There is no room for pacifists in the culture wars 

The most incisive response to the loose collection of young Canadian “New Right” writers coalescing around the Without Diminishment Substack1Although they have been dubbed the New Right, their project is “new” only in the way that “everything old is new again.” Most of what I’ve read from its proponents could have been lifted from the George Will who wrote “Statecraft as Soulcraft” four decades ago (not to be confused with the priggish, war-mongering libertarian Kamala Harris-supporter he became); much of the rest might be cribbed from Aristotle. The “Young Right” would be more apt. has been Sean Speers’s objection that: The problem is that the New Right often makes a set of maximalist arguments against liberalism—the basic philosophical underpinnings of the past two or three centuries—and then proposes a set of minimalist policy solutions—like better curricula, a bit more spending on families, or a greater focus on public safety—that seem disproportionate to their root-and-branch critique. There have been plenty of responses, including a punchy piece by Anthony Koch this week, and a reply from Speer urging conservatives not to abandon a liberal commitment to “neutral frameworks for common life.” Koch’s piece is typical of the New Right’s mode, which bristles with impatience at what, rightly or wrongly, they see as the failures of a generation of conservatives who ceded the institutions of the Canadian state and culture—from the schools and universities to the military and the media—to more ruthless progressives, and who now presume to lecture their successors on the proper form and limits of political strategy. As for the New Right’s policy solutions, we should not lightly dismiss either their value or the immense (and far from politically or philosophically neutral) task it would be first to enact them and then to protect them from ideological corruption. Take better curricula. Real reform is not a matter of revising a few reading lists. It means replacing an education establishment that has total control not just over what is taught but over who teaches and how. It means dismantling education faculties and institutions like OISE and salting the earth after them; enacting new rules for teacher accreditation; imposing new curricula over the objection of the unions whose members will have to teach it; and opening the school system to real choice. As policy solutions go, that’s about as minimalist as the Seville altarpiece. There have been more than a dozen self-styled conservative governments in Canada in the last decade, and only one has attempted even modest curriculum reform. As I was involved, I can report that without a committed premier, a strong minister, constant political direction of the public service, and an appetite to take on education faculties, teachers unions, and the media, even minor change is a non-starter. Despite most of these advantages, Alberta still ended up watering down its K-6 curriculum changes and resiled from further ambitious reforms. Spending more on families is not much easier. As used by the New Right, it is shorthand for a set of tax and policy changes that would transfer funds to younger, working Canadians from a leisure class of older and mostly retired voters who guard their pensions, house values, and the rest of the unearned perks of timely birth with the jealousy of medieval dragons. Even if it were possible politically, it would hardly be a neutral policy; it would be a conscious commitment by the state to support children and stronger families, backed by tax dollars (redirected or foregone). Effective public safety is probably the easiest of the three “minimalist” solutions Speer mentions, but again, it is radical enough to be beyond the current ability of our governments. Faced with tent cities, homeless tweakers, parades of masked pro-terrorist thugs, street blockades, gang warfare, extortion rings, and a noxious fug of pot smoke blanketing our cities, our governments have been largely absent—when they aren’t protecting the lawbreakers or chiding law-abiding Canadians. Those of us waiting for the smack of firm government continue to wait. If these three solutions were actually implemented, they would make a lot more than a minimal impact on life in Canada, and they are just the beginning of the policies the New Right is calling for. Near the top of their list are more and better housing and immigration reform that does not stop at the border. Both of these ideas have, slowly, started to gain mainstream traction, but to achieve the New Right’s goals, governments would have to go much further, starting with overriding local objections to gentle and attractive density and building more and better new neighbourhoods. On immigration, the New Right sees dramatically lower levels as just a first step; some are also calling for selection based on cultural compatibility and more active integration measures after they arrive. This could include stricter language requirements, longer probationary periods before qualifying for citizenship, ending automatic birth on soil citizenship and tighter criteria for citizenship generally, zero tolerance for lawbreaking, and faster deportation of failed applicants. In each case, the government would have to set non-neutral standards and then enforce them. We may not think of these policies as “cultural,” but, to take just two of them, nothing will have a bigger effect on the culture of our society in 25 years than our education and immigration systems. Beyond these, we can debate how much the state should do and what it should leave to other orders of society (always under its ultimate authority, of course), but wherever we set the limits will still leave much for the state to do. And what the state must do, it can do in different ways, choosing from a range of reasonable options, which are properly the subject of political and moral contest. There are no neutral choices in education, tax policy, immigration, or criminal law. Even choosing not to regulate would be a non-neutral choice. Who we let into the country, in what number,s makes a cultural difference. So does what is taxed, what is taught in schools, and whether parents have accessible school choices. Legalising drugs, gambling, prostitution, and state-administered euthanasia or not will affect a society in different ways. So will recognising “throuples” in law and allowing the sterilisation of minors, or not. Rules about our built environment shape how we live, move, and feel about our communities, and whether we can afford a home. Speer’s dig in his response to Koch that the New Right wants “a right-wing National Film Board” is clever but revealing. It prompts the question: What would a neutral NFB look like? A neutral SSHRC? A neutral Museum of History or a neutral War Museum? A neutral university? Someone has to choose what is funded. Will there be a department of classics or gender studies? Is Macdonald praised or condemned, and in what measure? Whatever criteria we apply, whatever standards we enforce, whatever story we tell, will not be neutral. Scrupulous proceduralism will not dislodge an entrenched and tenacious hostile status quo or prevent its return. None of this necessarily means rejecting liberalism as it would have been understood just a generation or two ago, but it does mean putting liberalism back in the box of moral, cultural, and legal constraints that it escaped sometime in the last century, or to be precise, building a new box to contain it, part of which must be made of laws. Speer is right that Edmund Burke’s little platoons of civil society have a role to play in this project, but we cannot rely on them for the simple reason that they are no longer the stable and orderly organising units of society. The old orders in Burke’s appeal to “ordered liberty” were already anachronist when he extolled them. Feudal loyalties, parishes, and guilds were giving way to urbanisation, industrialisation, and the atomisation and alienation that attended them. In a particularly florid and sentimental passage, Burke lamented that “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” Whatever else, Burke’s pessimism is a peculiar starting point for recovering what we have lost. The architecture of modern life is governed by the state and, increasingly, by corporations that operate with the impunity of states. Given the complexity of our society in an age of hyper-communication and hyper-mobility, it is useless to hope this will change. Being left alone in this world is not an option. Whether AJP Taylor’s golden age, when a “law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman,” ever really existed, it is now an irrecoverable fantasy.2Indeed, the change has been so profound that the post office is one state institution an Englishman might no longer notice. We might as well pine for Middle Earth. Because we cannot escape the state, we cannot be indifferent to its character. Just as every person who is free to act should act for good rather than ill, so when the state acts, it should act to promote the highest good of the people. This means setting the conditions for human flourishing, which in turn means placing reasonable limits on human autonomy. A proper conservative skepticism about the limits of human knowledge and state action must not become an excuse for neutrality between right and wrong or good and evil. Once you accept that “liberty” must be “ordered” to raise us above the state of freedom enjoyed by stray dogs, you join a debate whose terms are unavoidably moral and cultural. There is no room for pacifists in the culture wars.