspect that conservatism is not somewhere off to the right, but simply the straight and narrow path, with leftism the deviant, devilish temptation always waiting to pounce.

That deviance could come in the form of obviously malign trends, like the attempt to perform brutal and irreversible gender reassignment surgeries on confused children, or from pernicious ideas like ‘socialism has never been properly tried’.

In reality there is probably a pretty narrow range of things that actually work for individuals and society, and everything else is just the product of idle hands.

In this light, one could argue conservatism isn’t really political at all, but a necessary defence against politics. A bit like the Queen in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, one is forced to do something due to the presence of hysterical leftism.

So where does that leave us with my original question, ‘Can conservatives be rebels?’ Will I have to rename my blog? (Slight cringe there realising that’s essentially what this is).

On the face of it, following the straight and narrow path based on tried and tested methods, resisting attacks along the way, sounds anything but rebellious.

Then again, from a Christian perspective, we are always at odds with the world, which is run by the devil. As Jesus tells us in John 14:30: ‘Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.’

Thus to reject vice, temptation, and destructive ideologies is to be a happy square in God’s kingdom, a rebel on earth.

So the bad news is, the world is run by evil. The good news is my book proposal is still on the table.