The conservative revolution is in fact happening
The conservative that is, not Conservative, revolution:
About eight months ago, a fascinating social change began to ripple through hundreds of British neighbourhoods. Given the deluge of news that has happened since, it is easy to forget how remarkable it all seemed: droves of volunteers who were gripped by community spirit coming together to help deliver food and medicines to their vulnerable neighbours, check on the welfare of people experiencing poverty and loneliness, and much more besides. From a diverse range of places all over the country, the same essential message came through: the state was either absent or unreliable, so people were having to do things for themselves.
It’s possible to argue with that “have to” instead of desire to but still, the finding now is that it is preferred:
There and elsewhere, the key story of the Covid crisis has been that of town and parish councils enabling people to participate in community self-help.
Community self help might be this year’s buzzword for the process. But this is just - or perhaps is gloriously - Edmund Burke’s little platoons deploying for action. That appropriate technology - a method of organisation is a technology - for so many of life’s activities and problems. The voluntary association of those concerned to deal with what is in front of them. What’s not to like?
From the other side of politics, it is worth reading a recent report by the Tory MP Danny Kruger, commissioned by the government to look at “sustaining the community spirit we saw during lockdown, into the recovery phase and beyond”. Kruger proposes a new Community Power Act, using deliberative democracy, participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies “to create the plural public square we need”.
Well, obviously, there’s always someone out there willing to spoil a good thing. We’ve just found out that certain parts of life are better run without politics so politics must be reintroduced to them?
This is also of course the classical liberal as well as conservative position. That voluntary association provides the best method of dealing with many, but not all of, life’s processes. Sometimes it will be those little platoons. Sometimes it will be larger such voluntary cooperation - a supermarket chain is exactly that, a group of people that cooperates in order to produce retail services for the rest of us. Sometimes, if rarely, such spontaneous order doesn’t in fact work and then government is necessary.
But isn’t that an interesting finding from the recent pandemic? That the “rarely” is a lot more rare than our system previously assumed? At which point roll on the neoliberal, even if conservative and Burkean, revolution.