Roger Scruton has been the primary articulator of a considered, philosophical conservatism for over thirty years. It is a job he inherited pretty much by accident when he was invited by a liberal colleague (Ted Honderich) to produce a defence of “the” conservative position, as a way of sort of evening up the conceptual battleground within political philosophy (the academic  disciplines being then, as now, overcrowded with liberals).

There is much in Scruton’s conservatism that those on the American right might not embrace. American conservatism tends to take as a starting point a rejection of the emphasis of outcome over process. For American conservative thinkers justice resides not within some settled, equal political dispensation; rather it is to be found within the various transactions that take place prior to any such settled dispensation. Assuming there ever is a “settled” political dispensation.

 Liberalism proposes a contractarian view of the just society: the just society is the one that the rational citizen would consent to be a part of. Against this, Scruton argues that two concepts are primary: those of allegiance and obligation. All states exercise power over their subjects, but the legitimate state is one in which that power has been transformed into allegiance. Further, he recognises that there are forms of obligation that lack the character of the contract: the obligation of family is different from that of party: you can explain the latter in terms of a contract, but not the former. The obligations of family are more basic than those obligations generated as the outcome of a contract: as are the obligations of citizenship. The liberal model of the just society is therefore misconceived.

Conservatism, done properly, is anti-theoretical in character. The conservative will value the concrete here-and-now over the abstract. She is welcoming of those changes that reinforce what has been, and she is suspicious of those changes that propose an unnecessary leap into the unknown. It is therefore an irony that Scruton’s body of work has a deeply unifying theme. His range of philosophical reference is more than impressive and his aim is to reinstate the primacy of culture as an object of knowledge. This might seem trivial until you reflect on the course philosophy has taken over the last century or so. No longer interested in serving as a critical prism through which to examine the world, philosophy has too often ended up talking about itself. The method, once the means, is now the end in itself. Scruton’s overarching attempt has been to relegate the philosophical method to the status of a means to understand the human experience. Thus in his earlier books on aesthetics and on the nature of sexual desire, Scruton has developed theories of the mind in ways that illuminate genuine personal and cultural experiences (whilst at the same time doing genuine work in the philosophy of mind, incidentally).

As mentioned, Scruton became a more or less accidental ambassador for conservatism, but this was never enough to earn the forgiveness of the (liberal) academic establishment (whose “liberalism” is merely nominal and self-conferred) and he retired early from full-time university life in order to tend to his farm in Wiltshire. He remains both prolific and under-appreciated. At least for now.

Last Friday it was reported on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newswnight that John McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the US economy were strong had been “roundly condemned” within the US. The typical British viewer, taking this comment in good faith, would have gone to bed under the impression that McCain had been caught out in a gaffe of Dan Quayle proportions.

Dig a little deeper and it is obvious, at least to this Brit, that the BBC claim was incorrect in two ways: McCain had said nothing egregious and, far from being “roundly condemned”. McCain’s remark had been received sympathetically in a number of the less hysterically partisan media outlets. McCain’s claim, taken in its entirety, amounted to little more than that the fundamental unit of currency of the US economy was the US worker, whose industry and enterprise had not been impacted by the current, transitory, economic picture. If the liberal media had stopped being the liberal media for five minutes it might have thought to ask whether Obama’s denunciation of this truism implied a typical condescension towards those citizens who pulled in a little less than his 2007 $4m earnings. But it is in the nature of the liberal media to be incapable of not being the liberal media….even for five minutes.

US election reportage in this country manages to be both lazy and corrupt. It is lazy because the “reporting” amounts to little more than our foreign correspondents talking to your political correspondents. It is corrupt because they uncritically inherit the biases of those political correspondents. In this country all those campaign events that are embarrassing to Obama are omitted whilst those embarrassing to McCain are exaggerated. There has been no analysis of the Obama position on induced birth abortion (a “woman’s right to choose, even in the 4^th trimester” as Ann Coulter put it), nor of his disingenuous revisionism of his Illinois voting record on this issue; there has been little mention of “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright; none of Bill Ayers and most people here probably think that the Saddleback Debate is a film starring the late Heath Ledger. On the other hand: everybody knows that John McCain is about 120 years old and was captured during WW1.

There is a philosophical sense in which this doesn’t matter at all and a practical-ethical sense in which it matters very much. Philosophically speaking, our political beliefs are acquired not on the basis of an impartial reflection on “issues” but rather by acts of will, themselves guided by whatever we already believe. The desire for “unbiased” reporting is, on this view, misplaced : even assuming there is such a thing it does not follow that it is an essential feature of the electoral story.  At the time of the 1992 election I was teaching at a UK university and I clearly remember a colleague announcing, in all seriousness, that he was hoping Clinton would win on the grounds that Clinton, like himself, was an alumnus of Oxford University. This man is now a Professor of Philosophy at a major European university and is, as far as I’m aware, capable of feeding and clothing himself. For him the preference, on these grounds, was an entirely rational one.

But in another sense it matters very much: the BBC is not a private news corporation but a public sector broadcaster. Its charter commits it to impartial reporting, a duty it discharges haphazardly at the best of times. Its journalists should not be acting as foot soldiers in the campaign of a foreign presidential election. It makes no difference that they will prove to be ineffective: it is the attempt itself that is disreputable.

Whether or not I’m correct in believing that the appeal for “unbiased reporting” does not really describe the accumulation of political beliefs, it remains the case that the liberal partisanship of the media is a form of contagion. There are, after all, real constraints on what we are or are not entitled to believe. I’m not entitled to believe that black is white, and I’m not entitled to believe something I know to be a lie. In his brilliant book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, the late Bob Nozick proposed a thought experiment whose purpose is to establish that being part of a democracy is not, of itself, a sufficient requirement for being free. He invites us to imagine the various stages in the emancipation of a slave, whose Master becomes gradually more accommodating over time. Nozick then asks us to identify the specific stage at which the slave becomes free, knowing that we can’t do this. Similarly, the emergence of democracy does not, at any specific point, set us free: there is more to freedom than this. Simply having a vote in a democracy with a corrupt media as a chief agent of communication is not the same as being free.

Incidentally, I kicked this off with a jibe about Dan Quayle’s gaffes. Now I come to think of it, I learned about most of these from our domestic broadcast and print media. Perhaps I owe him an apology…….