Toryism as Stupidity? The Answer Lies in the “Vain Guard”

One of the more enduring contradictions still living in the American intellectual scene is the presence of a strong conservative movement that is intellectual in thrust – a bookish conservatism – and the enduring stereotype that the “right wing” is nothing more than the stupid faction. This contradiction is so engrained that more than a few conservatives actually thrive on it, in the same way a bodybuilder considers himself a “weak wimp” for being able to bench press ‘only’ 200 lbs.

You probably know that this leads to a different trap. If a young intellectual pursues excellence using that kind of self-castigation as a motivator, he or she will wind up being called “elitist” for their pains. It’s a sad fact that an educated brain doesn’t produce the same hormonal reactions in the average person as the sight of 16-18” biceps do.

I found that, when dealing with a hoax, the best strategy is two-stage: first, examine yourself for any significant traces of such stupidity; then, when they have either not been found or have been eradicated, go after the critics. There is something to the charge of “stupid Tory,” and it relates to the common perception of Adam Smith....

This article is really a self-examination for intellectuals, based upon the assumption that long-lived stereotypes of the kind that liberals apply to us have a grain of plausibility to them.

Some of you guys might see a clearing-of-the-decks thrust to this piece. That would seem to be necessary because the Left is taking in Adam Smith, so the one-store town now has two of them.

Competition never stops, sad to say.

That's a good point - but had I worked it in, I would have had to discuss the implication of it: once the principle of laissez-faire is breached at the political level, a Smithian of that sort would be left with nothing to say as government ratchets up, except for issue-specific criticisms of how a new policy measure makes the economy less efficient than it otherwise would have been. He or she would be confined at the vision level to Wriston-like assurances that government intervention isn't as bad as it seems because the market is still working fine, if less than optimally, underneath it.

The piece was brief, and I could be faulted for being adding too much "politics" in my political economy and not enough "economics." But adding the item you wrote would have involved bringing in the findings of the public-choice school, and their identifications and descriptions of the systemic flaws of the mercantile welfare State.

You have raised a real issue, though, and the above would be what I would have to work into a discussion of it.

Your article is hard to follow, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with Toryism, and little to do with intellectuals or intellectualism. It seems to be about free market or laissez-faire economics. If you are a Canadian, you probably already know that Smith and Rothbard are a long way from traditional Toryism.

John Stuart Mill, who famously called Tories, "the stupid party" was very much a free-marketeer himself, at least in his youth, before he embraced socialist doctrines. Enlightenment liberals of both statist and antistatist stripes have long considered Tories "stupid" because of the conservative attachment to religion, tradition, and established habits.

Leftists often do intimate or argue that free marketers are in favor of business or "the rich," but few libertarians or conservatives worth their salt are phased or at a loss for a response.

Okay. You're right about the origin of the "stupid Tory" crack, and about the proviso that Smith's work and the rest of the corpus of laissez-faire thought are very definitely "liberal" by European standards, but the Smithian in North America is (or at least was) easy to label as a "Tory" by Keynesians and other breeds of American liberal.

I've read a lot of complaints about this tarpasting in the writings of modern American defenders of laissez-faire. It's just as much a convention for these scholars to insist that laissez-faire is not apologetics for "big business" as it is for stock market advice givers to show that speculation is not usury in disguise.

Standard American liberal practice is to say that the era of laissez-faire ended with the Great Depression; ever since then, a defense of the free market has been reactionary. This is why, according to these types of liberals, a defense of the free market is considered to be an accurate litmus test for both "Toryism" (the North American variety) and "stupidity."

This was the current and accepted use of the "stupid Tory" crack in North America right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. I had assumed that the liberals would have continued with cracks of that sort, but maybe the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites took the wind out of their sails - and replaced the cracks with a redefinition of "free market."

The article was less than scholarly; that I concede. It was an attempt to warn conservative intellectuals about one of our Achilles heels.

I should add a postface. The reason why you found me "hard to follow" might very well be that I am stuck in a past when the libertarian type was easy to mock successfully, or it could be the result of my Canadian upbringing. Us Canadians lack a stable tradition of respect for minimal government in our own soil; we tended to rely upon British thought for its justification.

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