The Conservative Question

IN POLITICS, those who have the creative resources to turn disaffection into anger own the conversation. Increasingly, it’s the right that is winning. This is perhaps the third phase in the evolution of freedom after the fall of ideologies that sought the confiscation of conscience. It began with the last days of communism as the Soviet empire cracked under the weight of its own lies. As the liberated came to power, the suddenly unfettered civil society was still not stable enough to sustain the force of hope. It eventually set the stage for the nationalists to reclaim history as well as memory, and who, once in power, would go on to become the mythologists of the nation. Only the degree of power and persuasion separated them from their revolutionary forefathers. The ‘populist’ strongman, the über patriot with a kitschy resistance to the presumptions of capitalism (usually translated as the idea of America), was born. And what followed only made the right the most convincing reader of resentment. They moved to the far side of the established right to form an exclusive, nativist argument against immigration and cultural corrosion. The right surge has spawned a new age of liberal panic. And the fear of a new order of the ‘sovereign us’.

What is not sufficiently noticed is the fact that the rise of the right is matched by the decline of conservatism. As the far right becomes the new right, some believers argue that conservatism itself has gained muscle, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, with devotees like Tucker Carlson, being its mascot. Conservatism as aggressive evangelism may be a repudiation of the familiar traits of an ideological system that prefers stability to subversion; but those who were unmoored by the moral corruption of the old right, once argued to perfection by the likes of William Buckley and Roger Scruton and preserved in power by Reagan and Thatcher, could not—and would not—accept conservatism as politics of grievance.

What is currently unfolding in Britain and America is the best example of the broken political right. In the intellectual home of conservatism, it’s now an idea abandoned by the right. On the eve of an election the Conservatives have already lost the will to fight, Britain shows, in the worst possible way, how the essential political habits of a society can be curtailed by a ruling class that could not remain true to its core values. In a fundamentally conservative society like Britain, power alone corrupted conservatism. Thatcher brought it to the peak; David Cameron made it a centrist position and tested his own ideological conviction with the Brexit referendum. It has been a story of slow unravelling ever since—from the casual recklessness of Boris Johnson, Britain’s most popular Conservative after Thatcher, to the desperate posturing of Rishi Sunak, brought to power by a Westminster coup and today on the verge of losing his debut election as leader. The illness of British conservatism is caused by Conservatives’ failure to resist the temptations of radical change. They promised the fantastical and overlooked the familiar. They made home a permanent debate. Across the Atlantic, post-Reagan conservatism, even as it went on to add the suffix ‘neo’ and the adjective ‘compassionate’, could not calm the restless as usurpers of the right rose from below.

The insurgents have stolen the slogans. As Conservatives struggle for a winning argument for being English in the face of radical social changes and economic stagnation, the subversive right like the Reform Party has acquired the legitimacy of being the people’s party, as different from the party of the elite. And in the US, the possibility of Trump’s return to the White House shows how badly traditional conservatism has lost the popular touch. A mobilised culture of complaint may be the right’s chosen path to the mass mind—and power. It doesn’t restore conservatism because the concept is incompatible with radicalisation.

The quiet confidence of conservatism-as-usual is certain to be challenged by national conservatives, the ideologically supercharged defenders of the faith, and for whom national redemption is impossible without the maximisation of power. What drives national conservatives is not a passive philosophy of social stability but a permanent campaign for power. It is the nationalist’s last stand against multiculturalism and other demons in a vanishing home. Sadly, revolutions have a use-by date, and that is not the only reason why conservatism cannot be saved by inverting the order. Against the bad taste of radicalism, conservatism brings to the political space the decencies and responsibilities of being nationalists without rancour. The conservative crack-up is as real as the right resurgence.

Boris JohnsonBrexitCommunismconservatismgeopoliticsideologyMargaret ThatcherradicalisationRonald Reagan