The Future of Conservatism

THE TRULY REMARKABLE thing about Boris Johnson’s victory in the general election of December 2019 was not its wide margin, though 80 seats were larger than expected. It was the way that Johnson won by successfully presenting himself as an attractive alternative to the Conservative government—as a Conservative standing for change.

He did this by appealing to disillusioned Labour supporters who voted to leave the European Union (EU) in the referendum of 2016 and had since been enraged by the unwillingness of the political establishment to honour their decision. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that many of these people had ‘lent’ him their votes and he has pledged to reward their faith in him with a package of measures to improve their lives.

This leaves our Prime Minister as an anti-Tory Tory, promising to adopt Labour-style policies of public investment. At the same time, he has promised to ‘get Brexit done’, which is a massively disruptive process; the <Financial Times> reckons that he will have to negotiate 759 new treaties. There is also talk of setting up a commission to examine ‘how our democracy operates’. This is taken as code for curbing the powers of the judges who thwarted his attempt to prorogue Parliament in October. Meanwhile, the Withdrawal Agreement he has negotiated with the EU has left the constitutional status of Northern Ireland in doubt.

What then, we might reasonably ask, is conservative, with either a large or a small ‘c’, about his new government?

Conservatism has always been an essentially negative worldview, but in recent times, after generations of centrist liberal governments all over the West, many conservatives have come to embrace the necessity of positive change, of rejecting the status quo, which might mean permissive laws or longstanding institutions like the EU or North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Conservatism, therefore, now means not a conviction that the past can teach us valuable lessons, it has become a faith in enterprise and individuality. Uncritical acceptance of traditionalism has been swept away, replaced by an assertive counterattack against the politically correct, left-liberal agenda of radical equality. There is also a distinct whiff of ethnonationalism about it.

This development is somewhat easier to discern in the US than in Britain. President Donald Trump is no traditionalist, but he has a guiding conservative idea—that America can somehow be returned to the 1950s. As yet he hasn’t unveiled any practical measures to do this. The so-called ‘Muslim travel ban’ or the non-existent ‘big, beautiful wall’ on the US’ southern border are colourful baubles dangled before a public eager to feel that somebody somewhere is doing something to help them.

The negative bias of Trump’s agenda suggests that he is not directly addressing the real problems that the US faces. If America risks being out-produced and overshadowed by a determined, wealthy China, Trump’s domestic tinkering risks doing as little good as Mussolini’s attempts to make the trains run on time did for him. A key observation here is that the new conservatism of both Trump and Johnson is heavily dependent on presentation, on directing the public attention to resonant issues.

In a world of ever-increasing connectedness, the fear of change that has always fuelled conservatism has changed its focus; it has now latched on to a fear not of novelty but of foreigners. This is not just about patterns of international migration. The increased mobility of capital and especially the global nature of climate change can both be seen as ways in which foreigners have opportunities to control our lives. Arcane notions about legal sovereignty pale in comparison to the feeling of outrage if an electorate can be made to feel that foreigners are telling us what to do.

A new wave of demagogues has redirected the old left-wing passion for social justice into a craving for social solidarity based on local culture. Social inclusion has been dumped in favour of social conformity and the equality agenda has run aground. In an era of austerity and industrial decline, the idea that immigrants should have equal rights has become an absurdity.

The new conservatism certainly suits those on the right of politics in a way that traditional conservatism never did. The new version resists change, but it does not valorise hereditary privilege, aristocracy or God. Instead it champions the common people, setting them above their rulers. Of course, the rulers rule on; Trump and Johnson are executives trusted with enormous power. But commoners are no longer bought off with King and Country, or cowed with the Bible, or baffled with the mysteries of social degree. Instead, they are reassured of their moral worth, while being told that they can do better, that their lives can be improved—under the stewardship of specific characters. Hierarchy is now defended as strong leadership; a change in personnel disguises the lack of change in society.

How did we get here?

FIRST, THE LONG-RUNNING prosperity agenda that drove Western politics has run a little thin. There is an identifiable new socio-economic class—the squeezed middle, the JAMs (just about managing), the in-work poor—and they have new priorities. These are people who are so close to the edge economically that their prime concern is security. That makes them vulnerable to the seductive rhetoric of those who claim they can take care of them. Second, the rise of social media has made people much easier to contact directly, with personalised messages that have been laboratory-tested for their incendiary effect.

These two things mean that ambitious leaders no longer have to invade other countries to secure their power. Instead, they invade their own countries. This is the Putin strategy, and it has now been copied widely. Localism and security are the prime ingredients of the new popular conservatism.

In Britain, the left has just found out that the radical equality agenda is no match for this new conservative formulation. But still it seems that the Labour Party is not yet ready either to explain or disentangle the immense complexities that radical equality brings, or to accept its electoral toxicity.

The election of December 2019 saw the worst Labour performance since 1935 and was an unmissable, panto-season slap in the face for anyone in the party’s leadership who believed that there was an appetite for social equality all across the former industrial heartlands. Oh no, there wasn’t.

There was, however, a very real yearning for change, and promises of change did attract support, but only when they were based on traditional culture and traditional political issues of the bread-and-butter kind. The Leave campaign talked this language in the 2016 referendum. The Conservative Party talked this language in 2019. All along it was regional, not social inequality that was the problem. Labour missed the point and was fighting the wrong cause.

In an era of heightened insecurity, Trump and Johnson have hijacked the kind of solidarity that used to be the main weapon of the left. They seemed to recognise how communities were redefining themselves and they allowed them to redefine their enemies as criminals and immigrants, terrorists and gender nonconformists, traitorous judges and lying journalists. This represents a historic turnaround. Now the solidarity is of the social group, not the economic group, and the new conservatives have played this card brilliantly.

Above all, what the modern populists are doing is making sure that it is not that people get what they want; it is that people want what they get.

This can easily be dressed up as democracy, but in democratic societies it is leaders who set the agenda, not the masses. Leaders seek out the hot-button issues that move entire populations. And crucially, it is only leaders who can effectively flout what used to be thought of as the boundaries of civilised debate. Demonstrably, those who adopt the language of the masses do best. George W Bush tried this, and it worked. Donald Trump took it to another level.

Of course, the crucial element here is not the language—of prejudice, of extremity—it is the credibility of the leader. It is credibility that generates the emotional intensity of a leader’s connection with the population. Trump and Johnson provide this by being both edgy and entertaining, and by bringing a frisson of risk with them. Above all, they convince us that amongst all the other choices, they are the ones who can really get things done. And crucially, the trick is convincing rather than delivering. Once you can convince, delivery is much less important.

Conservatism can always attract willing recruits, because change can be scary; it implies uncertainty. But the new Conservatives seem to be promising change. Is this a contradiction? No, because they have rebranded change as improvement. They address the people with that in mind, and the message sounds different. They say: ‘We can unleash your potential.’ Most cuttingly, they convince their supporters that they have been failed by other, previous leaders.The new conservatism rebrands change as improvement.

Much of this is not so new. The first use of this strategy actually arrived in the late 1970s, with the advent of the Reagan-Thatcher double act.

It was Thatcher who stood up against the kind of socialism introduced by the Labour Party after 1945. By the 1970s the interpenetration of government and industry, and therefore the government’s obligation to deal directly with trade union leaders, had produced a gridlocked economy and effectively a class war between capital and workers. It was Thatcher, inspired by American economists such as Milton Friedman, who stood out against this economic and political model. Radical conservatism had arrived, but its methods and its aims were primarily economic.

We should not underestimate how brave a stance this was at the time. Most politicians and senior civil servants believed that the current model they were running, and in which they had grown up, could not be reformed without doing serious damage to the fabric of society and the productivity of the economy. Thatcherites would have none of this. The result was that in the decade after 1979, it was a Conservative government that dramatically reshaped the British economy, privatising nearly all the nationalised industries and utilities, deregulating the sale of financial services, abandoning support for manufacturing, selling off the housing stock held by local government (council houses), rewriting trade union legislation and reforming the tax system to ease the burden on higher earners.

This was a massive, very real cultural change and it was meant to introduce a new form of popular capitalism, based around a working class that was property-owning, shareholding, aspirational and, most importantly, not in trade unions. It was the biggest single cultural and economic shock to the country since the depression of the 1930s, and it was the deliberate policy of people who called themselves Conservatives.

In this we can see a backward glance to the 1860s, when Benjamin Disraeli realised that electoral reform required the property-owning classes to find ways to persuade the newly enfranchised lower classes to use their votes in support of privileged Tories. Disraeli did it with a combination of personal appeal and the use of pride in empire. Imperialism and a pint of bitter, as they said, was enough to win him a mandate.

There is also a forward glance from 1979 into the new alliance that has been forged by Boris Johnson, who has a much narrower scope for policy: no electoral reform, no Empire, no trade union bogey, no nationalised industries to sell. Instead, he has grasped the heaven-sent opportunity of Brexit to galvanise traditionally minded working-class people against progressive politics.

But where is this leading? Johnson now heads what he is calling a ‘people’s government’. We might wonder who voted for previous governments, but never mind. Can he retool conservatism in the way that Disraeli and Thatcher did?

Johnson’s 80-seat margin is the largest Conservative majority since Thatcher’s third victory in 1987 and he can do pretty much anything he wants for the next five years. But where is the guiding thread in his plans? Thatcher always had Thatcherism, though before 1979 it was more commonly called monetarism. Even before Tony Blair won his huge majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005 he had something called Blairism; he wanted a middle-ground, ‘third way’ style of inclusive government, socially liberal and fiscally moderate, something like the successful Clinton formula of the early 1990s in the US.

But what of Johnsonism?

Johnson is not a political intellectual. He is a hugely ambitious, frequently ruthless operator who would back or oppose almost anything depending on its short-term tactical utility to his own standing. He has created a new alliance in British politics, somewhat like the Thatcher coalition, but rather more fragile. It is based on a desire to leave the EU and the purported uplift this will bring to British hearts and the swelling, it is hoped, of British pockets. This may look like pretty thin gruel in a few years’ time. Leaving the EU is supposed to allow a freebooting Britannia to launch new global trading opportunities, unshackled at last from the baleful influence of the sclerotic, protectionist EU. The sky is the limit. We shall see.

The 1979 Thatcher revolution intended to overthrow welfarism and trade unionism and reverse the assumptions of post-imperial ‘managed decline’. And now? The 2019 Revolution is determined to overthrow Europeanism and the politically correct, finger-wagging suppression of free speech that metropolitan liberals have enforced for decades. Somehow one feels that there is currently rather less substance on offer and that unlike the Thatcher project, this is, in fact, a revolution against a straw establishment.

Being allowed to use insulting names for minorities is not going to be a great improvement to people’s lives, if their roof still leaks and they have no job. Throwing off the domination of Europeans may not seem like such a good idea if it is replaced by the domination of Americans, who have rather less reason to be nice to us than our nearest neighbours.

There may be another difference. Thatcher had long chosen her targets and had lined them up for the chopping block: trade unionists, left-wing councillors, socialist teachers and eventually even Germans. It was a long list and long nurtured; it was, in essence, her father’s prejudices writ large. And mostly it was a list of interest groups, not historic institutions.

Boris’ list may be rather shorter and help him rather less politically, but somewhere near the top is the BBC.

‘Auntie’ has long been the bugbear of free-market right-wingers—and for obvious reasons. The BBC is supported by a legally enforceable licence fee levied on every owner of a television in the country, whether they watch BBC output or not. Independent Television (ITV), founded in the 1950s, is paid for by advertising. Sky, Britain’s largest satellite broadcaster, is paid for by a mixture of advertising and direct subscription.

Thatcherites hated the BBC, and the feeling was mutual. But the licence fee remained sacred, and a bridge too far. None of that is now true. Most people on the Leave side of the argument consider that the BBC was shamelessly pro-Remain. Just for balance, most of the inner circle of the Labour Party also considered it was shamelessly anti-Corbyn. Nobody much likes broadcasters who aren’t supportive.

Boris Johnson’s new supporters watch ITV and Sky; the BBC has always been the bourgeois choice. If any single prediction can be made about this ‘people’s government’, apart from Johnson’s determination to tear up all the agreements with the EU and the possible disaggregation of the UK, it might well be the BBC that is the great casualty of the next five years.

Boris Johnson’s task, as he has described it himself, is to transform Britain. But transform Britain into what? He would say into a more prosperous, self-confident country, standing on its own two feet, open to the world, dynamic, profitable and wherever possible deregulated. The way to put things right is to take back control of our laws, our money and our borders.

RETAKING CONTROL OF any of these, however, is unlikely to produce immediate economic benefits. The game then, for Johnson, is either to convince Leave voters and the new ‘red’ Tories that their lives actually are better, despite the evidence of their lived experience, or that beneficial change is coming in a minute, or that it would be here already if it wasn’t for some obstructive force. This last option is the frightening one: that the nationalist, anti-foreigner rhetoric of the referendum campaign might be carried over into post-referendum Britain. When the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels have been triumphantly deposed, who, then, will take the blame for blighted lives?

Johnson has set his own bar very high. He has promised to deliver real change for everyone—‘a new golden age’. Many clever people have been wondering how he can do this, where the money will come from and how it all might work. But there are reasons to be sceptical that he will undertake any such project. Within his majority of 80, the number of seats that he took from Labour in the North is not very large—about 26. So, even allowing that Labour returns with a credible offer at the next election and he were to lose all those seats, he would still have a comfortable majority, especially if Remainer Tories have forgiven him by then. If you add in such political realities to all the theoretical difficulties involved with stimulating work opportunities and economic growth in Britain’s post-industrial wastelands, a reasonable person might well conclude that bus shelters will be repainted rather than heavy industries restarted.

We may be in for a period of apparent rather than real change. Presentation will dominate while careers are protected. Institutions may be refashioned, but fundamental social realities will not. This is not traditional conservatism, but it is a kind of holding operation: a way to stop the clock, if not actively to wind it back.

If tradition is abandoned as a guide, in the way we are currently seeing, some other criterion of judgement must be applied. In politics, this will always be self-interest. We are then left with the naked power struggle that the whole idea of conservatism was supposed to avoid. Traditional conservatism recognised that some members of society are stronger than others, and it attempted, by a series of moral and ethical standards, to mitigate that domination, while permitting it and even praising it. The worldwide collapse of coherent left-wing thinking and the vast social and economic changes that have followed on from globalisation and the reinvention of political processes via the rise of social media have fundamentally recast the meaning of democracy. Left-wing ideas about restraining the use of power—derisively dismissed as ‘the liberal consensus’ by the new, populist right-wingers—have been made to look clumsy, elitist and outdated.

The result, visible all over the world, is that leaders have been empowered to behave as individuals, because they claim to express in their persons the collective will and identity of the nations they govern. But this is always an illusion. There are really only liberating themselves from the bonds of tradition and the cautionary restraints that their forefathers observed. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are better understood as private individuals pursuing career paths than as national icons pursuing constructive programmes.

Sometimes tradition is not the most reliable guide; our ancestors did not always know better. But when suddenly it is individuals that are reshaping political parties, when vacuous slogans are given content solely by the personality of the speaker, when reprehensible personal behaviour is no longer a bar to high office, we can be sure that something is amiss.

What we are seeing now is individuals wielding great power, not organisations following logical and coherent programmes. We are seeing private citizens post-rationalising their personal ambition and calling it leadership. And if the personalities are sufficiently big and if the resentments they tap are sufficiently real, then enough of the audience can be persuaded that they are on a journey to somewhere. The truth, though, may be very different and the undermining of traditional institutions, be it the BBC, the judiciary or constitutional precedent, may turn out to be a journey to nowhere. And yet, if the discontents and the arguments continue, the big personalities can continue to justify their grip on power.

Change may lie ahead, but it will be in the superstructure of government, not society, for we are now in an era of cultural, not institutional conservatism. So don’t be surprised if Donald Trump wins a second term, or if Boris Johnson is re-elected in 2024 with much of the support he has enjoyed in 2019.

The easiest substitute for tradition is illusion, and in the end, the abandonment of tradition may lead not to revolution, or even anarchy. It may simply lead to prolonged social stasis, which will be presented as cultural improvement.

Boris JohnsonBrexitEuropean UnionpoliticsUnited Kingdom