Being the only Tory in the village- interview with Ed West

Small Men on the Wrong side of History is Ed West’s latest book. The journalist and deputy editor of UnHerd has written a compelling account of how conservatives keep winning elections while having lost every single cultural battle for the last forty years. I interviewed him to understand the latest developments in a progressive liberal culture that seems to become more extreme by the day.

Why do you think the current woke culture has started in the Anglosphere? Can the rest of the Western countries stay immune?

I think it originates in the American religious history and sectarianism. But because we speak English too, we have no immunity to this virus. What’s strange with Britain is, basically we’ve taken on America’s national story as our own, also taking the knee, people protesting police violence against our own bobbies, for something that happened five thousand miles away. People are watching American politics as entertainment; they almost think it’s theirs. Take my children for example, my eldest when she was in year 3 learned about three figures from history; Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks is not part of our history, but America is so powerful that its politics is dragging us down.

People say on the Continent, where the younger generation speak English, that attitude has spread, I am not saying it can’t spread anywhere, but maybe the English-speaking form of liberalism is much more extreme than on the Continent, certainly compared to France, which has a strong conservative movement, they might sort of resist it. I mean I’m hoping that as America seems so dysfunctional the attraction of this political ideology might start to wear off, these are people who are burning down cities, it’s not something we want to copy.

 I’m not being optimistic, 2020 is a terrible year anyway, so I’ve lost confidence in the marketplace of ideas, I think people adopt the enlightened view instead of the correct one because people like whatever is fashionable and sounds cool, and so just end up following really stupid political ideologies. I don’t know how this movement will ever stop, you can’t just surrender to it, you can’t say “I accept this position, okay, I surrender, leave me alone”, because they won’t, they’ll ask for something else the next month, by definition it has to mutate, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Reading your book, and drawing on my personal experience as a secondary school teacher, you argue that we are losing more and more young people day by day, and you also add that leftists tend to indoctrinate children a lot more than conservatives do and are less tolerant of them “going astray”. I was wondering if there is a anything we can do to raise a new conservative generation, I guess educating without indoctrinating?

Alistair Campbell recently tweeted the picture of a six-year-old who says something about Boris Johnson being a monster. My six year old doesn’t know a thing about politics, he might know the name of the Prime minister, and the Queen, but I would never try to talk to him about politics, I’d be horrified my children should repeat something that I said. It’s cringeworthy. When they ask me about something and I try to give them a fair balance, some people say this, and others would say this, but you have to decide your own way, but as I’ve got older I’ve become much more similar to my dad, I’ve been more outspoken about saying when I think they are being taught nonsense.

I just think the overwhelming power of the culture around children is so strong, and conservatism is not really cool, is it, I mean libertarianism is the closest thing on the right to being cool, because it’s about freedom, but social conservatism means social leprosy, if you’re a teenage boy especially you’re not going to get any girlfriends by being a social conservative, these are the overwhelming social messages kids pick up on. So, maybe my children will be radical and liberal as kids and then they’ll grow into sensible grownups, but evidence suggests that people in their thirties aren’t really becoming more conservative, they aren’t identifying as such anyway, and this is the thesis of my book. Partly this is due to the decline of religion; once a religion declines, liberalism becomes the default faith, the moral anchor for people. Most people of my age who are not religious and want to do good and change the world are left liberals, because that’s the new religion. So, how do you turn the tide with the next generation? It’s possible that amongst younger people they will start to see the negative effects of progressive politics in the real world, and it will start to seem a bit lame to them, and they might rebel against it with a more conservative lifestyle.

We must keep in mind that teenagers are not rebellious, teenagers want to be in a tribe, no one wants to be the lone weirdo and they tend to follow the strong ideas. Recently Peter Hitchens was followed by a mob of Black Lives Matter -supporting students in Oxford, this is what young people are like, they want to be part of the conformist crowd, they don’t want to rebel. At the same time, conservatism is seen as weak and old. So, I don’t really have an answer, though I’ve thought about it. I suppose you could lay out some basic principles of conservatism, though it will mean anyone adopting them will be very unusual among their friends.

What’s your opinion about this overwhelming “cult” of youth, as if young age were the most accomplished, that everybody seems to venerate?

I suppose the visual culture we live in tends to value sexual attractiveness and other things associated with youth. It’s actually a new thing for Conservatives not to have much support among young people, but we’re also losing the middle aged people as well, so I wonder where the future is going to come from. I am particularly worried, from a historical point of view, that young women are leaning left. Women used to be more conservative than men and that has changed a huge amount in just 30-40 years. Women under 30 overwhelmingly voted Corbyn, and where women go, men tend to follow, generally: there were lots of historical cases where kings converted to Christianity because they followed their wives, like the first king of the Franks, Clovis, and the first Christian English king, Ethelbert of Kent. Unfortunately, the equivalent now is young men becoming extremely woke because of their woke girlfriends. Now progressivism has become the successor religion to Christianity in Britain. This is also linked to marriage, as married women with children tend to be much more conservative than unmarried ones, and the former are in decline.

Conservatism is all about defending the nuclear family and tradition. English conservatism is especially tied to the nuclear family, which is paradoxically pro family but also pro individualism, while liberalism is very much a singleton’s ideology, most of the great liberal founding father were single, childless men, John Locke, for example. Liberalism works great without children. Most of Europe is now increasingly single, for example Italy still has one of the lowest birth rates. Conservative policies are very much linked to the model of one parent, normally the father, going to work and the other one, normally the mother, staying at home. A lot of conservatives in Britain will not talk about that because they are afraid it will make them unpopular, but that model is very much linked to conservatism. So, the fewer people who live that sort of life, the fewer who will end up voting Conservative, and this was the big problem with the Cameron-Osborne years, because they didn’t make any effort whatsoever to introduce financial incentives for one-income families. A family with one working parent, in Britain, cannot count on any help from the State, compared, for example, to France.

All in all, couldn’t we just say that the facts of life themselves are conservative, and therefore, the conservative demise cannot last too long? How long can we go on erasing historical memory and censoring?

I do believe that in the end everything will turn out fine. But I mean, look at European history, the Reformation, the French Revolution, communism: there were several times when society went mad, and by contrast the times when we’ve been sensible and civil have been relatively rare. So I can see this mania now going on and on. Liberals, moderates still believe “conservatives and radicals are just as bad as each other”, but there's only one group now that are trying to get people sacked if they don’t support their beliefs, only one group that’s thrown pluralism out of the window, and it’s not conservatives. There is only one political ideology in the West now which is actually kind of a danger  to the rest of us. And the statues thing, you know, fine, no one is a big fan of statues of slave owners, but then once these things start they never stop, and it will always end up turning from statues to people.

People say there will be a conservative reaction, but where is the conservative reaction at the moment? I think there is a false analogy to be made with ‘68, the student riots in France and in the US, but then the right ends up in power, as most people were outraged by extremism. Western societies then were much more conservative and much more religious, and even at universities in Britain conservatives accounted for around 30-40% of academics. Today it’s fewer than 10%, and falling.

Now progressives are dominant in almost all institutions in Britain apart from the military I suppose, and even there it’s changing, even the Royal family has Prince Harry who is a herald of the new religion, just as they once switched from Catholicism to Protestantism. So, I don’t think there’s going to be this great backlash from the conservatives, and I don’t think there is a moral majority anymore, and conservatives generally tend to be less powerful and influential, older, less educated. I think this thing will go on and on for quite some time unfortunately.

I mean, when coronavirus came out people thought that culture war issues aren’t going to be relevant anymore, at least until when the virus is gone, because no one will care about politics ; yet now it seems like political fury has come back,  angrier than ever. It just doesn’t stop.