Conservatism is not fascism. It is the answer to it
The movement must take stock and distinguish itself from the mouth-breathers and fringe extremists
Fascists are not conservatives. On the contrary, conservatism is a compelling answer to fascism. But if conservatives are to help beat the lie of racism, they do need to put their own house in order. That begins by asserting that fascists are not conservatives.
Real fascists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia at the weekend, signposting their ideology with swastikas and burning torches. A woman was killed when she was hit by a car. President Trump at first condemned hate and violence “on many sides”, skipping over the specific hate that caused this particular violence: white supremacy. They called this rally “Unite the Right” – a coalition of neo-nazis, klansmen and alt-right mouth-breathers united by the shared fantasy that white people are both superior to everyone else yet also victimised by them.
Trump’s initial, poorly worded statement failed those who are genuinely oppressed. It also failed conservatives, who are tarred with the same brush as the President. Trump ran as a Republican and, even if many Republicans opposed him, he won as a Republican. He has now identified the extremists by name, but his delayed reaction fuels a Left-wing narrative, that conservative parties are vehicles for extremists because they share core beliefs about nation and identity. “We voted for Donald Trump,” said a former klan wizard. “We are going to fulfil [his] promises.”
Then again, fascists would say that, wouldn’t they? They want you to think they are part of mainstream conservatism because it gives them a significance they don’t deserve.
Sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump. Are they all white supremacists? No. Only a few hundred actual fascists, part of a long tradition of American political violence that predates Trump, turned up in Charlottesville – and that’s probably, hopefully, the largest rally they can manage. I can guess who this lot were: criminals and hypocrites. Just as you can bet your bottom dollar that the “holy warrior” who carried out the latest Islamist terror attack was an ex-convict who smoked dope with his boyfriend, so the line between white nationalism and crime always turns out to be vanishingly thin. Yes, the radical Islamist owes something to Islam, the religion that he quotes inaccurately, but he is not Islam. Likewise, the klansman owes something to the American South, but he doesn’t speak for it.
Conservatives should make that distinction, to plead their innocence. But they do also need to ask themselves some tough questions. Why did Trump choose to ride the Republican Party to the White House? Why do fascists now ride him? Why is prejudice always a component of conservative parties?
The answer requires a book, not a column, but the tragedy of Ukip provides. For many years it walked its own line between making a reasonable case for British sovereignty and bashing immigrants – and conservatives needed it to stay on the right side of that line because it was Ukip’s campaigning that made the EU referendum possible. Now, sadly, the party is threatening to elect a woman called Anne Marie Waters as its leader. Waters has links to the far-right and once called Islam “evil”. In 2017, she was deselected as a Ukip parliamentary candidate and the then leader Paul Nuttall said her views went “above and beyond party policy”. How she now qualifies to run said party, I cannot imagine – and I beg Ukippers not to vote for her. My friends, you’ll split your party, distract from Brexit and give a platform to something unconservative and morally wrong.
It’s an old story. A party shrinks, outsiders hijack it. They are fanatics burrowing through the institutions. Conservatives struggle to find the vocabulary to fight back in part because their own sense of identity lacks definition. This is a weakness and a beauty of conservatism. It generally rejects ideology in favour of common sense, the tried-and-tested. Being concerned with individual liberty, it wouldn’t seek to define mankind by sweeping, ugly notions of race – or try to tell anyone which god to worship.
Conservatism wants to prevent both disorder and tyranny, believing that one generally ends in the other. If fascism is mob rule leading to dictatorship, the conservative fights it by defending constitutional norms or with policies that reduce popular discontent. Are voters worried about immigration? Then control the borders. The economy is bad? Liberate capital and create jobs. Apathy and alienation running high? Reassert the sovereignty of parliament. The answer most conservatives would give to “how do we fight extremism?” is “run the country better”.
But that’s not enough. The time has come for the conservative movement to pause, take stock and distinguish clearly between itself and the extremism at its edges. The latter, for avoidance of doubt, is the unscientific, un-christian philosophy of life’s failures. It is pathetic, but it is also dangerous. And it succeeds only when smarter, better people fail to do something about it. FOLLOW Tim Stanley on Twitter @timothy_stanley; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion