CONSERVATIVE

top, by the government in the nation’s capital.
The breakup of the glorious old French provinces
with their local parlements and their replacement with
small departements, named after some geographic feature
and totally dependent upon the Paris government, was
a typically leftist “reform”. Or let us look at education.
The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of
grievances and animosities against personal initiative
and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing
everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence)
is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency
to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry
of education controlling all aspects of education. For
example, there is the famous story of the French
Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and,
glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment
in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an
essay on the joys of winter”. Church schools, parochial
schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at
all in keeping with leftist sentiments.
The reasons for this attitude are manifold.
Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but
the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive;
i.e., the notion that social differences in education
should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a
chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type
of information in the same fashion and to the same
degree. This should help them to think in identical or at
least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should
be especially true of countries where “democratism” as
an ‘-ism’ is being pushed. There efforts will be made to
ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts.
Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated
and promotion from one grade to the next be made
automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint
this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this
hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not
tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so
schlimmer fur die Tatsachen” (all the worse for the facts).
Leftism does not like religion for a variety of
causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating
state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least
one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a
Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion,
leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures.
One is a form of separation of Church and State which
eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to
atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside
the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of
the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment.
Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated,
not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used
the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the
latter.
The anti-religious bias of leftism rests, however,
not solely on anti-clericalism, anti-ecclesiasticism, and
the antagonism against the existence of another body,
another organization within the boundaries of the State:
It gets its impetus not only from jealousy but, above
all, from the rejection of the idea of a supernatural, a
spiritual order. Leftism is basically materialistic.
The Provident State, Hilaire Belloc’s “Servile
State”, is obviously a creation of the leftist mentality.
We will not call it the Welfare State because every state
exists for the welfare of its citizens; here a good name
has been misused for a bad thing. In the final prophecy
of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America the
possibility, nay, the probability of the democratic
state’s totalitarian evolution toward the Provident State
has been foretold with great accuracy. Here again two
wishes of the leftist find their fulfilment, the extension
of government and the dependence of the person
upon the state which controls his destiny from the
cradle to the grave. Every movement of the citizen, his
birth and his death, his marriage and his income, his
illness and his education, his military training and his
transportation, his real estate and his travels abroad—
everything is to be a matter of knowledge to the state.
One could continue this list ad nauseam.
Naturally, we must add that in the practical order of
things there are exceptions to the rule because leftism is
a disease that does not necessarily spread as a coherent,
systematic ideology. Here and there an isolated
manifestation can appear in the “opposite camp”.
Sometimes, to quote an example, the stamp of rightism
has been applied to Spain’s present government.
Yet it is obvious that certain features of the Franco
government have a leftist character as, for instance, the
strong centralizing tendencies, the restrictions placed
on languages other than Castilian, the censorship, the
monopoly of the state-directed syndicates. As for the
first two failings—leftist tendencies are failings—one
has to remember the effects of the immediate historic
past.
Nationalism (in the European sense) is leftism;
and Catalonian, Basque, and Gallegan (Galician)
nationalism naturally assumed a radically leftist
character opposing “Castilian” centralization. Hence,
in Madrid, almost all movements promoting local rights
and privileges, be they political or ethnic, are suspect
as leftist, as automatically opposed to the present
regime as well as to the unity of Spain. (Spain is “Una,
Grande, Libre”!) Oddly enough—but understandable to
anybody with a real knowledge of Spanish history—the
extreme right in Spain, represented, naturally, by the
Carlists and not at all by the Falangists, is federalistic
(“localistic”, anti-centralistic) in the European sense.
The Carlists are opposed to the centralizing tendencies
of Madrid and when late in 1964 the central government
made an effort to cancel the privileges of Navarra, the
fueros, the Carlists of Navarra, nearly issued a call to
rebellion—at which point the government quickly
declared its own preparatory steps as a “mistake” and
backed down.
All conservative movements in Europe are
federalistic and opposed to centralization. Thus
we encounter in Catalonia, for instance, a desire for
autonomy and the cultivation of the Catalan language
among the supporters of the extreme right as well as the
left. The notorious Catalonian Anarchists always have
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Summer 2015