Everyone’s worst fears for America are coming true. The traditional Left sees increasing inequality and falling real wages for workers. The libertarian Right grows alarmed at the federal government’s ever heavier hand in the economy—from bailouts to healthcare reform—and the steady erosion of civil liberties before the flood tide of the national-security state. Cultural conservatives, meanwhile, lament a toxic environment of competitive sex and recreational violence. Americans still enjoy freedom of a sort, but not old-fashioned economic or political liberty, only the chimeras of lifestyle choice.

You can sleep with whomever you want, but there will be no legally binding commitments, and whether you keep your house or your children will be up to a judge. You can quit your job at any time, but good luck finding another. You can vote for the Republican or Democrat of your preference, and they will both give the country bigger government and more wars. Even which church to attend is a consumer choice, as self-interested and trivialized as which soft drink to buy. For all the fetishization of choice, Americans are taught by their institutions that there is only one way to live: casually, unconcernedly, without strong connections to anything but the provider state and its flag.

This is not the world that conservatives or progressives, or for that matter libertarians, wanted to make, but all deserve a share of the blame. The welfare state has deprived millions of Americans of the will, as well as the ability, to manage their own lives. Indiscriminate application of a free-market ethos to other spheres of life has reduced attachments to whims, atomizing society. And for all their hand-wringing about culture, conservatives have not applied themselves to creating art or literature, but have spent their energies glorifying militarism and shivering in fear of leftist and Islamofascist phantoms. They locate the ills of society not in the state or the oligopolized market, but in bad people—Commies, terrorists, McGovernites—who can be bombed, jailed, or tortured away.

A different kind of economy, politics, and society can be imagined, one characterized by smaller government, more widely dispersed property, and an interesting local life not defined by big bangs delivered from a glowing screen. Progressives like Christopher Lasch have tried to describe such an alternative. So have left-libertarians like Karl Hess—they are Left not because they are “libertines,” as the canard goes, but because they look critically at concentrations of power. And so, too, have traditional conservatives—and now Red Tories like Phillip Blond.

Red Toryism is not an easy sell in the United States. “Tory” was what our forefathers labeled the British loyalists they ran out of the country. All good Americans, from the radical Tom Paine to the conservative John Dickinson, were Whigs. As for “Red”—not too long ago we thought we would be better off dead. Prefixed to “state,” it might be acceptable. Otherwise it conjures to the right-minded citizen images of European or Canadian social democracy: the EUSSR or Soviet Canuckistan. God-fearing Americans love the free market, and we have the freest in the world. That’s what makes us exceptional.

Or so Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would like you to think. In fact, the word “conservative” was once as unpopular as anything red or Tory, and the first brave souls who openly called themselves conservatives after the Second World War had visions of society very much like Blond’s. Peter Viereck, whose Conservatism Revisited in 1949 first adopted the c-word unabashedly, went so far as to profess admiration for the “socialiste conservateur” Klemens von Metternich. Russell Kirk, whose Conservative Mind in 1953 converted many a young Republican into a born-again Tory, was every bit as critical of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham as Blond is today.

Twenty-five years later, Irving Kristol could muster only “two cheers for capitalism.” He and other neoconservatives meditated long on what Daniel Bell called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism.” Paleoconservatives also had doubts about our economic system, with Sam Francis declaring “capitalism the enemy” and Patrick Buchanan campaigning in 1992 on a “conservatism of the heart.” George Will quipped that was conservatism thinking with the wrong organ—yet Will self-consciously styled himself a Tory and wrote a book celebrating “statecraft as soulcraft.”

In practical politics, too, American conservatives have often made a point of promising to tame the market and create what George H.W. Bush called a “kinder, gentler America.” Yet the results have been disappointing. Richard Nixon entertained the idea of creating a negative income tax to benefit the poor—but his escalation of the war in Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) and the Watergate scandal put the lie to the myth of Nixon’s bleeding heart. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and vows to foster an “ownership society” may have sounded distant echoes of G.K. Chesterton’s distributism. Yet Bush, too, is remembered for other things—like Enron, Abu Ghraib, Lehman Brothers, and “Mission Accomplished.”

Conservatives of many stripes have recognized that there is something deficient in the American tradition. Yet attempts to supply the missing element have not only failed, they have served to provide rhetorical cover for further consolidation of wealth and power in Washington and Wall Street. Our experience differs from that of Great Britain. In Red Tory, Blond argues that the sum of Margaret Thatcher’s free-market liberalism and New Labour’s cultural liberalism has been a vacuum of intimacy speedily filled by new police powers. Surveillance is the remedy for a society of distrustful strangers. Liberalism of both sorts is the problem, and values conservatism is part of the answer—and will not only improve social life but also reduce the need for an intrusive state.

In the U.S., however, the greatest escalations of police powers have taken place under Republican presidents elected in the name of “values voters” or the “silent majority.” Anti-liberal leaders like Nixon and the second Bush have only made matters worse—the culture coarsens all the more while the demands of national security displace those of hearth and home.

As actual morality disintegrates, politics becomes deeply moralistic. This is not a paradox: it is always easier for the virtucrat to demand that government reform society than for him to reform himself or his own neighborhood. Conservatives no less than liberals have indulged in morality by proxy, according to which the measure of a man is not how he behaves but how he votes and what ideology he professes. Control of government has become a substitute for leading a good life—as Robert Nisbet warned in The Quest for Community, “power comes to resemble community, especially in times of convulsive social change and of widespread preoccupation with personal identity, moral certainty, and social meaning.”

What the American order lacks is not power but integrating institutions that stand apart from ideological warfare and the clash of personal interests. Red Toryism has a chance in Great Britain because that country retains a handful of institutions that keep alive the idea of the nation as spiritual community. The monarchy and the Church of England may be badly degraded, but they preserve at least the memory, and thus the psychological possibility, of a pre-liberal society predicated on something other than the nexus of cash and power. However feeble their voices may be, when Prince Charles praises beautiful architecture or when the Archbishop of Canterbury criticizes a war, some moral instruction takes place. They can shame the selfish interests of commerce and politics.

America does not just suffer from the absence of similar institutions to give authoritative voice to counter-values. We have national institutions, but not of the traditional, pre-liberal kind. Ours are the White House, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve. Everything else is the domain of wealth and private interest—including Congress and our churches. We do, however, have a national religion: the cult of American Exceptionalism that unites everyone from Pat Robertson to Christopher Hitchens. Its high priest is the president, to whom we turn in times of danger when divine help is most besought, such as after 9/11.

What happens if one injects an uncompromising critique of rights, individualism, and liberalism into this national machinery? The product may not be Red Toryism, but more executive secrecy, deficit spending, war, torture, and disempowerment of civil society. No wonder, then, that for all our national-greatness conservatives laud Benjamin Disraeli, they never sound like Tories. They are instead in the tradition of Caesar and Napoleon, of mass democracy and militarism.

The first task of the American Tory is Hippocratic: do no harm. Restrict at every turn the imperial institutions that have displaced the Founders’ design. Congress should take precedence over the executive, even in foreign policy, as was intended in the Constitution. Our decentralized system has spared us some of the abuses to which Britain has succumbed—America is less of a surveillance state. But the diffusion of authority in the legislature and among the states creates obstacles for reform. There is no way around that: without formal institutions of authority, informal hierarchies rooted in excellence of character will have to do. George Washington, after all, had a higher place in the hearts of his countrymen than George III did in those of his subjects. Today the place for such ethical leadership is not in the White House, but in legislatures and the splintered institutions of civil society—perhaps most of all in the nonprofit sector of think tanks and universities, the closest things we have to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as the clerisy. Our universities have fallen far short of their missions, but institutions such as the Tocqueville Forum, which hosted Phillip Blond at Georgetown, may yet provide seeds of regeneration. 

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