Was Louis Scarcella a Robin Hood?
https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2018/12/jon-burge-gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz-and_27.html
The case below could also be an example of that. These days I interest myself in police misbehavior only when it occurs in Australia. Example below:https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/2024/01/man-acquitted-of-murder-seeks-5.html
But in the 80s and 90s I looked more widely. I followed crooked convictions in the USA and UK too. Being now aged 80, however, I have to limit my ambitions a bit these daysAnd NYPD detective Louis Scarcella was one whose name kept popping up in my reading. And as I recollect it, Scarcella nearly always targeted blacks who had "form": They had prior criminal convictions, were gang-bangers or were drug dealers. When however they came to attention for something serious Scarcella would spring into action. If there was insufficient evidence to convict the presumed offender, Scarcella would make sure that evidence was provided, often in the form of forced confessions. The result was that a lot of dubious citizens got a long holiday in a government building
So was that good or bad? Mostly bad it seems to me but taking a lot of hoodlums off the street was surely a silver lining. They might or might not have not been guilty of what sent them to jail but they were rarely innocents either
Australia had a notorious crooked cop too: Roger Rogerson, who has just died. He too put a lot of bad guys away but eventually went too far. There is a memoir of him here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12981943/roger-rogerson-aneurysm.html
A Brooklyn man who served 14 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit – in a case investigated by disgraced ex-NYPD Det. Louis Scarcella – had his conviction overturned Thursday, prosecutors said.
Steven Ruffin, 45, choked up in court as his 1996 manslaughter case was tossed by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D’Emic following an investigation that found several serious errors — including that he was pressured into confessing to the crime after having denied it several times.
“I lost 14 years of my life for a crime I didn’t commit, and today will help me to move on from that chapter of my life, cleared of any wrongdoing,” Ruffin said in a statement.
In court, Ruffin thanked the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and its Conviction Review Unit for the “incredible amount of work” it did in reviewing his decades-old case.
He paused to compose himself, overcome with emotion, as he thanked his parents, noting that his mother hadn’t lived to see her son’s exoneration.
Ruffin was just 18 when he was convicted of killing 16-year-old James Deligny, who was shot on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights around 9:10 p.m. on Feb. 5, 1996 in a case of mistaken identity.
Deligny was apparently targeted after robbing Ruffin’s sister Diana, a college freshman, of her earrings, the DA’s Office said.
Ruffin’s sister told her family about the mugging and a manhunt was underway to find the robber. Several members of a group eventually encountered Deligny and his sister a few blocks from Ruffin’s home, where a fight ensued and Deligny was gunned down.
Scarcella interrogated Ruffin, then 17, twice where he denied being the shooter, prosecutors said.
Ruffin’s estranged dad, a cop, was brought to the precinct to convince his son to confess to the slaying, saying he shot Deligny four times, according to the Conviction Review Unit report.
He was released on parole in 2010.
It would take more than a decade after Ruffin was out of jail for prosecutors to reexamine the case and find several errors in the investigation.
“The fact that they actively looked into my case, took the application and the amount of resources that they put in to exonerate me, it, it—that is what staggers my mind,” Ruffin said. “If they would have never said a word about Scarcella, I would have never known because I live in Georgia.”
Deligny’s sister had testified that the shooter had a cracked tooth, like Ruffin.
According to the investigation, Ruffin’s defense attorney at the time, botched the case by failing to tell the jury that the boyfriend of Ruffin’s sister also had a cracked tooth.
The boyfriend confessed to multiple people that he was the one who killed Deligny, the investigation found.
“After a full investigation by my Conviction Review Unit, we can no longer stand by this old conviction and will move to give Mr. Ruffin his good name back,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
Ruffin’s exoneration marks the 18th case that has been overturned involving Scarcella, according to the Legal Aid Society.
“The fact that they actively looked into my case, took the application and the amount of resources that they put in to exonerate me, it, it—that is what staggers my mind,” Ruffin said. “If they would have never said a word about Scarcella, I would have never known because I live in Georgia.”
“We will continue to correct miscarriages of justice and to learn from the mistakes we uncover to ensure that they never happen again,” Gonzalez said.
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Is the loss of Christian restraint behind our present problems?
The conventional wisdom among modern conservatives is that the West is undergoing a moral crisis.
This paper recently published a piece by Tom Switzer, “Instead of facing up to moral decline, the West is lowering its standards”, which was representative of this genre. It called attention to the way many aspects of our contemporary situation – family breakdown, “non-existent parenting”, drug abuse and drug-related crime, and the impossibility of civil debate in the face of cancel culture and hypocritical virtue-signalling – have been normalised when in the past they would have been regarded as unacceptable.
Unfortunately, while the piece laid out a list of symptoms, it suggested no overarching diagnosis or cure, no pathway to social renewal and health.
This is because it did not identify the underlying causes of our malaise, which has been 500 years in the making, not 50, as many conservatives would suggest.
Like many illnesses, the underlying cause is actually a positive development taken to extremes. A correction that becomes an overcorrection. A medicine that, taken in excessive quantities, becomes a poison. The ancient Greek word pharmakon means both cure and poison. So what is our pharmakon? It is individual freedom.
It may be an oversimplified generalisation to say the West’s commitment to individual freedom began as a necessary corrective cure to medieval social, cultural, religious, political and economic traditions, customs and systems that had been considered divinely ordained and so not subject to change (oversimplified because late-medieval Europe was in many ways a dynamic society that gave birth to the Renaissance flowering of the arts and the rediscovery of ancient learning). Nevertheless, it is the case that the power of the ideal of individual freedom really gained momentum and force in the wake of the Reformation and its (ultimately) secular counterpart, the Enlightenment.
In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Cathedral, challenging the hegemonic power of the papacy in European society and suggesting the individual could have direct access to God unmediated by the institutional church.
A century later, Francis Bacon published Novum Organon, a milestone in the philosophy of science, championing the power of human reason, and arguing for the separation of science and religion so the individual scientist would be free to conduct their investigations without fear of ecclesial censure. (Only 13 years later, Galileo was forced by the Roman Inquisition to recant his findings that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around.)
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the dominant idea of political philosophy was “the social contract”, promoted by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While each of these had different versions of the theory, what they had in common was the view that social order was the result of some kind of unspoken agreement between the individuals who comprised a society and the state that provided the laws and the order within which they could exercise their individual freedom. In economics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, contributed the theoretical support for free market capitalism, in which the pursuit by individuals of their own wellbeing, minimally regulated by government, would deliver improvements in living standards.
These movements resulted in an explosion of human creativity, knowledge, innovation and wealth and the development of modern parliamentary democracies.
But what began as a drive for human liberation has gradually mutated, over time, into a force for human enslavement. The enslavement is not to external forces but to our own egoistic impulses. This is because, at the same time as this expansion in individual freedom was taking place, and partly because of it, the cultural, social and moral influence of religion as a force for self-regulation began to wane. The rituals, beliefs and customs of Christianity had underpinned the sense of community and participation in a common enterprise, and a sense of life’s meaning and purpose as being connected to something greater than oneself and one’s own interests. As the influence of religion weakened, so did many of the social and cultural bonds that held communities together, leading to an even stronger emphasis on the need for the individual to assert themselves and pursue their desires.
By the end of the 19th century, the rituals of religion were for many people little more than social conventions providing a veneer of respectability that papered over the cultural cracks appearing in societies that were increasingly driven by the logic of the market. Those cultural cracks have widened into seemingly unbridgeable fissures in recent decades, hastened by the power of new communications technologies, to the point where there is growing concern that “the centre cannot hold” in secular, liberal, capitalist democracies for much longer. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, an excess of individual autonomy at the expense of community leads to atomism, anomie, and makes us vulnerable to the appeals of demagogues.
Michael Polanyi, in his 1962 lectures History and Hope, portrayed existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as the archetypal representative of the “moral inversion” brought about by the hyper-scepticism of the Enlightenment: “Just look how in France itself, where the dawn of unlimited hopes first arose in the 18th century, the continuous pursuit of these great hopes has led the present generation of writers to a philosophy and literature of despair. How, actually using The Age of Reason as his title, Sartre demonstrates that the ultimate outcome of the age of reason is a recognition of the total absurdity of man and the universe, and finds that this reduces man’s freedom to total arbitrariness.”
In his 2016 bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Duneen has argued persuasively that the scientific revolution, in promoting the hubristic idea that man could master nature, overturned the older notion that virtue was necessary to conform our desires to the forces of nature. What need have we of virtue and self-restraint when our destiny is to harness the power of science to bend nature to our will?
Four hundred years after Bacon, we live in a world where technology is developed and deployed by the forces of the market – which has become our master, not our servant – with the intention of enslaving us to our own impulses under the guise of liberating us. Gratification is the purpose of life, and the sooner the better.
In such a culture, virtue, reflectiveness and self-restraint, which are allies of democracy, are the enemies of the market. Freedom, unmoderated by virtue in the interests of the common good, has mutated into licence. The sexual liberation of the 1960s has mutated into the gargantuan global pornography industry. Freedom of speech has mutated from a mechanism for promoting political discussion into a mechanism for verbal abuse and cancel culture, sacrificing truth along the way. And the news and current affairs market has discovered outrage and prejudice can be very profitable.
Modern technocracy, by eroding cultural and religious allegiances, maintains only a superficial moral and emotional hold on us. Recognising the motivational shortcomings of a calculating ethos, modern secularists have embraced the liberalism and language of human rights while killing the god that underpinned them. But rather than asserting their own spiritual potency, liberal technocracies offer us only an agnostic, anodyne, superficial faith. This instrumentalist and limitless (thus empty) liberty cannot feed the moral imagination or fuel the quest for wider purpose.
So how do we recover? How do we embark on a process of social and cultural renewal from such a debased starting point? How do we self-correct without over-correcting?
The first step is to face up to the cultural causes of our moral malaise, namely an inadequate conception of individual freedom, which is unconnected to truth. In embarking on this quest, we could do worse than look closely at the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, who died just over a year ago.
Before he became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had made his life project working through the implications of Christianity’s encounter and engagement with Western liberalism. At the heart of this project is the question of human freedom and its connection to truth.
In his 2007 encyclical, Spe Salvi, Benedict maintains that the fundamental difficulty with the contemporary Western concept of freedom is that it has been separated from that of truth. The general notion of freedom is that expressed by Karl Marx, when he says that in the future communist society one will be able “to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner, just as I please”. This concept of freedom as the ability to do or to have anything we desire, to have one’s own will as the sole norm of our action, presupposes that one’s will is truly free. Yet, Benedict asks, if the will is irrational, can it be truly free? Can it be truly good? He proposes the need for a definition of freedom that says it is “the capacity to will and to do what we will in the context of reason”.
Benedict points out that both Marxism and liberalism have failed to deliver the freedom they promised. Although Marxism claimed to have discovered a scientifically guaranteed way to freedom, it instituted a gigantic system of slavery. Despite the promises of the liberal system of politics and economics, many people in democratic societies are excluded from freedom by unemployment and material poverty, and are “haunted by the spectre of meaninglessness”.
This crisis of meaninglessness is being manifested today in many ways, including an epidemic of teenage self-harm and our frenetic efforts to compensate for a lack of purpose through compulsive consumption.
The separation of faith and reason into hermetically sealed compartments has impoverished both, and resulted in a secularised “thin” conception of the human being as essentially an organism that is little more than a bundle of urges susceptible to scientific analysis and manipulation, whose “freedom” consists in impulse gratification and is thus illusory. Contrast this to a “thick” vision of the human being as a person, embedded in communities, oriented towards truth, beauty and goodness.
We need to restart the dialogue between faith and reason, not with a view to turning back the clock to the theocratic Middle Ages but with a view to developing a new philosophy of human freedom that is linked to truth and to higher purpose, that of love and responsibility. Hopefully, in the process, we can help save the West from itself.
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‘Break It Down’: No Consequences for Pro-Terrorism Protestors Assaulting White House
Ten weeks ago, I wrote of a November 4 protest at the White House in which a pro-Hamas mob “cursed the U.S. president, waved the flag of a foreign adversary, and endeavored to breach the White House compound.” No one was held accountable for that vile display of hate and anti-Semitism, even from the president ostensibly committed to the extermination of these evils. So, in the least surprising development ever, the pro-terrorism protest happened again this Saturday, only bigger and bolder — and again with no consequences.
This weekend’s protest imitated the earlier one in many respects: a large crowd assembled in Freedom Plaza before moving over to the White House and attempting to scale the fence. Again, rallygoers — including not only Arabs, but white college students, black race activists, and red communists — donned the black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh scarf. Again, they left behind a mess of trash and graffiti in Lafayette Park. Again, they chanted curses at an absent president, as well as subtle endorsements of genocide, such as “Free Palestine.” Again, they flew the flags of foreign powers inside the White House’s protective fence.
And again, all who committed lawlessness at the protest got away with it. “During the demonstration near the White House complex Jan. 13, a portion of the anti-scale fencing that was erected for the event sustained temporary damage. The issues were promptly repaired on site by U.S. Secret Service support teams,” said the Secret Service, adding that they made no arrests.
D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith told reporters, “a majority of today’s demonstration remained peaceful,” but “there were instances of illegal and destructive behavior in Lafayette Park, including items being thrown at our officers.” Her statement did not indicate that D.C. police had made any arrests. Conservative reporter Julio Rosas, who was on the scene, posted on X/Twitter, “I did not personally see anyone get arrested outside the White House tonight.”
The sizable crowd — reported at anywhere from “tens of thousands” to “400,000” — overflowed Freedom Plaza, east of the White House, as buses arrived from 20 states to swell the crowd for the post-lunch rally. Organizers pompously dubbed the gathering, “The March on Washington for Gaza,” a nod to the famous Civil Rights-era event during which — unlike Saturday’s protest — the attendees actually marched to Washington on their own two legs. At around 2 p.m., an Islamic call to prayer, in Arabic, was played over loudspeakers at the park, which sits on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol.
Attendees smothered the event in hundreds of Palestinian flags, including one apparently larger than my house. Other flags spotted at the event include the Islamic Jihadist flag, used by U.S.-designated foreign terrorists organizations, and the national flags of Egypt (the Gaza Strip’s other neighbor), Yemen (where the Iran-backed Houthis are based), South Africa (which, despite its own history of apartheid, accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice), and Tunisia (which recently considered a bill to criminalize normalizing relations with Israel).
Of course, the Progress Pride flag flew there, too, right under the flag of Palestine, where the powers that be would likely kill and torture anyone who identified as any sort of LGBTQ identity. Meanwhile, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (a communist party) sponsored a banner that read, “End all U.S. funding for Israeli apartheid.”
Just before 3 p.m., the crowd began to assemble for a march on 14th Street NW, exiting Freedom Plaza from its northwest corner. At 4 p.m., the protestors began a half-circuit of the White House complex, heading north on 14th Street NW, then west on K Street NW, then south on 17th Street NW, before finally arriving at the northeast corner of the White House complex around 4:50 p.m. A large number of protestors eventually filled Pennsylvania Avenue and the adjacent Lafayette Square.
The only known arrest associated with Saturday’s demonstration occurred along the march route. On 14th Street NW, between H Street and I Street, a man brandished a knife at the head of the march. One protestor quickly disarmed him, and police took him into custody. It seems implausible that the knife-wielding man was present to attend the protest. The man’s attire (bright orange jacket and dayglow-yellow hat and gloves) and his behavior are more consistent with a mentally unstable member of D.C.‘s population, many of whom congregate in Franklin Park, a block from the incident. If so, then his arrest was a sad, bizarre intrusion of D.C.’s ordinary affairs into this national protest.
Ironically, the protestors had no problem with D.C. police closing the route of their march to vehicular traffic. Thousands of protestors walked right past scores of uniformed officers without so much as an insult. Yet after hours of such peaceful cooperation — or at least co-existence — within 15 minutes of arriving at the White House, the protestors were attempting to break through barricades.
By 5:02 p.m., conservative journalist Wid Lyman reported, “Protestors are shaking the outer fence at the White House.” At 5:16 — when it was still not quite dark — Rosas concurred, “Palestinian protesters aggressively shake and hit the security fence outside the White House.”
During the next half hour, the number of protestors swelled as more marchers completed their trek. Protestors lit flares in the colors of the Palestinian flag, draped Palestinian flags and keffiyehs on the statues of Lafayette Square, graffitied public property, and threw “bloody baby dolls” over the White House fence. They began throwing other items, too: water bottles, rocks, even staves broken off from the flags they carried.
As protestors continued to hit and rattle the security fence, they took to chanting, “Break it down!” Now, both their actions and their words declared their desire to breach the White House’s perimeter. Rosas reported at 6:13, “Palestinian protesters have shaken the fence so hard that they have moved portions of it back.” In an improvement upon the previous protest, this time the Secret Service had installed a second, temporary fence, comprised of heavy metal screens that locked together. Unlike the permanent fence, this one was not anchored to the ground.
The tensest moment came around 6:45 p.m., when protestors shook the fence so violently that they managed to partially dis-attach one section of the temporary fence at the top. As the crowd chanted, “Free Palestine” and rattled the fence in a terrible clanging, another conservative journalist, Mark Naughton, captured the moment on video in real-time, from the thick of the fray.
Secret Service agents — who had already donned riot gear — rushed to repair the fence. Protestors predicted they were about to be pepper-sprayed as officers shook up cans in preparation. At least one officer had to climb a ladder by the wildly swinging fence to secure it. “Police were not able to fix the broken fence and had to attach makeshift clamps,” reported Lyman. As officers reattached the fence, the crowd booed and began shouting, “Shame on you!”
Although the situation was quickly resolved, it did alarm the Secret Service, prompting them to order a partial evacuation of the White House. “As a precaution, some members of the media and staff in proximity to Pennsylvania Avenue were temporarily relocated while the issue was being addressed,” said the Secret Service.
The near-breach in the security perimeter might have prompted Secret Service to call in reinforcements. About 15 minutes later, more police officers appeared and dispersed the crowd. By 7:43, all that was left were the items thrown from the crowd.
The massive protest received strikingly light media attention. “I saw no obvious MSM yesterday in DC covering the massive protest,” wrote Naughton. “Some well equipped media maybe MSM (no affiliation hats or jackets) at the literal start line of the March but by the second block, all were gone. When some protesters became aggressive at the White House, only @Julio_Rosas11 and @Wid_Lyman and a few unknown media remained.”
Rosas echoed the sentiment, describing the media’s response as “passive coverage, instead of an outrage cycle.”
There were a couple stories, such as this one by PBS, but they contain little firsthand reporting of the actual riot. This, despite the fact that White House reporters were evacuated when the fence was breached; the mainstream media was situated inside the barricades, not in the crowd.
Two conversations captured during the fracas demonstrate that the protestors themselves knew that their actions were 1) not peaceful and 2) not going to change anyone’s mind. Unfortunately, some of the exchange was inaudible, but the rest is a profound denunciation of the protestors’ tactics and motivations.
In one exchange, a protestor standing by the fence asked the one standing next to him, who was shaking it with all his might, “What is the point of this [rattling fence]? [inaudible] for our point to get across?” “Yes, yes,” the other replied. “Honestly, how old are you? What’s going to happen? Do you think now he’s [Biden] going to change his mind, because you’ve proved to him that Palestine is [inaudible]?”
Afterward, another protestor exhorted those shaking the fence, “Why are we doing this? Let’s do this s*** right, bro.” Someone asked him, “Okay, what is ‘right’?” He replied, “‘Right’ is doing it peacefully, singing our songs, and doing our dances.” Those around him called him a crude name and then ignored his advice.
The fringe-left street activists aren’t alone. Employees of as many as 22 federal agencies, including the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Agency, the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Naval Research Laboratory, planned to participate in an illegal strike on Tuesday, organized by an anonymous group calling itself “Feds United for Peace.” They planned to observe a “Day of Mourning,” as Tuesday is the 100th day since Hamas’s terror attack. However, their plans came to nothing, as all federal offices in the D.C. area were closed anyway due to a winter storm.
Somehow — does it have to do with the dissidents within the system? — the Left’s constant pressure on Biden is having an effect on his foreign policy. Although the majority of Americans supports Israel and is disgusted by the Left’s uncivilized street demonstrations, the Biden administration is heeding its warnings, ratcheting up pressure on Israel as the radical Left turns up the heat on the White House. “The president’s patience is running out” on Israel’s war in Gaza, an anonymous official told Axios on Sunday. Several weeks ago, Biden abruptly hung up on Netanyahu after a tense exchange.
After his administration has done everything possible to slow down Israel’s war and making its task harder, Biden is now annoyed with Israel that it hasn’t won yet. Or, perhaps more correctly, Biden is channeling the anger of those who are annoyed that Israel fought back at all after Hamas’s October 7 terror attack. Meanwhile, Israel’s surrounding enemies have no desire for peace and continue to attack, with a Hezbollah rocket attack killing more Israelis on Tuesday.
In addition, the U.S. military’s passive response to provocations have emboldened other Iranian proxies in the Middle East to conduct bolder attacks. As of Thursday, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, in addition to a number of missiles aimed at Israel. On January 9, they escalated the situation even further by directly attacking U.S. military ships. “These attacks have endangered U.S. personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation,” complained Biden. “More than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea — which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times.”
In response, the U.S. finally launched retaliatory strikes against the Houthis on Thursday and Friday.
The pro-terrorism protestors outside the White House had this message for American forces trying to keep the world’s most important shipping lane open for business: “Hands off Yemen.” Wouldn’t that be nice, if we could do so?
On Sunday, the Houthis launched an anti-ship cruise missile towards a U.S. Navy ship it was capable of sinking. Fortunately, the ship survived, but the terrorist group has now made its intentions to kill U.S. servicemembers plain. The U.S. responded with a third strike against Yemeni targets on Tuesday. Meanwhile, on Thursday U.S. Navy SEALs captured a small boat that was smuggling missile parts from Iran to Yemen. Two men went missing during that mission, possibly drowned.
In light of these tense and dangerous developments in the Middle East, why would President Biden listen to the opinions of a fringe element that embraces anti-Semitism, alienates the public, and obviously hates America? Perhaps it’s because he needs their votes in November. Biden’s approval rating sank to an all-time low of 33%, while 58% disapprove in a recent ABC News/IPSOS poll. Biden now has the lowest approval rating of any president since George W. Bush in 2006-2008. So, the radical Left can continue their pro-terrorism protests, rattling Biden’s cage in the most literal sense, and expect no consequences.
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The collapse of conservatism
James Allan below writes well but takes insufficient notice of the fact that conservative policies have always undergone a lot of change. Consistency in answer to the question "What is a conservative?" will always be hard to find over the long run. That is because ALL politicians have to react to changes in the world about them and changes in reality will often require changing policies.
That is not to say that there is abolutely no consistency in what makes a conservative. Consistecy CAN be found but it is at the pychological, not the policy level. In a nutshell, the essence of conservatism is caution and the essence of Leftism is anger. Whatever they do, conservatives will be cautious, as they see that, at the time
In the developed Anglosphere countries over the past couple of centuries, there has been a general understanding of what it means to be a conservative voter. In rough and ready terms, with plenty of arguments and differences at the periphery, conservatives wanted to keep in place the main tenets of the core institutions, practices, conventions, and principles that had worked up till then. They were for conserving. Not everything, always and forever. Not in aspic jelly with no changes or innovations ever allowed but rather with a prima facie weighting towards the status quo and with the burden on those proposing change and restructuring to make a clear case why the novel was preferable to what was already in place. Gradual reform over idealistic revolutionary aspirationalism. Clearly, as I said, there was plenty of room for intra-conservative fights and disagreements. But the general proclivity for the established and ‘what already was in place and seemed to work moderately well’ was plain.
Spelled out in those terms it is pretty obvious that the desire to conserve what happens to exist is contingent. It depends on where you happen to be and when. No sane person would want to be described as a ‘conservative’ in today’s North Korea, and only religious zealots in today’s Iran. Put bluntly, there is an element of luck as to whether it makes sense to be a Tory or conservative. It is time and place contingent, along with depending on the sort of instincts, preferences, and political taste buds the individual brings to the table.
I am a big fan of the Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume, one of the all-time greats. In fact, I did my philosophy doctorate on his moral and legal thinking. But Samuel Johnson, London high Tory, wit, and author of the first real English dictionary, was rather scornful of Hume. His renowned biographer James Boswell reported Johnson as saying of Hume ‘that he’s just a Tory by chance; if anything he’s a Hobbesian’. I’ve always thought that Johnsonian description of Hume rather excellent. It’s just that Johnson meant it as a stinging criticism whereas I think it shows the genius of Hume.
In a way, it is just chance whether it is sensible for anyone to be a Tory or favour conservative political positions. And that brings us to the present day in countries such as the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia. Because what should those described as ‘conservatives’ want to conserve right now? You might think ‘the presumption of innocence’ would be a no-brainer. But vote for the Libs in 2019 and you got a prime minister, Scott Morrison, who wouldn’t grasp or adhere to this principle if it walked up and hit him in the head. Just ask Bruce Lehrmann. Or Christine Holgate. Or a fair few of his own cabinet ministers. And let’s be clear that today’s Australian legal fraternity hardly makes one confident it cares much, if at all, about this formerly core precept in the criminal justice system.
Or take the notions of free speech and an impartial and questioning media. No one with a functioning brain could have come through the pandemic years with any confidence our present institutions and establishment class uphold either of these. The same goes for upholding our core civil liberties. I don’t mean rushing off to bring picayune standards against the government when those seeking to come to this country illegally are involved. Our judges can be counted on to do that. I mean that over the two and half years of the pandemic, we saw the ‘greatest inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years’ (the words of former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, and they’re correct), and yet not a single country in the Anglosphere saw judges do anything. And I mean countries with potent bills of rights included. The judges pushed back against government Covid brutality not one whit. The legal establishment was all in on the fear-mongering and enforcement of what a moment’s thought would have told you were nonsensical rules dreamt up by puffed-up bureaucrats. (Did you see Mr Fauci in the US last week concede that the six-foot separation rule was just made up out of thin air and had no scientific basis?) Put it this way, those of us known as ‘conservatives’ have very little reason to want to conserve the ABC, do we? And given its profligacy, making up out of thin air the ‘National Cabinet’, and willingness to facilitate state premiers’ thuggery, tell me what there is to want to conserve about today’s Liberal party? (I avoided mentioning the state Liberal iteration in Victoria because, well, it is so pathetic it doesn’t really feel fair picking on people who take sides against those who simply believe that those with XX chromosomes will always be different than those with XY chromosomes, and that public policies will sometimes have to reflect that core fact about the external, causal world however much it might hurt some people’s feelings.)
I could keep going for some time. Treasury and the RBA seem to be completely in thrall to Keynesianism. They just whitter on about GDP and never mention Australia’s pretty ordinary to awful recent record as regards GDP per person. A side effect is that our political class is addicted to big immigration to keep GDP looking okay even as it makes individuals poorer, traffic far worse, and house prices more astronomical. (And yes we should all feel sorry for today’s younger generation because it is way, way harder to buy a house today than when we were all younger – look at average wage to average house price – and no amount of shunning a daily flat white will fix that.) Put bluntly again, I don’t see much reason to conserve the economic thinking that prevails at present. Heck, the entire political caste, with only a few exceptions here and there, seem to be out of sync with the average voter. The Voice referendum sure showed that while exposing the faultlines in the Liberal party. Then there’s the universities, (not what they were I can assure you all), the corporate boardrooms, the list goes on.
So what do we voters formerly known as ‘conservatives’ do when much of what was worth conserving has been jettisoned? Tough question. But I think I’ve gone a long way in explaining the appeal of Mr Trump, the so-called populist parties in Europe, and the current Tory leader in Canada, Mr. Poilievre, who is up 10-15 points in the polls. He’s promised all sorts of ‘radical’ policies such as halving the CBC’s budget. And we ‘conservatives’ love it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/taking-conserve-out-of-conservative/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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