If this is our hope, there is no hope

Conservative people all over the West are beginning to fear that there soon will be nothing left to conserve.

Left-wing governments are coming to power everywhere, but that by itself hasn’t traditionally spelled catastrophe. One would be hard-pressed to name a single Western country that hasn’t had any socialist governments over the past few decades.

Such governments invariably cause damage to everything they touch: economy, education, social order, culture, medical care, political institutions. Yet socialists come and then go, leaving their successors to apply balm to the wounds.

So they do, with variable success. Reasons to feel optimistic suffer attrition at times, but they never quite disappear. Traditional institutions seem sturdy enough to withstand the odd squall from the left. They might deflect and totter but they don’t tumble down.

Therefore, when yet another socialist government takes over, conservatives grit their teeth and repeat the sacramental adage “this too shall pass”. A little patience, and things will go back to normal. We may bleed, but we won’t bleed out.

That sense of latent optimism is no more. Talking to conservative people in several countries (England, France, the US and Holland, to be exact), I’m struck by the gloom of despondency descending on all of them. Everything conservatives hold dear seems to be debauched at best, wiped out at worst. The ongoing collapse is no longer political. It’s existential, civilisational, possibly even ontological.

Voting one lot out and the other lot in can offer no cure for such ills. There is no other lot. They all seem the same, give or take. History may indeed have ended, but not the way that intellectually challenged neocon declared in 1989.

That’s when people turn away from Dr Pangloss and towards Guy Fawkes. “A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy,” they say, fully aware that the original dangerous remedy was an attempt to blow up the king and the House of Lords during the opening of Parliament.

Good conservative people wince when watching mobs of extremists rant and riot in the streets, or rabblerousers get into governments. But they then suppress the wince and just shrug: if the rabble doesn’t resist the nightmare, no one else will. And someone has to.

The hope is that tattooed thugs will turn into a giant blanket smothering the fetid zeitgeist, only for the good conservative people then to reclaim possession of Western civilisation with its rarefied air of traditional virtues.

“If not [Tommy Robinson or any typological equivalent in any other country], then who?” conservatives ask what they think is a rhetorical question. They know, and they expect you to agree, that there is no one else. Populist extremism is our only hope.

Sorry, but I can’t agree. When I hear such sentiments expressed, and this is almost a daily occurrence, I always respond with the phrase in the title above.

A barbarian onslaught can’t save a civilisation; it can only destroy it. If you don’t believe me, read Edward Gibbon who wrote over 700 pages on this very subject.

I wonder how these good people, who have every reason to be desperate, envisage the mechanics of a victory thus achieved. We all agree on the generalities, but what about the specifics?

Let’s say expert rabblerousers drum up much wider support than they enjoy now. Instead of driving thousands into the streets, they manage to put together mobs numbering in hundreds of thousands. What then?

Such mobs will then march on [Capitol Hill, Westminster, the Elysée Palace, etc.] and overrun the defences. Everyone working at such locations will be summarily [thrown out, exiled, imprisoned, guillotined, drawn and quartered – take your pick]. Then what?

Will good conservative people, a sort of collective Jacob Rees-Mogg, ride in on a white steed, disperse the rabble and restore everything they hold dear? Anyone who believes that lacks both historical knowledge and imagination.

History shows that a revolutionary overthrow of traditional institutions, flawed though they may be at that moment, invariably leads to a blood-soaked chaos, a Hobbesian war of all against all. No modern revolution over the past 250 years disproves this observation.

Even the American Revolution, the most benign of them all, claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, if one justifiably regards the Civil War as the Revolution’s second act. And the less said about the French and Russian revolutions, the better – and God knows enough has been said already.

Let’s just mention that France took at least a century to recover a semblance of traditional order, and some naysayers will maintain she hasn’t really recovered it even to this day. As to Russia, all those moderate pince-nezed socialists and bearded conservatives so eager to let the revolutionary monster out fell its first victims, and Russia turned from a mildly objectionable country into a downright evil one.

What should terrify any real, which is to say temperamental, conservative is that the consequences of any violent mass outburst are totally unpredictable. And if we go by European historical evidence, it’s not the cream but the scum that tends to rise to the top.

A civilisation under threat or in decline has to have the inner strength to repel the former or reverse the latter. If there is no indigenous source of such strength, the civilisation is already dead, even if it may be unaware of this.

Those of us who hope that such strength, though not immediately obvious, still exists must realise that its source can’t be the Tommy Robinsons of this world. Belief that it might be shows woeful misunderstanding of the roots of the problem.

For any civilisation is a physical expression of a metaphysical fact. It’s a body growing around the core of self-defining beliefs.

Only when such beliefs are strong, obvious and more or less universally shared can a civilisation garner enough strength and self-confidence to defend itself. Conversely, no matter how physically strong a civilisation may appear to be on the periphery, a weakness at the core will always bring it down.

All it takes is a push, from without or from within. When the spiritual muscles of a great civilisation grow flabby, it falls prey to barbarians clad in wolfskins or to some internal turmoil – the kind of challenges it used to swat away with ease when it still knew what it stood for.

In the West that core was Christianity, first the faith, then the religion, then the civilisation. Yet at some point Western people began to believe that they could dispense with that core, while keeping and strengthening the body it had produced. All they had to do was find an equally viable replacement.

What at that point seemed easy has since proved impossible. No replacement has been found, although many have been tried. As a result, every muscle in the body began to atrophy, a symptom recognised by many even if the cause isn’t.

Recovering the original core is our only hope, and losing hope is as wrong morally as it may be appealing rationally. However, vesting such hope into the revolutionary zeal of the mob is a terrible mistake. So vested, the hope will be stamped to death by the jackboots of conquering modernity – even if that footwear is made by Adidas or Nike.