The Community Of The Realm

By Cernig

Iain Dale, a well-known British conservative commentator and blogger, today posted an excerpt from his interview with Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond that grabbed my attention and got me thinking. Here's the passage.

The SNP has a strong, beating social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn�t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. It didn�t mind the economic side so much. But we didn�t like the social side at all. One of the most famous phrases in Scottish history is the �Community of the realm� � I used it earlier. This idea that there is a community of interest stretching across the population. It�s a very Scottish concept and Scotland doesn�t like people who regale against it.

The Community of The Realm is the idea that it takes all of a people to make a nation and that in that sense even a King is only one of the many. Even as far back as the seminal 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the King was the King of Scots, the people, not Scotland. Scotland belonged to all her people, not just the King. It is indeed a very Scottish concept - even that hero of conservative free-marketeers Adam Smith recognised it, and its essential role in preserving a whole nation.

Where most conservatives err is in believing that economics takes precedence to morality or that economics can regulate morality just like any other market. The utilitarians - inspired by that other great Scot, J.S. Mill - were to point this error out very well (and indeed Mill became far more of an influence on the Founders of America than Smith ever was). Smith was never that dumb. He himself advocated for a Government that was active in sectors other than the economy: he advocated for public education of poor adults; for institutional systems that were not profitable for private industries; for a judiciary; and for a standing army. Scots, pragmatic as ever and never mindlessly following extremist ideologues, chose a middle course beween the need for social "nannying", as conservatives like to call it without ever noting that a standing army is just as much a part of that social fabric as social security payments, and the entirely free market...a balance of positive and negative freedoms.

As a consequence of that Scottish pragmatism, a strong British conservative tradition that includes Smith, Benjamin Disraeli (One Nation) and the younger Winston Churchill that predates both Marx and Thatcherite/American Republican thugonomics evolved. That current grew out of one of the few positive experiences with administering an Empire - that it was painfully obvious that there was another direction on the scale of "relative poverty". Thankfully, the British Conservative party has since returned to that tradition and repudiated Thatcherism but that tradition never made its way into the "I'm Alright, Jack" variety of American conservativism exemplified by the modern Republican Party. All Republicanism today is interested in are  negative freedoms - the freedom to be without government supervision as much as is concommitant with public safety. But the British variety, like more left-wing political theory, also concerns itself with the need for the government to provide positive freedoms through legislation - such things as rent assistance, food stamps and other social programs enable the people to not be free to starve, go cold or go without shelter.

And here's where I think the crucial difference between barrack Obama and John McCain lies. Obama, although doubtless fond of rhetoric which he may not deliver upon, seems to really get the Community of The Realm. "Eight Houses" Mccain doesn't, as when he backed predatory lenders over the people suffering real privation because of the credit crunch those lenders created for themselves. Neither do George Bush or the current mainstream of Republicanism, which is why we've seen such a strong push for an Imperial Presidency this last eight years.

As America is asked to choose between the Community of The Realm or the Imperial Presidency, then it would do well to emulate the Founding fathers, who brought their studies of Mill, Adams and the Scottish Declaration of Independence to the fore as they drew up their own and the subsequent Constitution.