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Daniel Hannan Verified account@DanielJHannan 41 minutes ago
The alt-right and the woke Left are not opposites when it comes to race. They both define people by ethnic identity. The real anti-racists are the classical liberals who see everyone as an individual.
Daniel Hannan, Thatcherite and Brexiteer, says that he is a Whig not a Tory. He has that in common with left-wing Tories like Ian Gilmour, David Cameron and probably Harold Macmillan, whose father was a Liberal Unionist and who married the daughter of a Whig duke.
Everyone is an individual and of infinite importance to the economy of the universe, and this is liberalism's great insight, but an individual does not come into the world a blank sheet of paper. It is a great fault of liberalism to misunderstand or ignore the great importance of the many factors which form individuals and societies, especially traditions, cultures, ethnic groups and religions.
Daniel Hannon gave a talk a year or so about the Anglosphere and was, so I read somewhere on Facebook, visibly upset when asked whether countries in the Anglosphere would still be Anglo if most people in those countries were descended from people from outside the British Isles or even from outside Europe. He got very cross and said he strongly believed that descent was irrelevant and that culture was independent of descent or lineage.
This is liberalism rather than Toryism.
The Old Whigs (for example Chief Justice Sir John Holt) were patriots - and the liberal Prime Minister Gladstone spent much more time on such matters as religion than he did on politics. Although. due to local factors, I would have been a Conservative not a Liberal here in Kettering (even in 1870 - on the School Board issue and other matters), I must confess that I prefer Gladstone to Disraeli - indeed I can not think of any domestic of foreign policy of Disraeli with which I agree. I know Disraeli settled in Beaconsfield (a claim of intellectual and spiritual kinship with Edmund Burke) I still think that Gladstone (for all his faults - which were many) was closer to Edmund Burke than Disraeli was. It is the machine-like liberals - the "Westminster Review" crowd (with their hatred of landowners and their weird Hobbes and Hume philosophy - leading to Bentham) that leave me cold. Paul M
ReplyDeleteWhere does respect for culture stop and injustice begin? I think with the use of FORCE (or the threat of it). For example the homes for fallen women in Ireland started off as a force for good (not evil) that started to change when people started to lock-the-doors (at first to protect the women) and then started to forbid the women to leave.
ReplyDeleteThat everyone is an individual soul - and, as such, precious to God, is central to Christianity. It is why Edmund Burke rejected the idea that different standards should be applied in governing India than governing Britain. Although, of course, the Old Whig Edmund Burke never visited India and so did not grasp just how difficult governing such a place is. Burke even found French culture hard to grasp at times - for example he was sincerely shocked that men did not come to the aid of a women (say the Queen of France) who was to be murdered, that "it would make no difference - she will be killed anyway" is not how an Irishman tends to think (and Burke was very Irish at times) - when an injustice is before you one does not count the enemy forces and calculate odds, it is head down and CHARGE, "I will take you all on" if right is on my side. If he had been in the crowd (old man that he was) he would, of course, have drawn his sword and taken them all on - and died horribly, but bravely (but that is not how calculating man in French culture thinks). I understand the calculators - but I do not really like them.
ReplyDelete'Everyone is an individual...'
ReplyDeleteNo kidding...
What Hannan doesn’t understand is that Whiggish liberalism coasted along for the last two centuries on the ballast of a non-liberal past. Up until a few decades ago we had a common racial, cultural and religious identity which for a long time kept its worst excesses in check. Now, the social fabric has been torn up. The racial and cultural tear has produced the Alternative Right which has rejected liberalism.
ReplyDeleteHowever, ideologically the Alt-Right are the descendants of the historical Tories. They share with Toryism a deep unease with the free market and believe it must be restrained and subordinated to the nation and its culture, they reject the Enlightenment notion that “all men are created equal.”
Hannan's claim that the "woke Left" is the same as the Alt-Right on race is stupid. The mainstream Left supports ethnic collectivism – for everyone except white people – because it's motivated by anti-white hatred. They're not even hiding it anymore.
The Whig Left and the Woke left work together. Whig Leftists like Hannan direct whites into the dead end of individualism rather than collective defence and self-preservation. So the traditional West eventually is crushed and digested with a pincer movement.