Virtue triumphs over reactionary dudes like R Scruton

Gripping example of the new moral authoritarianism in the Graud today (where else), and also another sign that the Great Virtue Signalling Display is moving on -- or perhaps back -- in its relentless quest to find somebody to culturally distance.

This time is is the issue of R Scruton leaving his advisory Government post because of nasty things he is supposed to have said. The debate is summarized by the redoubtable Z Williams:

following an interview with George Eaton that was published in the New Statesman magazine.... Eaton quoted Scruton on three subjects – immigration in Hungary, George Soros and China – and amid the fallout from the perceived racism of Scruton’s views as presented, he was sacked from his (unpaid) job as chair of the Building More, Building Beautiful government commission.

The razor sharp mind of Z Williams is alert to spectral evidence:

Scruton’s original complaint, that he was misrepresented by Eaton and his words were taken out of context, has now broadened. As he put it on the Today programme, he believes that “thought crimes are being manufactured” to hound conservatives such as him out of public life. This is plainly silly; the philosopher has been broadcasting his conservative views for years. He has long been part of an intellectual culture giving respectability to views at the farthest edges of acceptable race generalisation on the mainstream right, to no detriment at all to his standing.

The whole point of this silly view could be that this notion of thought crime is recent, of course, and is active despite the 'standing' of Scruton developed during a more tolerant age. But Scruton is already being found wanting by his 'giving respectability' to the mainstream right.I didn't really see that in his book on Kant but let that pass as a minor contribution and not the point here.

Williams wants to be fair:

Yet his more specific complaints about the interview do deserve examination. Eaton relays Scruton’s thoughts about China thus: “They’re creating robots out of their own people … each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.” The transcript, when it was leaked under still mysterious circumstances, shows Scruton making a point about the conformity demanded by the authoritarian Chinese government, rather than denigrating Chinese people. This should have been made clearer.

So context is important here but also in what follows, but in a different way:

Scruton is on much thinner ice when he moves on defend his comments about “the invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East” into Hungary. He was not, he says, calling it an invasion, or sorting anyone into a huge tribe on his own account. He was merely ventriloquising the legitimate concerns of the average Hungarian. They must feel like that, or they wouldn’t have voted for the hard-right scourge of refugees, Victor Orbán, right? This entire proposition is fabulously disingenuous.

Liberal thought police have never understood academic indirect discourses. Scruton's is an absurd generalisation,but it is far less clear that these are his own personal views. Nevertheless:

First, when you talk about groups of people in dehumanising, “tribes”, “floods” and “swarms”, when you turn reality on its head so that the most vulnerable people on Earth become a threat or an “invasion”, that has impact. To project those thoughts, post hoc, on to some imaginary “average person” doesn’t change the fact that it was you that said them [so indirect discourse must be banned] . Second, the notion of “huge” numbers of refugees is itself a figment of Orbán’s imagination, conjured up as a scapegoating device of the kind the far right has been using for time immemorial. The total number of asylum applications to Hungary last year was under 1,000. [ well, asylum applications is not the same as people actually arriving, of course,if we want to be sticklers on matters of unparenthesised fact]...There is nothing conservative about going in to bat for the falsehoods of a regime which gathers people into camps and starves them. This stuff is really pretty radical. [So it is Scruton not Orban that bears the responsibility. Was he 'going into bat' for him? Is he defending the policy of herding people into camps?]

On an even more gripping topic for those into the very latest cultural politics:

Scruton told Eaton: “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.” Murray said Eaton had wrongly failed to include in his write-up what Scruton said next: “It’s not necessarily an empire of Jews – I mean, that’s such nonsense.”

But Willliams sees through this denial and is is still out for conviction, if only by association:

But Scruton’s telling of the “facts” is itself partial [nice ambiguity] . Soros has been a hate figure for Orbán since 2018. [so does this contradict 'the facts'? The term is now in inverted commas, of course] His Open Society Foundation felt obliged to move from Budapest to Berlin. Conspiracies theories have been fabricated casting him as nefarious puppet master in chief. If Soros looms large in Hungarian society, it’s not because he has an empire, it’s because ancient antisemitic tropes are being reanimated in his name.[She just knows this].  Which isn’t to say Scruton is an antisemite, but when he plays into notions of Soros’s empire that are being used across the globe by the far right for antisemitic purposes, it doesn’t seem like the most rigid policing of thought crime to point that out.[Scruton is guilty because some other people also attack Soros, and they really are antisemites, so he must be contaminated. ANY criticism of Soros must therefore be condemned. Of course, both Williams and Thatcher were women...]

Williams just knows she is right because she is far more in touch with the zeitgeist:

Scruton, transfixed by the context and reception of his own remarks, [so naive, these philosophers] fails to consider the broader political context: refugees, Muslims in particular, are demonised, their numbers magnified and their hardships minimised for a purpose. Jews are demonised for the same purpose – the sowing of social division to serve an authoritarian agenda. It’s really nothing personal when we challenge these narratives of otherness; no malice is intended towards the bullied conservative.[Lovely -- and there's no evidence for personal attacks or campaigns, say to get Scruton sacked? Williams must know the context here, so surely she is as guilty as those blinkered intolerants who wanted him punished and for whom she has just gone into bat] It’s just that the principles of universal human rights [to which she has a privileged access, of course] – more than that, love, fellowship, solidarity – are more important than whether or not a reactionary dude gets to keep on chairing a commission.

I agree. The destiny of the Nation is more important than the personal freedom of reactionary elements! The national interests should dominate rather than the mere votes of 17.4m reactionary dudes