Reagan and Thatcher's conservatism must be rescued from Trump and Johnson

Alienation of Conservative Affections

The rot set in well before Johnson and Trump took office. In the first decade or so of the 21st century, Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK had already strained the Reagan-Thatcher model to destruction.

In the US, George W. Bush responded to the shock of 9/11 with a new version of the Reagan doctrine: Declare war on a new global threat — terrorism rather than communism — and try to spread democracy to the Middle East. He also increased public spending while cutting taxes on the grounds that, as his vice-president, Dick Cheney, put it, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

The war on terrorism failed not just for incidental reasons — US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s pig-headed failure to prepare for the occupation of Iraq — but because transplanting democracy in hostile soil is a labor of Sisyphus, and a bloody one at that. The cost of this failure was borne most heavily by working-class communities that provided the bulk of troops for Iraq and Afghanistan. The bursting of the economic bubble in 2008 also victimised less well-off voters. America saw 1.7 million home foreclosures in 2008 and 2.1 million in 2009.

In the UK, David Cameron tried a different version of the formula. He sided with Thatcher rather than Reagan over how to handle a deficit, implementing a severe program of austerity — even though global borrowing costs were unusually low. He also focused on winning affluent voters by taking up issues like global warming and gay marriage. Budget cuts gradually but relentlessly hollowed out both local government and the National Health Service while his photo-op “ hug-a-husky” climate policies did nothing for the less-well-off.

The result in both the US and UK was a deepening alienation from politics as people concluded that the ruling parties were either paying no attention to their problems or actively making them worse. In the US, the Tea Party movement protested furiously against bank bailouts and tax rises. In Britain, millions gave up voting on the grounds that you always got the same identikit politicians mouthing the same identikit policies.

An incident in Newcastle in the north of England during the Brexit referendum debates summed up the divergence. An academic, Anand Menon, had invited the audience to think about the decline in GDP that would result from a vote to leave the European Union. A woman then loudly heckled him, “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.”

Populism Explodes

The two great populist eruptions of 2016 — Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in November — were responses to the collapse of the Reagan-Thatcher-Clinton-Blair template.

Brexit was powered by a coalition of people who felt that they were being ignored by Cameron’s “double liberalism” of free markets and trendy causes. About 2.8 million habitual non-voters were galvanised enough to go to the polls to propel Britain out of the EU. In the US, Trump vowed to keep America out of “pointless wars” in distant parts of the world. He aimed to prevent foreigners, particularly the Chinese, from making fools of Americans by twisting global trade rules to their advantage.

As a result, the Conservative Party and the GOP engaged in a thoroughgoing revision of their perceived constituencies and policies — and became more blue collar. Conservatives on both sides of the ocean shifted their focus from “freedom” — the great battle cry of the 1980s — to “security” because downscale voters are more dependent on state aid.

Theresa May, Cameron’s successor as prime minister, offered a vision of a more activist government focused on helping the “just-about-managing” — the people neglected by Cameron who then voted in large numbers for Brexit. Trump, who liked to dub himself a “blue collar billionaire,” embraced a combination of tariffs against Chinese goods, immigration restrictions and government subsidies to try to boost the fortunes of the workers who, in his view, had built America in the first place.

A group of prominent Senators — Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and, most recently, JD Vance — have vigorously argued that the GOP needs to dedicate itself to protecting and promoting blue collar jobs. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, has made his name by taking on “Big Woke” corporations, most notably the Walt Disney Co.

Populism has had a deep impact. In Britain, blue collar voters retook their position at the heart of politics from the educated middle class whose support obsessed Blair and Cameron. Sebastian Payne, head of the think tank Onward and author of Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England, says that when he grew up in Gateshead, a working-class town in the north, socialists ruled the polling booths. Now, the Tories have made voting truly competitive. Meanwhile, in America, Trump has provided a roadmap for President Joe Biden, who has consolidated, and indeed extended, his predecessor’s security-oriented policies with massive pieces of legislation aimed at protecting America from some Chinese products and stimulating domestic industries.

Nevertheless, the transition to this new political settlement was a mess. Johnson and Trump were chaotic managers — and had to deal with the pandemic to boot. Both made up policies as they went along. Trump either left administration jobs unfilled or sacked people on the grounds that “I’m the only one that matters.” Johnson eventually resigned because almost no one would serve under him any longer.

For a while, Johnson and Trump employed fire and brimstone advisors in the shabby forms of Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon, respectively. Cummings told Downing Street staff that the party was committed to achieving Brexit “by any means necessary” — a reference to a speech by Malcolm X on violence in the pursuit of justice. Bannon announced after the 2016 election that “it’s not time to bring the country together. It’s time to take on the elites in this country. Take the torch to them. Hit them with a blowtorch.”

Populism proved to be more a protest movement than a philosophy of governing. The results were economic paralysis and political hypocrisy.

After 13 years of Tory government in the UK, real wages are going down, borrowing costs are going up, and public services are crumbling. Brexit has reduced living standards by an estimated 14 percent compared with what they would have been if Britain had not left the EU. Life opportunities between the north and the south have continued to widen despite Johnson’s attempt at “levelling-up” the just-about-managing. According to a recent YouGov poll, only 9 percent of voters think that Brexit was “more of a success than a failure.”

The Challenge to Conservatism

The populist mutation of conservatism has untethered Anglo-American adherents from their traditional moorings.

In the UK, the core of the Conservative party is no longer among country squires and small-town solicitors. Its membership has dwindled to 150,000 diehards who not only tend to be much older and more right-wing than the average voter but also indulge in the irresponsibility that comes from having paid off your mortgage and being in receipt of an index-linked pension. These capricious elderlies gave Liz Truss the prime minister’s office over Rishi Sunak precisely because her growth at the highest speed policies dovetailed with their self interests.

Today’s GOP is also very far from the country club Republicans of George H. W. Bush — that nearly moribund type of noblesse oblige New England Brahmins. It now belongs to middle and working class radicals who believe in a combustible combination of gun rights, low taxes and, increasingly, higher spending.

These constituencies put the future of both parties at risk because powerful social and economic forces are drawing the world away from conservatism. Ironically, Thatcher and Reagan set in motion the globalisation that has made life progressively difficult for both avowedly free-market parties. Global capitalism reserved its biggest benefits for rich-world plutocrats and the emerging world’s middle class. In the US in 1993-2015, for example, the top 1 percent captured 52 percent of the increase in real pretax incomes.

The sort of people who once acted as the backbones of the Conservative Party and the GOP — the small manufacturer in Athens, Ohio or the comfortable solicitor in Manchester, England — find themselves put out of business by Mega Bucks Corp. or Big Law LLC. They watch misty-eyed as their children troop off to London or New York to work for those massive enterprises run by world-class money grubbers. Payne puts it politely: “Conservatism is not yet delivering the mass prosperity that it needs to deliver if it is to create a conservative society.”

But global economics is just one factor. The old Brahmins are being replaced by new Brahmins — a class that is far from conservative ideologically.

The new Brahmin elite in the eyes of the economist Thomas Piketty is the class of highly-educated knowledge workers. They have already transformed academia and the public-sector into conservative-free zones. A survey by The Harvard Crimson found that only 2 percent of the university’s faculty were willing to identify themselves as conservatives, while some 80 percent regarded themselves as left-of-center.

Senior civil servants on both sides of the Atlantic are happier with left-of-center administrations. Indeed, they were perhaps most content under Clinton and Blair.

The proliferation of this Brahmin elite is threatening to transfigure big corporations, too. While there continues to be some pushback, big companies routinely implement diversity, equity and inclusion programs and talk about “stakeholder” interests

Though the new Brahmin mindset is commonly defined as “woke,” you might as well define it as “anti-conservative.” They think the Anglo-American past is irredeemably stained by slavery, racism and colonialism. They also believe in making up for these sins by embracing minorities of every kind, at the expense of the majority.

How Conservatives Have Responded

Conservatives despair at the spread of this Brahmin virtue signaling. One response has been anger. Many feel they are strangers in their own lands: that they are not only seeing big increases in immigration, but are being asked to conform to the habits of the newcomers rather than vice versa. They feel that they are being squeezed out of power in institutions that they once controlled, particularly universities. The culture, they feel, continues to march relentlessly to the left. The result can be rabid populism.

Conservative anger was at its most splenetic in the US. Trump’s rallies during his campaign against Hillary Clinton echoed with chants of “lock her up.” Michael Anton, a pro-Trump intellectual, called 2016 the “Flight 93 election”— a reference to the 9/11 plane in which passengers attempted to wrest control back from hijackers. “Charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote under his then-pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” in the Claremont Review of Books. “You may die anyway.”

But you can also see it in Britain where politics, and particularly Tory politics, has traditionally smacked more of Bilbo Baggins’ sandy hobbit hole than the American snake-snarling “don’t tread on me.” Young Tory bloggers despair that they are being deprived of their birthright in the form of an affordable house and a decent job. The anger is not as furious as it was during the Brexit impasse when senior Tories talked about bulldozing the House of Commons and the Daily Mail accused senior judges of being “traitors” on its front page. But one senses that it is bubbling away not too far beneath the surface.

Truss’s abortive rush-for-growth government was the product partly of her hot-headed nature, but also partly out of a sense that nothing else had worked so Conservatives might as well roll the dice and try something radical. It had a Flight 93 feel to it, too.

Those heated sentiments can coalesce in nationalism, which offered the rediscovery of home in a world that was becoming both dangerous and impersonal. Trump’s favorite slogan was “Make America Great Again.” He said he was sick of US politicians who put everyone else before the American people, and of global do-gooders who blamed America for everything that was wrong in the world. Brexit was driven above all by English nationalism — a sense that Britain was an exceptional country and that the country’s elites were culpable of either sacrificing England’s interests to foreigners or denigrating its past achievements.

An Alternative Response

But there’s another, less confrontational way to reading nationalism: pride in your country. As Dean Godson, the head of the UK think tank Policy Exchange, puts it, the best way to spot a conservative these days is not by the traditional sign of a posh accent but whether you believe in “our island story.”

There’s been an efflorescence of conservatives thinking about the nature of conservatism — and how it can still be effective in the world. In Britain, the right is more intellectually adventurous than the left, despite the fact that Conservatives have been solidly in power for 13 years. Whatever we are living through, it is certainly not a repeat of 1945 or 1997 when the left succeeded in setting the agenda against an exhausted right. Conservative think tanks are focusing on long-term projects rather than quick policy fixes. In Britain, Payne’s Onward has launched a major project on the future of conservatism; and Godson’s Policy Exchange is trying to shape long-term policies for a post-Brexit Britain.

In America, new groupings such as Compass are vying with established institutions such as the Claremont Institute to provide some intellectual substance to Trump’s national conservatism. Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Decade of Decay — a volume of essays edited by Arthur Milikh of the Heritage Foundation — was  published on June 27.

Patrick Deneen, who wrote Why Liberalism Failed in 2018, has a new book called Regime Change, something that conservatives used to recommend for Iraq rather than their own country.  “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he recently told Politico magazine. “I want something far more revolutionary.” The book says the current grassroots populism may provide a way back to a pre-liberal age of settled values and stable communities. This is the road to nowhere.

To avoid becoming howling-at-the-moon reactionaries, conservatives need to revive some of the central ideas of conservatism that were forgotten by the recent populist frenzy: respect for institutions, a belief in the importance of character (Trump and Johnson have between them all the character flaws known to man),  and a general commitment to good cheer and sociability. It’s time for conservatives to rediscover their traditional love of laughter and champagne (socialists prefer interminable meetings). And British and American conservatives should shelve such uncivil actions as proroguing parliament or besieging Congress.

Conservatives also need to engage in a more constructive dialogue with liberals. Conservatism was born after the French Revolution in reaction against liberalism. Ever since, it has been at its best when it debates liberalism rather than ignoring it or going beyond it. Conservatives need to think carefully about how to fix the machinery of free-market capitalism rather than abandoning the field to big government. They also need to produce conservative solutions to the problems identified by the woke Brahmin rather than engaging in ritual demonisation.

Anglo-American Separation? Or Reconciliation?

Whither conservatism on either side of the Atlantic? A movement that once advanced together faces two potentially existential problems.

One is divorce — or at least moving into separate houses. The ties between British and American conservatism are deep. Policy Exchange wears its pro-Americanism on its sleeve with two full-sized flags, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, dominating the main floor of its offices; there are large pictures of Condoleezza Rice and Mike Pompeo on the walls. Some British Conservative MPs such as Liam Fox and Steve Baker give the impression that they are always on the verge of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

But there have always been gaps between the two nations. The US has always been three-clicks to the right of Britain — more comfortable with capitalism red in tooth-and-claw and more hostile to collective safety nets. The majority of British Conservative MPs would surely have voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump in 2016 (and many would have voted for Al Gore rather than Bush in 2000).

America has a libertarian folk tradition that is almost completely absent in Britain: Witness the average Briton’s incomprehension at the right to bear arms. America has long been more polarised than Britain because of the absence of a national broadcaster such as the BBC and vast differences between “red” and “blue” America.

And the differences are growing wider. US polarisation is becoming so extreme that Republicans and Democrats no longer inhabit the same reality. The country’s money politics is something out of ancient Rome rather than modern Europe. Frank Luntz, an American pollster who has advised leading Republicans including George W. Bush, has used a visiting position at the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank established by Margaret Thatcher, to issue bloodcurdling warnings to British Conservatives to avoid going down the American road.

Robert Colville, the Centre’s director, argues that there may now be closer parallels between Labour and the Democrats than the GOP and the Conservatives. Godson of Policy Exchange points out that, unlike America’s new right, the British Conservative establishment has remained resolutely internationalist, particularly when it comes to defense, the main division being over whether Britain should seek to be closer to Europe or the English-speaking world. As a small trading nation, Britain has no choice but to remain globally integrated. As a giant continental power, America can retreat inwards, as it did with such catastrophic global consequences in the 1920s and 1930s.

There is also the possibility that either the Republicans or the Conservatives — or perhaps both — will drift into angry irrelevance. The chances of this are highest in the US. The GOP is having a harder job of ridding itself of Trump than the Conservatives are of ridding themselves of Johnson. The culture war is more vicious in the US and the anger of GOP voters at the liberal establishment more palpable.

But the Conservatives may also be entering a long period in the wilderness similar to the Blair-Brown era of 1997-2000. Sunak’s party is trailing Labour by 25 points according to a Times/YouGov poll published on June 24. Much depends on the next election, which must occur before Jan. 28, 2025. If he loses badly, the Tories may lurch further to the right on the grounds that the people voted for the left because the Conservatives weren’t conservative enough.

Both these options — divorce or irrelevance — would be bad for both the broader conservative cause and for Britain and America more generally. Anglo-American conservatism is “stronger together” because each side provides something that the other needs: America provides intellectual vim and excitement, while Britain provides a leveling of common sense.

Britain and America are better off with a strong conservative movement not only because countries need oppositions but also because conservatism can prevent liberalism from going too far. Conservatives need to work hard to put the Johnson and Trump years behind them if they are to rescue both a great intellectual tradition and a vital trans-Atlantic partnership.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg