The last few days have helped cement something in my mind – that in mainstream politics the conservative right has now paradoxically become the party of change and the left wing the party of the status quo.
The marching on Washington by Trump’s supporters, and the condemnation of this insurrectionary threat by Biden, is just the clearest example of this trend – one that’s obvious not just in the US, but across many Western European countries too.What we’ve seen over the last five to ten years is the so-called ‘conservative’ parties consolidating a populist position that is critical of the economic and political settlement established over the past couple of decades – the globalised economy, acceptance of immigration, liberal social policies. And they’ve used this to mobilise large constituencies of disgruntled citizens who feel angry, marginalised and ready for change. The conservative parties have offered them radical change – to drain the swamp of Washington, to put America first, to leave the EU deal or no deal, to cut back on immigration.
(One of the best accounts of this, though it’s a difficult read in places, is Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell’s book, National Populism which points to how people support the populist right because they distrust elites, are suffering from relative deprivation, feel their nation is being destroyed by outsiders, and conventional party alignment has collapsed.)
The mainstream left, on the other hand – traditionally the party of change – has responded to much of this with a very ‘conservative’ agenda, in that they seek to maintain the status quo. Yes, the Democrats flirted with a Sanders-style socialism for a while, and the Labour-party even more so with a Corbynite left, but over the last 15 years these have been short bursts of radicalism in an otherwise very establishment view of the world. The UK’s Labour Party has been led by Blair, Brown, Milliband and now Starmer. The US’s Democrats by Obama, then Hilary Clinton now Biden. All offering a soft response of continuity to the right-wing rabble rousers.
So what we see now is that whenever the right proposes radical change, the left replies with the status quo. In the US we see Trump calling out electoral democracy and for his supporters to refuse to accept the election result; the left advocates the peaceful continuity of the US election cycle. In the UK, the right argued for leaving the EU, even though it might be bad for the economy, knowing their voters wanted something new; the left argued for remaining in the EU for the sake of the economy. In the US the right argued for a new approach to immigration dramatically limiting numbers; the left advocated immigration but with small tweaks. In both the UK and US we see the right breaking established conventions of political office, with special advisers, business supporters and allies getting special favours; the left talk about decency and values in public office.
There are so many ironies to the way the right-wing parties in these countries have assumed the mantle of radicalism – not least that the leaders of this revolt are part of the elite themselves, and in reality the parties are often implementing economic policies that reinforce the problems their supporters wanted removed in the first place.
But one of the biggest ironies is that in the 1970s the right in many ways created the political settlement that they are now railing against in the 1970s.
After the second world war the post-war consensus had largely settled in Western Europe and the US, with increased state spending on welfare, housing and other public goods, and to a lesser extent a gradual social liberalisation. It was once again the right who brought about radical change at this point, with Thatcher and Reagan introducing neo-classical economics as a way to radically overturn the consensus on an active state. The result was that the free market became all-powerful, gradually reducing the power of the state, allowing business and global capital to dominate, with the knock-on consequences of increased inequality, immigration and liberalisation.
And interestingly too, not only did the apparently conservative parties of the 70s create the state of affairs that four decades later they have railed against. Just like now, when they overturned the post-war consensus the left-wing parties went along with it. Beyond a small foray into left radicalism with Michael Foot in the early 1980s, the UK Labour party came to embrace the Conservative Party’s agenda, first under Kinnock and the most obviously under Blair’s long rule. In the US, similarly, we see even less opposition to Reaganite economics, such that by the 2010s even a limited amount of state support for healthcare can be seen as too radical.
All this is to say that the last few days have just made clear a paradox in the party politics of many Western democracies: that although the left is supposedly the political agent for change, they’ve often been the party to defend the status quo, whereas the right, supposedly the party of conservatism, has been the party of radical change and renewal.
Giles book reviews 