Conservative thought is alive and kicking – in America, not Britain

Most of us probably assumed that the debate over vaccine passports, or “Covid Status Certification”, as Boris Johnson’s government coyly terms the process, had pretty well run into the ground, with people taking entrenched positions and nothing new to be said. Many of us probably also thought that conservatives had long abandoned original thinking and had little to contribute philosophically to this or any other debate. In that sterile environment, therefore, it was stimulating to read, above an online article by a commentator on the conservative website American Announcement, the headline: “The Un-Conservative Rejection of Vaccine Passports”.

Refreshingly, this piece denounced Republicans and American conservatives generally who reject the idea of vaccination “passports”, as trampling upon the most sacred tenet of conservatism: the inalienable rights of owners of private property. Its author quoted from James Madison and Milton Friedman on the central importance of property rights, to which he could have added Edmund Burke and many others, from Aristotle onwards.

He pointed out that conservatives support businesses being free to enforce a dress code on employees and some restaurants imposing the same stipulation on patrons; that they champion the right of bakers to refuse to supply cakes for same-sex weddings and believe pharmacies should not have to provide emergency contraceptives; and that they do not object to corporations drug-testing job applicants. “All these policies,” he wrote, “rest on the accepted notion that private companies are allowed to set their own terms for doing business and customers who object are free to go elsewhere.”

The writer added the qualification that there were some rare exceptions, such as the prohibition on discrimination against historically oppressed groups. He quoted a tweet from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), saying: “Vaccine Passports are unconstitutional. Period.” To that he responded: “She’s welcome to take that up with the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly described ‘the right to exclude others’ as ‘one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property’.”

The nub of his argument was: “So why, if you own a business, should you be forced to admit someone who declines to verify that he or she has been immunised against a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus?’

That question neatly inverts the whole “personal rights” argument employed by those who object to vaccine documentation, allegedly on conservative grounds. It illustrates that there may be as many philosophical and juridical complexities as there will undoubtedly be practical problems in imposing a certification regime. Of itself, it is a valid opinion; it raises the issue, however, of whether it is outweighed by other considerations also founded on a conservative worldview. Its undoubted value is the philosophical challenge it introduces into a largely stagnant debate.

The writer of this stimulating, or provoking – depending on one’s point of view – article was Steve Chapman, a conservative commentator, author of a twice-weekly syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune and one of several columnists canvassed as a possible successor to William Safire at The New York Times in 2005 by Jack Shafer, editor of Slate, who described Chapman as “a polymath, a creative policy wonk, a tap-dancing writer, a true son of liberty, (and) a failed Christian”, referring to his pro-gun, anti-government, pro-peace, anti-drug war, pro-market views.

Chapman describes himself as a “moderate libertarian”. He is no party hack; he reluctantly supported John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, on the grounds that Dubya had exhausted the mandate of Heaven: “I’ve never done it before, and I hope I never have to do it again. But President Bush has made an irresistible case against his own re-election.”

The important thing about Chapman’s defence of vaccine passports is not whether his argument is convincing or sophistical, but the fact that he has advanced it. The fact, too, that it is based on libertarian considerations – the freedom of a proprietor to exclude customers he perceives as posing a potentially lethal health hazard – bowls a googly at his fellow libertarians who have rushed to judgement on the passports issue with lemming unanimity. That does not mean Chapman’s thesis trumps the arguments of the anti-documentation camp, but it does conservative discourse a favour by requiring his opponents to justify their stance.

Philosophically, Chapman’s case is sound. Wider considerations, however, might outweigh it in practical terms. Today, the surveillance state is a rapidly progressing threat to freedom. China is the most advanced example, but many other governments of a supposedly contrasting ideological complexion are increasingly inclined to go down the same path: Tony Blair was championing isometric passports and identity cards when China’s surveillance systems were much more primitive.

In Western states the pretext is efficiency: comprehensive databases will hugely facilitate more efficient delivery of healthcare, social benefits and other public services; unfortunately, getting the trains running on time has an unhappy resonance in free societies. Or, rather, it did. Today, Britons and other citizens of developed countries have allowed themselves to become cowed by the excesses of the intruder state, curbing speech and freedom of expression, and policing the internet. This menace is augmented by Big Tech amassing outrageous quantities of personal information about customers who have few options but to utilise its services.

As with ID cards in the past, there is a growing unease that vaccination passports would mark the crossing of a Rubicon by state control. The left is happy with that: Marxism envisages universal state oversight, from womb to tomb, as the ideal state of existence. For conservatives, there is a considerable intellectual and moral dilemma.

Broadly summarised, the dilemma is as follows. Would vaccine passports increase the health security of vulnerable people, reduce Covid transmission and even save lives? The honest answer is: almost certainly, yes, though on what scale is impossible to determine. Would passports disrupt the working of the economy? The most likely answer seems to be that they might slow down service at certain venues, at least when first introduced, but not to any serious detriment to the economy; there is no reason why they should be any more obstructive than bus passes.

In abstract terms, therefore, it could persuasively be argued that vaccine passports would be a useful weapon in the fight against Covid and we would be foolish to reject them. But we are not confronted by an abstraction, but by a concrete situation. If the government were universally trusted to impose certification only for the duration of the emergency and then, under transparent supervision, to destroy all databases containing information acquired during the pandemic, most people would acquiesce in the state, very temporarily and for a short-term constructive purpose, acquiring additional power.

But, on the contrary, the state is more mistrusted than at any time since the rule of Cromwell’s major-generals. It cannot be trusted to surrender powers acquired by a further turn of the ratchet of state control. Such is contemporary technology, there is no way of ascertaining that databases have been erased. This presents a profound danger to a formerly free society.

For conservatives, the challenge is to raise their game intellectually. In America, traditionalist cultural conservatism went into decline with the demise of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr, et al., with only Patrick Buchanan preserving the flame. The Trump presidency has revived it, not through the agency of activists in MAGA hats, but through the percolation of their concerns through to the many think tanks, journals and blogs with which American conservatism is endowed.

The more liberal, market-based conservatism is alive and kicking, but it is experiencing a crisis of confidence, in the face of the phenomenon of “woke” corporations. How do conservatives defend the market, when the market is leading the revolution? The outcome is not far to seek: conservatives will lead the drive to curb large corporations, which are now wholly in bed with the state – a less bizarre alliance than might be thought, if one consults history: as long ago as 1830, the headquarters of the violent second French Revolution was in the house of the banker Lafitte. Conservatism today has an important role in defending the interests of SMEs.

Britain’s conservatives are in a less viable state. The fact that the Conservative Party rules Britain with a large majority is in no way reflected in the state of society. The Tories have been in power, albeit initially in coalition, for over a decade: that period has seen the most leftward drift this country has ever experienced, not towards traditional Labour social democracy, but into a totalitarian mesh of cultural Marxism, putting out the lights in our key institutions with bewildering speed. If conservatives do not quickly rediscover their beliefs and reassert them vigorously, everything they claim to value and defend will soon be lost.