"A good day for anyone employed by a political party"

Writing in The Times, former Conservative Director of Research Daniel Finkelstein has an interesting slant on the election of David Cameron as party leader:

YESTERDAY was a very good day for anyone who has ever been employed by a political party.

You see, working for a party can be exhilarating, but there is a snag. The upside is this — you may get to be present when history is made, although in my case this mostly consisted of being in the room when people resigned or were informed of a fresh political disaster. The downside? Who is going to employ you when it’s all over? …

Karl Hess, the chief speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, went looking for work after that election was over. He was turned down by every senator and congressman he approached. He then applied to become the Senate lift attendant. When he failed to gain even this appointment, he went on a welding course and took a job on the night-shift in a machine shop.

Anyone reading this who does work for a political party should be assured that Hess’s fate was exceptional and freely-chosen. In the manner of a minuscule faction of the more zealous wing of American conservatism, he arrived at a peculiarly pitiless doctrine known as anarcho-capitalism, which holds that taxation is indistinguishable from slavery. (The most barking elements hold that taxation is worse than slavery. You think I exaggerate? Consider Paul Craig Roberts, a former Treasury official in the Reagan administration, who has run so far to the protectionist, nativist and isolationist far-Right that he has emerged as a regular contributor to the protectionist, nativist and isolationist far-Left Counterpunch magazine. He maintains that slaves in ante-bellum America “were freer than today’s American taxpayer”.)

Believing that America in Vietnam was comparable to Nazi Germany in Poland, and that American government at home was coercive in levying taxes, Hess advocated and practised ‘tax resistance’. The IRS consequently put a claim on all his future earnings in lieu of unpaid taxes, and Hess then took up welding so that he would have a skill he could barter with. Unsurprisingly, his bartering, like the rest of his schemes, was not a great success. I am relieved that Daniel has not followed the same route since leaving Conservative Central Office, but has got himself a responsible job as a Times columnist and political guru.

(A nice story about Goldwater, incidentally, concerns a militant anti-war protest at the Capitol. Only one Congressman went out to meet the demonstrators; it was Goldwater, seeking his former aide Karl Hess, by now a hirsute militant in the cause. On finding Hess, Goldwater embraced him, aware that politics was a second-order matter compared with the demands of friendship.)

There is no moral to this tale. But the Blairite candidate for Conservative leader was clearly the preferable one. In my book Anti-Totalitarianism I argue that regime change and the promotion of global democracy are a progressive cause but also need to be a bipartisan one. Cameron’s views on the totalitarian threat and its antecedents are very much in acord with this.

UPDATE: Just supposing there might be a reader looking for a copy of my book, please pay no attention to Amazon's estimate of the shipping date. The current estimate is because - I am embarrassed to say, because it appears vainglorious rather than merely informative - they have sold out of their initial consignment, but they are receiving another this week.