Unimportance of Policy

My vision of a reactionary future is a state with a secure but small
government, that insists on its own sovereignty but is otherwise light
in touch; that supports norms of traditional social behaviour but does
not enforce them; that is tolerant of both home-grown and immigrant
minority subcultures but does not permit them to attempt to impose
themselves or their sensitivities on the traditional culture of the
country.
I think that will work well. I want it because I think it will work
well. If I am wrong, and it works badly — under-regulated businesses
pauperise the bulk of the population; immigrant ghettoes subvert the
native culture and cause crime and disorder; other problems I have not
anticipated — then I don’t want it.
Among those of us who call ourselves reactionaries, there are some
with very different visions of a reactionary society. If one of them,
like me, says that they wish to see their vision realised because it
will work well, then we are allies, in spite of our conflicting
visions, because the reactionary principle we share is that neither
they nor I get to decide how a good society is to be achieved. That is
a matter for the legitimate sovereign, not for votes or opinion polls
or TV debates.
I do not hold it at all likely that a newly-installed reactionary
regime will immediately establish a state exactly according to my
particular vision. So be it. A reactionary ruler has a precious
attribute that no non-reactionary ruler can have: his legitimacy is
independent of his policy.
If a ruler imposes heavy wealth taxes, and they drive investment out
of the country, and jobs disappear, and the people become poorer, and
his revenues fall, he can shrug, and say, “that turned out badly”, and
reverse the policy. If a group of radical Wiccanists buy a couple of
square miles of land, set up a private village, permitted by the
policy of religious freedom, and then start sneaking out to bomb
churches, the government can ban their organisations and require
specific licensing for any new religious community. In neither case
will the U-turn in policy undermine the right of the government to
keep on governing.
This shit is difficult, and I don’t expect anyone to get it right
first time. One of the great problems of democracy is that those in
power (whether formal or informal) largely achieve it by associating
themselves with specific policies, and are therefore subject to
overwhelming incentive to hold those same policies regardless of
evidence. The shift of power from politicians to academics was
intended to solve this problem, but it only resulted in turning
academics into politicians, their academic positions tied to the
policies they support, and no more able to recant an error than an
elected representative. A climatologist radically changing his
estimate of the climate sensitivity is in exactly the same position as
a Member of Parliament crossing the floor of the house.
If a new King comes to absolute power, and adopts policies that I
think are bad, I will wait for him to see the bad effects, and fix the
policies. He is far more likely to be responsive to reality than is a
sprawling institutional structure that admits acolytes to its ranks on
the basis of their loyalty to the political campaigns of the
moment. That is the fatal flaw of the Modern Structure: by tying
legitimacy to particular policies, it produces policy based on what
sounds good in an ivory tower, not on what pleases Nature or Nature’s
God when it is applied.
Questions of policy are relevant to reactionaries only as
demonstrations of the failings of the Modern Structure to recognise
failure and respond to it.
Admittedly, the question of what “working well” means is not quite as
clear-cut as I would like. It’s conceivable that the ruler could
decide that the policies I want are working badly, when it seems to me
they are working well. We are all so used to dealing with politicians
who will swear blind that obvious catastrophes are triumphs that I
think we tend to overestimate this problem. A sovereign who benefits
from real success and is harmed by real failure is, in my judgement,
far more likely to assess success and failure more reasonably than a
politician who benefits only from the popular perception of
success. The key difference is that a secure King cares what his
subjects think of the country, not what they think of him. He may
still prefer the effects of policies that are not my own favourites,
but if he does then they are almost sure to be good enough. Good
government is very difficult, and satisficing is a perfectly sane
approach.
Update: I just saw nickbsteve’s latest. He makes a related
point: that while it is in the nature of the Cathedral to make factual errors,
the particular factual errors it makes are not the most important thing, compared
to the mechanisms that cause it to make those errors. I would say that the particular
failing of the Cathedral is not the fact of its making errors, but its relative
inability to correct them, for the reasons above.