After four resignations in little more than a decade, the Sky camera crew outside Sajid Javid’s London home have become friends of the family. Rebellious backbenchers look to Michael Gove to wield the dagger; as always, he remains inscrutable. Television pictures show Steve Barclay emerging from Number 10 with his 27th Cabinet job in barely a decade, while the disgraced Matt Hancock is reportedly eyeing a fresh comeback. On Radio Four, the 99-year-old Lord Heseltine is talking about Brexit. On Twitter, Foreign Secretary Nadine Dorries pledges her loyalty to the PM. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.

Is that, perhaps, how Boris Johnson’s remaining loyalists imagine the future? Alas, I have news for them. David Cameron may have compared his Old Etonian rival with a greased piglet, forever wriggling away from the most excruciating scrapes, but even the most sebaceous porker ends up on the breakfast table eventually. And even by Boris’s standards, to lose a Chancellor and a Health Secretary in a single evening, as well as a gaggle of parliamentary aides and trade envoys, represents a sensational and surely fatal humiliation.

True, Harold Macmillan lost his entire Treasury team in 1958, but he was riding high in the polls and few people knew who the Chancellor was anyway. (Peter Thorneycroft, if you’re wondering.) And yes, Margaret Thatcher soldiered on for another year after losing Nigel Lawson in 1989. But in retrospect, it’s obvious she was doomed. So even if, by some miracle of escapology, Johnson clings on until the end of the week and then through the summer, before defying his backbench critics to soldier on to the party conference and beyond, it’s almost impossible to imagine him lasting to the next General Election.

And what if he does? Electoral oblivion, surely. Divided parties very rarely win elections, and it’s hard to see Tory England voting once again for a man whom Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, David Davis and Steve Baker, to name but five, have explicitly told them is not up to it. So why bother? What’s the point?

For his critics, Johnson’s fall has been coming from the first. In the summer of 2019, before he had even laid hands on the crown, his former editor Max Hastings predicted that his premiership would “almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”. Johnson, he wrote, would surely “come to regret securing the prize for which he has struggled so long, because the experience of the premiership will lay bare his absolute unfitness for it”.

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Boris can't keep a story straight

By Kathleen Stock

Was this just a patrician Tory Remainer talking? Not really. That same summer, another of Johnson’s old newspaper colleagues, the Brexit ultra Simon Heffer, warned that Tory party members would soon tire of his “indolence, casualness, monstrous selfishness, lack of attention to detail, incompetence and monumental dishonesty”. And even if Johnson won an election, wrote Heffer, “no one should bet on him shaping the destiny of Britain and her people for much more than a brief, and possibly deeply troubling, interlude”.

There is, perhaps, another side of the picture. Detached from the hurly-burly of our present arguments, future historians may well be struck by Johnson’s formidable, if ephemeral, strengths as a communicator and campaigner. His roguishness, his showmanship, his patriotic populism may have enraged the bien-pensant — as well as his own former colleagues — but they clearly struck a chord with millions of ordinary Britons who had little interest in the niceties of politics.

In a thoughtful analysis after his crushing General Election victory in 2019, the Cambridge academic Helen Thompson wrote almost approvingly of “his willingness to enter the realm of risk, his eagerness to trade his dignity, his indifference to conventional pieties and mundane detail”, all of which she traced to his “pagan energy”. And in another acute profile, published last year, Tom McTague argued that Johnson “understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do”. Johnson was right, he wrote, to see that politics was “a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear.”

These articles have an ironic ring today, amid the risible chaos of the fin de régime. But they weren’t necessarily wrong. Much as his critics loathed Johnson’s populist persona, he won elections. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. British political history, even at the highest level, is littered with rogues and showmen, from Palmerston and Disraeli to Lloyd George and Blair. They weren’t just rogues and showmen, of course: that was why they were so successful. Energy, optimism, a gift for storytelling, a sense of humour: these are hardly negligible qualities for somebody hoping to become prime minister.

No less an observer than Karl Marx once called Palmerston “an exceedingly happy joker” who “ingratiates himself with everybody”. “When unable to master a subject, he knows how to play with it,” said Marx. “If wanting in general views, he is always ready to weave a web of elegant generalities.” That sounds pretty familiar. Yet plenty of ordinary voters adored Palmerston as the bluff incarnation of British patriotism, forever sticking it to the priggish and prissy Macrons and von der Leyens of the mid-19th-century world. One observer spotted him visiting the Great Exhibition in 1851. “The moment he came in sight,” he wrote, “throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as by an electric shock. ‘Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston for ever!’’”

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By Robert Saunders

The problem is that in the 21st century, merely playing Lord Palmerston — or even Johnson’s supposed hero, Winston Churchill — can never be enough. The scope of government has widened far beyond what either man imagined possible, and a modern Prime Minister is responsible for a bureaucratic machine that touches almost every aspect of seventy million people’s lives.

Johnson’s government didn’t get everything wrong: when his defenders point to the vaccine rollout or his support for Ukraine, they have a point. But surely, alone with his confessor, even Jacob Rees-Mogg would admit that the conduct of affairs inside Downing Street has been an utter, utter shambles. Britain has had plenty of inept and sleazy governments before, but very few with such a palpable lack of ideological direction and such a basic indifference to organisational competence. Even those infamous parties, judging by the photos, had a forlorn and hapless look, unworthy of a venue that has seen some pretty heroic drinking in its time. A glass of cut-price Chardonnay with the Big Dog and his teenage groupies, or a double Scotch and a tirade about socialism from the Iron Lady? I know which I’d prefer.

It really didn’t have to be this way, though. Recent history offers some excellent examples of political showmen who ran competent, efficient administrations, largely by standing back and letting the professionals deal with the nuts and bolts. When Ronald Reagan became President of the United States in January 1981, his critics derided him as a mere Hollywood has-been. They mocked him as a know-nothing, an airhead, coasting to disaster on clouds of his own optimism and good humour.

Even his closest international soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, sometimes despaired of his spectacular inattention to detail. Her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, once recalled that after they had endured Reagan’s thoughts about South Africa during their first visit to the White House (“Well of course, the South Africans are whites and they fought for us during the war. The blacks are black and they are Communists”) she left the Oval Office, pulled him aside and pointed at her head. “Peter,” she whispered in horror, “there’s nothing there!”

But Reagan was no fool. He surrounded himself with some of the biggest beasts in the Republican jungle: George Bush, Al Haig, James Baker, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, hard-nosed operators who knew how the machine worked and how to get things done. That took a degree of psychological security, even humility: it often meant Reagan was the least bright and least well-informed person in the room. But he didn’t mind. It left him free to play the part that came most naturally: the jolly, sunny, patriotic father of the nation, always ready to disarm his opponents with a rousing story, a Hollywood anecdote or — in private — a dirty joke. And it worked. He won elections — and even his adversaries secretly liked him.

Has Britain ever had a politician like Reagan? Well, I can think of one obvious example: another good-humoured, amusing, patriotic fellow, who liked nothing better than to make voters laugh and put them at ease. He too was dismissed by his critics as a mere screen performer, a charismatic joker who knew nothing of economics and was indifferent to details. But ordinary voters, whether diehard Tories or traditional Labour, liked him, and twice elected him to run their capital city. And while he rolled out the crowd-pleasing rib-ticklers, he had a team of serious, professional operators to keep things ticking over behind the scenes. His name, of course, was Boris Johnson.

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Stop pretending Britain is America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Why didn’t Boris Johnson learn from Boris Johnson? Why didn’t he run Britain as he had once run London? For me, that’s the really baffling question. Why didn’t he play the British Reagan? Why didn’t he surround himself from the first with genuinely seasoned, clever, ruthless people, as Reagan did — or as Thatcher, Clement Attlee and his hero Churchill did? Why employ Gavin Williamson? Why associate with Nadine Dorries? What can possibly explain the Cabinet career of Jacob Rees-Mogg? An elaborate bet? A practical joke that got wildly out of hand?

Ask people who know Johnson well, and you get different answers. Some suggest that deep down, he has always been intensely insecure — something that’s true of many politicians, but wasn’t true of Reagan or Thatcher — and that he dreaded surrounding himself with rivals and potential successors.  Others point to the breakdown of his marriage to Marina Wheeler in 2018, insisting that she was his rock, his anchor, his source of psychological stability and political sense.

But perhaps there’s a simpler explanation, less grounded in amateur psychology, but none the less thematically satisfying. It may be that Boris Johnson’s capacity to play the British Reagan vanished some time between midnight and dawn on 24 June 2016, as it became clear that Britain had voted to leave the European Union. For as the sun rose that morning, just under half of the country vowed that it would never forget and never forgive. They blamed Gove, they blamed Farage, but above all they blamed Johnson. And with that, the part of the national conciliator, the amiable patriotic showman, was lost to him forever. He tried out for other parts, of course: the Brexit deal-maker, the Whitehall party-planner, the East African travel agent. But none of them really worked out. All his life he had been preparing to play a single role — and in the very act of securing it, he lost it forever.

So perhaps, in the end, he was just another victim of Brexit. As a former classical scholar, he might appreciate the irony.

British parties are always fractious coalitions. First Past the Post requires parties to hold together an unstable alliance of forces, with divergent interests, priorities and visions. Labour has struggled throughout its history to bind together Fabians, Left-liberals, trade unionists, socialists and social democrats. The Conservative Party has been an explosive cocktail of Thatcherites, protectionists, free-marketeers, Powellites, paternalists and Christian conservatives. For a party to succeed, it needs some shared gravitational field that can contain its centrifugal impulses: a role played in Conservative history by hostility to socialism, the defence of established institutions, the rights of property and a “conservative temperament”.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been increasingly difficult to say what Conservatives have in common. They are no longer anchored in historic institutions, such as the Crown or the Church of England. They have lost their suspicion of change. They are no longer rooted in British business, and they can no longer mobilise against Communism at home and abroad. That leaves only the party’s notorious instinct for power. As a unifying force, that instinct should not be underrated: it makes the Conservatives much more likely than Labour to mobilise behind a perceived “winner”. But it also leaves any leader dangerously vulnerable if they begin to slide in the polls.

The party’s loss of cohesion was not resolved by the purge of 2019, or even the massive majority won at the general election. Johnson’s majority, like the Leave vote on which it was founded, was built on highly discordant materials: elements of which wanted to shrink the state, end austerity, cut taxes and boost spending. Those elements were held together by two magnetic impulses that were peculiar to that election: hostility to Jeremy Corbyn; and the desire to “Get Brexit Done”. With Corbyn gone and Britain outside the EU, holding that coalition together would prove a task of particular delicacy.

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By Suzanne Moore

Covid temporarily suspended that difficulty, because it suspended the usual rules of politics. Spending could rise, taxes fall and divisive questions be held over to another day — all in the name of a national emergency that discouraged political dissent. But as the Covid crisis recedes, the choices confronting the government are becoming more pressing; and for divided parties, choice is dangerous.

Johnson was in some respects well-placed to lead a party that was pulling in opposing directions. Throughout his career he has poured himself into a variety of ideological moulds, projecting different political personas to different sections of his party. As Mayor of London, he championed immigration, celebrated multiculturalism and called Donald Trump “unfit to hold the office of President”. As a Brexit campaigner, he mocked the “part-Kenyan” Obama and promised to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. As prime minister, he suspended Parliament and threatened to ignore legislation. That has allowed him to straddle his party’s divisions, to a degree unmatched by almost any other politician.

Johnson is not an Enoch Powell or a Tony Benn. He is not the sort of politician who sets an intellectual pole-star and drags his party along behind it. But nor is he simply a “weathervane”, who follows the prevailing political wind. Instead, his great skill is an ability to defy definition, by sending conflicting signals about his beliefs and intentions.

As Johnson approaches his 60th birthday, people still argue about what kind of politician he is “really”, or what he might become in the future. Is he a liberal? A populist? A “one-nation” Tory? A culture warrior? “Britain Trump”? Or a “Brexity Hezza”? Ambiguity is an underrated political skill, and Johnson has it in spades.

Johnson’s ability to hold those roles in creative tension — or in his favoured expression, to “have his cake and eat it” — has been a feature of his career. It rests on a series of rhetorical techniques, honed during his years as a journalist and public speaker. But the efficacy of those techniques has been declining in recent months: not because of “Partygate” – though that may have calcified a certain image in the eyes of the public — but because of changes in the economic climate.

Johnson’s favoured technique is rhetorical extravagance. Promises to “ping off the guy-ropes of self-doubt”, or to unleash “the ketchup of catch-up”, or to inflate “the mattress of dough” commit him to nothing, but they give an impression of energy and authenticity.  The effect is enhanced by a macho political style: one that scoffs at “girly swots” and “big girls blouses”, and parades a love of fast cars, hi-vis jackets, grandiose building projects and shagging. The result is an unusual combination of artful ambiguity and performative purpose.

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That runs alongside a self-parodying political style. It is not unknown for politicians to feign sincerity; Johnson, by contrast, actively performs insincerity. He deliberately strips his words of meaning, by rhetorical exaggeration, ludicrous turns of phrase and the knowing look down the camera. No other politician so consistently breaks “the fourth wall” in interviews, inviting the public to be in on the joke of his own performance. It becomes impossible to hold him to what he has said, because anything can be dismissed as a joke.

This has enabled Johnson to cultivate a reputation for dynamism, while sending conflicting signals on his politics. Johnson has been a prolific writer and public speaker for nearly 30 years. But if we set aside the insults and the gaffs (“tank-topped bum-boys”, “picaninnies”, “clearing the dead bodies from the beach”), few people could quote a word he has ever said. When challenged about his past comments, Johnson invariably seems astonished that anyone should have taken them seriously. For Johnson, ideas and arguments are like rhetorical flares: sent up into the sky to awe and amaze, while distracting from the emptiness around them.

So long as politics centred on issues of culture and identity, Johnson’s political style could be highly effective. But economic questions are less susceptible to this kind of rhetorical mystification: and those questions are moving remorselessly up the political agenda.

2022 may come to be seen, in retrospect, as the end of a 30-year period of consistently low inflation. Such periods are peculiarly hospitable to “cakeism”, because they soften the competition for resources. By contrast, inflation sharpens political choices: do you raise taxes or cut spending? Subsidise energy bills, or let the market decide? Inflation is already reopening debates about monetary policy, public ownership and the independence of the Bank of England, while wages, industrial action and the cost of living are all surging up the political agenda. The effect is to bring economic and distributional questions back into the political mainstream, opening up questions on which the party is deeply divided.

Such questions play to all of Johnson’s weaknesses and none of his strengths. Tax rates, wage bills, fuel costs and supermarket bills are not susceptible to his peculiar brand of rhetorical mystification; and voters struggling with rising bills and falling living standards may be less forgiving of a politics of distraction. It is no coincidence that his speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2021, in which he repeatedly lost his place and joked about Peppa Pig, landed so badly, when equally chaotic speeches on other subjects have drawn laughter and acclaim.

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Johnson himself has no economic policy to speak of. His approach to economics — like his view of history — centres almost entirely on heroic individuals: those “entrepreneurs” and “wealth creators”, for whose “concupiscent energy and sheer wealth-creating dynamism” we should give “humble and hearty thanks”. Discussing post-Brexit trade barriers earlier this year, he told MPs: “There is no natural impediment to our exports, it is just will and energy and ambition”. There is not much here for policy-makers to work with, at a moment when policy is badly needed.

On economic questions, at least, “to govern is to choose”. Yet every choice Johnson makes on tax rates, energy bills or public spending infuriates some wing of his party, eager for higher spending, lower taxes, more intervention or more deregulation. And as Brexit moves from rhetoric to reality, the choices already made grow harder to ignore. Johnson can give his party no star to steer by, for he has none. His political compass points only at himself.

Johnson’s leadership is a symptom, not a cause, of his party’s loss of cohesion and direction. For that reason, it cannot also be a cure — though it may, like a fever, bring the illusion of vigour and short-lived colour to the cheeks. Whether or not Johnson survives the consequences of yesterday’s vote, Conservatism is in a parlous state. It will take a very different skill-set than his to restore it to health and vitality.

If Boris was, as his enemies proclaim, a Trumpian figure, it was only in the sense that he was an imperfect vessel for the revolutionary moment he was chosen to oversee. Like Trump, he was a metropolitan liberal who read the mood of the times and chose to play the role of tribune of the ignored, riding the anger of the forgotten as his vehicle to power. Like Trump, he was temperamentally unsuited to the needs of the hour: too lazy, too careless of detail, too distracted by his own personal and financial entanglements.

As with Trump, Johnson’s political foes, the liberal establishment he had betrayed, stymied his rule with all the stunts and tricks liberalism deploys to arrest democracy, here directly imported from the imperial metropole: the fictitious parallel institutions of liberal shadow governance such as Independent Sage, the same pointless, time-consuming lawfare of Twitter barristers calling themselves defenders of the rule of law, the same mass demonstrations of fevered identity warriors stoked by the opposition press for narrow political gain. No scandal was too petty, no wild accusation of fascism or dictatorial tendencies too overblown in the liberal para-state’s mission to save democracy from the voters.

For five and a half years we lived through the politics of crisis, a cold civil war in which the immediate triggers may have changed but the overarching antagonists remained the same. Boris was entrusted with the task of delivering Brexit against the opposition of the nation’s true government: the Westminster blob of bureaucrats, journalists and NGOs who ensure that, however people vote, nothing truly changes; the entire apparatus of the parallel state created by the union of New Labour legislation with a complacent and inept British establishment.

With democratic governance deadlocked by the wounded and vengeful establishment, Brexiteers were forced to choose having Brexit done at all over having it done well. To Johnson’s credit he delivered Brexit when it would have been easy not to, and he was at times willing enough to bend the rules to do so — Brexit was, after all, the result of the popular perception that the rules as they stand don’t work; that the British state functions far below its potential capacity; and the British nation is poorer, less safe and less happy than it ought to be. With a historic majority, at the helm of the country during its greatest moment of political change since Suez, Johnson had the potential to lead a radical reformist government and arrest the nation’s seemingly endless decline. Alas, the forces of inertia and dysfunction were too great.

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What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

The Dom and Boris partnership was the best chance of defeating the Westminster rigmarole machine, the source of the solipsistic froth and exhausted defeatism that passes for British governance. In blog after blog, and then in tweets written in the awkward textspeak of an eccentric uncle, Cummings has excoriated the failings of the civil service and the lobby courtiers in savage and convincing detail. And then, with all the bitter passion of a spurned partner, Cummings deployed the very same Westminster bubble he despises and pledged to destroy as his chosen tool to bring down his faithless master.

How absurd and trivial are the crimes for which Johnson is now being brought to bay; and yet his accusers, affecting outrage over his entourage sharing a packet of crisps, are the people who say they wish we were a serious country once again, taken seriously on the world stage. And all this from the very same blob which uses a British government trip to a Ukraine on the brink of invasion to ask about office parties, and forces Johnson to back out of a phone call with Putin to answer urgent questions about cakes. The jovial cavalier was finally unhorsed by thin-lipped puritans in a scandal so petty and meaningless it provokes only blank incomprehension and derision abroad.

Surely Johnson must now realise what a tremendous waste his period in office was: he could have repealed the entire corpus of New Labour legislation and reset the nation back to 1997 in search of a better path than the stagnation and social conflict that defines modern Britain. Johnson had the power and the mandate to dismantle the entire system of overproduction of embittered, indebted graduates from third-rate universities that spawns the party’s political enemies, and to overturn the legislation establishing the liberal shadow-government that frustrates effective Conservative governance. Like the conservative journalist he at heart remains, Johnson found it easier and more comfortable complaining about woke excess than identifying and dismantling the systems that nurture it. He could have done all this without facing any greater opposition than the press hysteria he already faced, or the affected outrage about crisps and sandwiches which has destroyed his career. What a waste of time it all was.

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By David Jeffrey

That such an opportunity could be squandered as the result of Downing Street domestic psychodrama is almost beyond comprehension. What a squalid betrayal, by both Johnson and Cummings, of the historic task they were entrusted with and of the voters who entrusted them with it. And how ironic that they both came to exemplify the failings of the governing class against which they proclaimed to rebel. In the end, Cummings looked too long into the rigmarole, and the rigmarole looked right back into him.

Britain’s political system is broken, and Johnson’s downfall by petty Covid rules highlights a central problem: it was easier for the Government to impose needless restrictions on people’s lives than to seize control of the machinery of the state to improve them, building the infrastructure and state capacity Britain lacks. Like the legislation against online speech which Johnson’s government is now inexplicably bringing in, or their funding of the NGO lobbies which hobble their governance, the Conservative government seems compelled to hand its political enemies the very weapons they will use against it. That Johnson was brought down by the petty restrictions he introduced may have a pleasing symmetry: that he laid his own head on the block for decapitation by the self-appointed Covid marshals of Labour’s tabloid press simply proves he was incapable of the task in front of him.

Johnson was incapable of delivering any reform in the face of hysterical opposition. Now we need a prime minister who can deliver a serious reformist program, and who can dismiss the lobby and the Blairite parallel state with the contempt it deserves.

None of the potential challengers so far fits this mould: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both promise a return to the zombie Thatcherism that vastly accelerated the state’s decline, and Tom Tugendhat is merely a neoconservative who has never yet seen a war he doesn’t wish Britain’s depleted armed forces to take part in — a foreign policy catastrophe waiting to happen.

As with Trump, the result may yet be that a more competent tribune, this time a true believer, will arise in time to finish the job. Johnson was, in many ways, a relic of the 2016 era of popular revolt against managerial liberalism and poor governance: the 2020s version will surely reflect the darkened mood of the decade. The background mood of economic stagnation, rising crime, deteriorating standards of living and sombre intimations of war is not favourable to a liberal renaissance. The difficult years we are heading into — perhaps a permanent downward trend — are of a kind likely to provoke a harder-edged conservative reaction than Johnson would ever have been capable of.

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The world after Trump

By Aris Roussinos

Just as the failure of the Trump administration has fostered the growth of a more serious and competent American Right in challengers such as Josh Hawley and Blake Masters, and Marine Le Pen’s series of electoral defeats in France has paved the way for the more radical Éric Zemmour, Johnson’s failure will perhaps lead to a more serious Right-wing challenger here in Britain, a Corbyn of the Right willing to remodel the state root and branch.

Perhaps, like the American Republicans, it will be necessary for the Conservatives to have some time on the Opposition benches to determine what they stand for, and what their vision of the Britain of the near future is. The general political and international situation is rapidly deteriorating — and the British state as it stands is incapable of meeting the demands of the times.

But to me the resonant detail was less the pornography than the tractor. The search term “Dominator” is apparently a class of combine harvester, as well as having more lubricious connotations. This one word slid Parish sideways in a single click from the preoccupations of an old-fashioned Tory to the full-spectrum violence and nihilism of today’s culture of universal pornification.

And he did so in public view, scrolling pornography in the House of Commons — an act as obviously, flagrantly, socially unacceptable as walking out of your front door naked from the waist down. Ascribing behaviour this bizarre to so banal an impulse as sexism doesn’t add up.

Parish called it a “moment of madness”, but psychologists have long recognised that impulsive actions can be revealing. And if you were to read it as a cry of despair, Parish’s act would make eloquent sense — not just for him as an individual, but for those last surviving fragments of conservatism that still somehow cling on in the modern Conservative Party.

For Parish exemplifies a type of conservatism which is homeless. It is incompatible with the Tory Party today and is unrepresented in the increasingly influential “dissident Right”. For inasmuch as there is energy on the Right, it is in this febrile movement, which fizzes with energy — but is wholly estranged from the modern Tory Party, whose aggregate actions (accidentally or otherwise) look more like part of the problem than the solution.

Consider, for example, the current tussle over regulating imported Canadian beef. Canadian officials are pushing for a deal that would oblige us to accept hormone-treated meat, a practice banned by the EU in 1989 and that studies have shown uses carcinogenic chemicals. This is, for Boris Johnson, a difficult circle to square since, much like the once-again radioactive immigration debate, hormone beef pits the Party’s longstanding commitment to “free trade” (ie growth) against what’s left of the Party’s desire to conserve anything at all, including Britain’s increasingly strained and miserable (and hitherto loyally Tory) rural economy.

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Is Jamie Wallis exploiting his trauma?

By Mary Harrington

The online Right, meanwhile, is so internationally ebullient it’s making the New York Times anxious: it was described as ‘reactionary chic’ by Michelle Goldberg. Unlike the cringy Young Tories of old, this youthful New Right is (according to Vanity Fair) “quietly edgy and cool” in increasingly prominent circles. And it has plenty to say about farming, food standards and animal welfare.

In one of its subcultures, the distinctly fascism-tinged health movement that calls itself “raw egg nationalism”, Benjamin Braddock denounces globalisation in terms indistinguishable from a late-Nineties left-wing green activist. The “large-scale low-quality mindset” of global market capitalism, he argues, results in a “corrupted toxic food supply” that poisons both the earth and the humans who consume its products:

“Our farmers must now compete with the third world in a race to the bottom. We import farmed fish grown in sewage tanks in China and call it progress. Our free trade deals impose legal requirements on our trading partners to throw upon their doors to multinationals like Monsanto”.

And here we get to the heart of Neil Parish’s dilemma. For his party isn’t just running out of ideas. They’re running out of ways to square conservatism and growth, without making life worse for their core constituencies — and especially for the kind of rural true-blues Neil Parish both exemplifies and represents.

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The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

For most of the modern era, the Conservatives have styled themselves as the party of order, heritage and prosperity. In practice, though, their role has been to make sure the “creative destruction” of heritage that fuelled rising prosperity took place somewhere other than Tory heartlands (for example among the working class, or overseas) while the prosperity accrued to the true blue.

In the very first essay I wrote for UnHerd, just before Covid sent the world mad, I accused the Tories of sacrificing conservatism in its entirety on this altar of economic growth. And to my eye, this remains largely true today. The difficulty is that there’s very little of the cultural, ecological and economic family silver left to sell. (Privatising the Passport Office, Boris? Really?). And having run out of places to externalise its costs, the Tories are turning on the amenities and social fabric enjoyed by Tory voters themselves, in the rural British heartlands.

In this, they are more aligned than not with the progressive consensus. To illustrate, consider a by no means exhaustive list of things I’ve seen condemned lately as “problematic” or as having “shades of fascism”: farmers’ markets, going to the gym, beauty, classical architecture, talking about England before the Norman Conquest, Greek and Roman literature, gardening, sex dimorphism, punctuality, objectivity, enjoying the natural world, and mums. In other words: the stuff most ordinary people, and all ordinary conservatives, believed until about five minutes ago made life worth living.

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By Mary Harrington

A non-problematic world, then, must have whatever the opposite of these things is. That suggests a world that’s childless, touch-less, and relativistic, that embraces ultra-processed food, de-materialised occupations, artificial surroundings and transient, possession-less renting, and in cultural terms swims in a formless meme-soup where embodiment, memory, beauty and the natural world are your political enemies.

To capture the support of adherents to “reactionary chic”, the modern Tory Party would have to oppose this (frankly not very appealing) vision. But recent policy decisions suggest they’re at best ambivalent. They’re hopelessly confused on families and decent housing, vacillating between shoving young people into overpriced urban shoeboxes, and forcing hectares of identikit box-homes onto greenfield sites typically converted from Tory-voting farmland.

As regards literal conservation, they make faint noises about environmental subsidies for farmers. But Johnson’s government has also done its best to leave water companies free to disgorge sewage into rivers, and is sidling toward un-banning EU-banned pesticides.

Meanwhile, the Brexit so triumphantly delivered by Johnson’s administration is proving (to say the least) a frightening time for British farmers. Many smaller landowners, confronted with uncertainty over post-Brexit subsidies, are selling up, accelerating a long-term trend toward consolidation in UK farming.

Where does this leave an ageing conservative such as Neil Parish? A look at his voting record suggests him to be about as close as it’s possible to get to old-school, country Toryism: tough on welfare spending and immigration, opposed to gay marriage and EU membership, with a longstanding interest in animal welfare issues and rural affairs. So there’s an eloquent irony in his searching for tractors and ending up clicking pornography in a “moment of madness”.

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The rise of the liberal groomer

By Mary Harrington

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han described capitalism — in other words, the Tories’ sainted value of “growth” — as “aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display”. Parish’s stumble from “Dominator” tractors to who knows what more titillating form of domination is evocative of the hopeless dilemma faced by such old-fashioned Tories. For a political stance capable of squaring growth with conserving anything at all is now radically untenable. Especially in farming.

Did Neil Parish resolved the quandary for himself by committing professional suicide? As bleak as it sounds, perhaps Parish’s watching of pornography in Parliament could be read as an act of pure nihilism, from someone who has grasped that a long-successful political compromise has reached the end of the line, and that the party which once defended his tribe is now devouring it. It is a gesture strongly resonant of the one now being made in droves by the farmers selling up as a consequence of Tory assent to prioritising the commodifying demands of growth over the unshakeably material nature of land-based livelihoods.

And nor does Parish have an obvious home in the “reactionary chic” subculture now busy celebrating all those problematic things like farmers’ markets, beauty, classical literature, procreation and so on (along with, in some cases, a side order of fascist aesthetics). This movement may be “edgy and cool”, and it may produce strange and sometimes agricultural fruit, from the ‘Doomer Optimist’ neo-homesteaders preparing for collapse in the USA, to the far-right “Anastasian” back-to-the-land movement in Germany.

But such experimental forms of reactionary futurism also flourish largely in the iridescent, dematerialised, borderless digital maelstrom that’s now mostly replaced the politics of places, constituencies and the material world. And there’s little room in this reality for an old-fashioned Tory with a Labrador and a family farm.

The story blew up for no other reason than Canadian politics is not usually known for producing unruly sights like this one. While broader Western politics have been marked by rising populist fervour against elites over the last half-decade, Canada has, true to stereotype, remained quiet, contented, bland and unexciting. The patron saint of liberal elites was, after all, re-elected last year and continues to rule over a country that prides itself on its inoffensiveness.

There is every reason to believe that this is how things will remain: the global populist revolution that gave us Trump, Brexit and the gilet jaunes has had a hard time getting a foothold in Canada for structural reasons. It is unlikely that the protesting truckers will have changed many minds, much less public health regulations, or accomplished anything other than increasing traffic congestion in Downtown Ottawa. The industry association representing truckers has disowned them, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, while a recent poll put nationwide popular support for the convoy at a paltry 28%.

Canada’s general incompatibility with populist politics goes back to its roots. Ask an American why the United States was founded and he might say something like: “We had a revolution to secure freedom and government of, by and for the people…” The foundation of Canada was an explicit rebuttal to this notion.

As a country, it was designed to serve as a bulwark against the spectre of revolution and the idiom of popular sovereignty. Its two main political cultures descend from peoples who were defined by their conspicuous non-participation in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French, from which much of the modern rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the will of the people is derived.

Subsequently, the evolution of Canada’s political identity can be thought of less as having a liberal or conservative orientation, but as, quite simply, anti-revolutionary. This means that when change does happen, it is actively managed and mediated by elites at the top rather than brought about by uprisings from below. Though the country has had its own bouts of populism of the Right and Left varieties (and a few failed revolts), it has never been the dominant tradition.

This is because historically, Canada’s elites have proven to be expert not merely at resisting the pressures of revolutionary change but at pre-empting the causes of it.

English Canada was shaped in large part by Loyalist refugees who fled north because they did not want to be a part of the revolutionary experiment of 1776. Disavowing Yankee radical individualism and republicanism, the colonies that would become Canada were suspicious of mass democracy, more deferential to authority, and more mindful of communal obligations: they were said to be “more Tory than the King” and their progeny retained the so-called “Tory touch”.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, looked south of the border with horror (as many Canadians do now) at the chaos of the American Civil War and vowed to establish a strong central government that would have unquestioned supremacy over its constituent provinces. Thus, modern Canada was born in 1867 with the motto “peace, order and good government” — a somewhat authoritarian-sounding reply to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

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French Canada is different but the same. Its people are the descendants of pious habitant colonists who were insulated from the influence of the Jacobin revolution across the Atlantic by the British conquest of Quebec in the Seven Years War.

Macdonald’s chief French Canadian ally, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, claimed that despite the trauma of defeat, the conquest was actually a blessing in disguise sent by Providence to save French Canada “from the misery and shame of the French Revolution”. The Ancien Régime, with its spirit of conformity and obedience to Catholic orthodoxy, lived on in Quebec until the Sixties, when secular nationalism replaced Catholicism as the de facto state religion.

In that decade, Canada would prove yet again that it was the anti-revolutionary country par excellence. While American cities burned in riots over race and the Vietnam war, Canadians smugly congratulated themselves for living in “the peaceable kingdom”. When, in 1968, the streets of Paris, Chicago and Prague were racked with revolutionary violence, Canada witnessed a peaceful transition of power to the new generation as embodied by a charismatic action-intellectual named Pierre Trudeau, who unlike LBJ, Nixon or De Gaulle, was definitely with it.

The first Trudeau’s rise to power, much like the second, was greeted by fawning crowds and adoring fangirls: it took on the feel of a Beatles tour and was dubbed “Trudeaumania”. What might have looked like a spontaneous democratic outpouring was actually the result of backroom dealing by ruling party elites, who recruited Trudeau and practically fast-tracked him to the premiership: Canada’s own Ancien Régime had found a way to adapt itself to the Age of Aquarius.

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Trudeau’s chief task was to keep Canada together in the face of Quebec separatism. With the exception of the brief terrorist October Crisis of 1970, which Trudeau met with heavy-handed repression, his 16 years in power were marked by vigorous but non-violent political debate culminating in the 1980 Quebec independence referendum. Unlike other interethnic hotspots, say Northern Ireland or the Balkans, Canada resolved its divisions through the ballot box — and through occasionally heated but mostly boring conferences where elites could hash things out.

Fast forward to the second Trudeau. The world is once again living through revolutionary times. But Canada seems to be immune. US or UK conservatives might look at the insufferably progressive rhetoric of Justin Trudeau and wonder why ordinary Canadians haven’t tossed him out in favour a more populist alternative. Have they all been brainwashed up there?

Yet once again, like Macdonald and Trudeau Sr. before him, Justin Trudeau is the face of a Machiavellian elite that can maintain itself in power by diffusing and pre-empting the pressures of revolutionary change. Looking past the often-deceptive rhetoric and surface-level imagery, one will see that Canada is not nearly as liberal, progressive or cosmopolitan as it is perceived.

Trudeau Jr, like his father, is a promoter of official multiculturalism and is fond of uttering slogans like “diversity is our strength”. But as Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath has pointed out, unlike the United States, the Canadian government “does not engage in race-based classification of citizens [just as] the census does not impose racial categories”.

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And though Canadian universities are prone to indulging in critical theory jargon — as a certain University of Toronto psychology professor will be able to tell you — Canada has nothing like the American policy of “affirmative action” or race-based admission quotas, which is the source of interminable racial and ethnic animus in the US.

When it comes to immigration, Trudeau has been depicted by both liberal fans and conservative critics abroad as a bleeding-heart advocate of open borders. But look at Canada’s actual immigration system; in many ways, it is far more stringent than the US immigration system was under Trump. Canada may not have a border wall but it has a ruthlessly efficient “bureaucratic wall,” in addition to having invented the famous “points system”, emulated by Australia, and now the UK.

What shocks, particularly from the American vantage point, is that Canada has its own version of “mandatory E-Verify”, an employment verification policy for the purposes of immigration enforcement. In the United States the measure is usually only advocated for by hard immigration restrictionists. Not even Trump (for understandable reasons) and the Republican establishment are willing to support it. 

The drivers of Right-wing populism — divisive racial preferentialism, permissive immigration policy, a widespread sense of the loss of control — are thus not present in Canada. In other countries, pandemic restrictions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the latest in a long line of elite excesses that long predated Covid-19.

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But in Canada, whatever the policy on restrictions or vaccine mandates, absent those other factors, the camel’s back is not nearly so overburdened. Save for in the perpetually dissatisfied energy-producing region out west, populism will remain a hard sell. It is simply not favoured by Canada’s political culture.

This is not to say that the truckers are “un-Canadian” as their liberal opponents will paint them, though the decision by some of them to carry Confederate and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags does not help — nor does desecrating the National War Memorial. Shameful hooliganism aside, there is a place for dissenters in what is still (contrary to their cries of “tyranny”) a free country. 

They will just have to accept that they are up against one of the most entrenched and hegemonic ruling classes anywhere in the Western world: the “Laurentian elites” and their instrument for wielding power, the Liberal Party. As veteran journalist Peter C. Newman once observed, they have “reigned longer over Canada than … Communists ruled Russia”. If the Freedom Convoy is looking to overthrow this regime, they will have a very long drive ahead.

Still, there are times when a refusal to engage in self-criticism can be a hindrance to your tribe — as both the American Right and Left are now discovering.

Since 2016, the American Left has desperately cut itself off from reality: its unwillingness to concede that Donald Trump won the election precluded the Democrats from being able to consider why their candidate lost. But the American Right is equally capable of deluding itself. In fact, with Biden in the White House, it is now as much a problem for the American Right as it was for the Left during the Trump years.

Absent any self-reflection, political tribes are condemned to return to the same question: what is it about their opponents that makes them so belligerently wrong? This is why Democrats and Republicans responded to the 2016 and 2020 elections in a similar fashion. What on earth was there to dislike about Hillary Clinton? What could possibly be said against the character of Donald Trump?

Sometimes, however, this lack of self-criticism is more profound. Towards the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. Being, as I told one of the organisers, only about two-thirds in agreement with the conference agenda, I didn’t feel it was my place to give a speech. So instead, I took part in an interesting panel discussion with Dave Rubin, Sohrab Ahmari and the conference’s convenor, Yoram Hazony.

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It was a rich discussion, but we passed over too lightly a subject which demands serious focus. At one point during the panel, Dave brought up the popular talk-show host Bill Maher. In recent years, Maher has singled himself out on the American Left for his willingness to criticise the excesses of his own political side, in particular “cancel culture” and the “cult of woke”. Dave suggested that, given how much Maher agrees with conservatives on these points, it is strange that he still identifies with the Left. In other words, why should he not come over and join the merry men of the Right?

There are a number of possible answers to this question. The first, which many conservatives would offer (while no doubt patting themselves on the back), is that Maher somehow lacks the bravery or courage needed to commit such an act of apostasy. He may have moved Rightwards, but he is not willing to concede as much.

The second answer, which I imagine Maher himself might offer, is that he hasn’t left the Left — the Left has left him. He has stayed precisely where he was, and remains as true to his principles as ever. There is, perhaps, some truth here. But this still fails to address the key question: why, in the face of the current Leftist orthodoxies, are so many on the traditional Left reluctant to admit they now have more in common with the Right?

After all, previous generations of American public figures had no problem with making a move from Left to Right and admitting as much. Both Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz flirted with Marxism before coming out for conservatism. British public life is also peppered with individuals who made similar journeys without any embarrassment: Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Johnson and Kingsley Amis, to name but three.

Yet in America today, such apostasy is almost unheard of. There have been semi-regular defections from the Right, especially during the Trump era, when people such as Max Boot broke publicly with their own side to support a Democrat president. But there is a glaring absence of any movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to identify as conservative. And that should be a cause for concern. Rather than ignoring this trend, conservatives need to ask themselves: what is it about the Right that is so unappealing that people who agree almost entirely with its views resile from joining its ranks?

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As it happens, I suspect the one of the answers to this question can be found in one of the speeches given at the National Conservatism conference. During his talk, the distinguished conservative scholar Patrick Deneen offered — and I do not say this to do him any injustice — a lament for the Fifties; for the change in people’s habits of dress, manners and sexual etiquette. I listened to all of this with great interest and considerable disagreement. But as I did so, I could not help thinking that here in a nutshell was the main reason why disenchanted liberals like Maher would never in a million years join the American Right.

All political and social movements have their own oddities and obsessions. Many of the obsessions of the American Right, however, are too illiberal to possibly win over anyone but that type of person who jumps political sides, boots and all, because they favour the political certainty of its all-encompassing ideological home. Why won’t thoughtful ex-liberals consider joining the Right? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the type of conservative they’d be associated with.

What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.

At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.

And yet in America, the desire on the Right to mix religion and politics remains a significant temptation. The National Conservatism conference was filled with a disproportionate amount of Catholic social doctrine, and it is not the first time I have observed this encroachment. Most gatherings of conservative intellectuals fracture along this same line. The Vanenburg meetings fell into this problem at the start of the last decade. And I was once at a meeting of conservatives on the continent where, on several occasions, an American participant gleefully referred to gay couples as being in “sodomitical relationships”. Should we be surprised that so many liberals instinctively revile conservatism?

All of which is to say that this overlap between politics and religion remains a special type of kryptonite to any separation-of-church-and-state liberal. And that would be a subject of niche interest were it not also for the fact that it is electorally disastrous for the American Right, however enjoyable it may be as a religious or intellectual enterprise.

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As many as three in ten American adults are now religiously non-affiliated; fewer than half of Americans belong to a religious congregation. In such a world, the idea that a conservative movement can succeed while being intrinsically tied to religion — let alone one particular denomination — is a steer into the political wilderness.

After all, why would people who share 95% of your political attitudes not wish to join you? More often than not, the answer is not because of any lack of fortitude, but because of that 5% of beliefs you had hoped they might overlook.

Perhaps that small portion of ideas is worth fighting for; perhaps even to the extent that it’s worth alienating would-be conservatives. But these are questions the Right needs to answer, rather than blaming liberals for pointing them out.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

I didn’t expect excitable millennials to quote Hunter S. Thompson at me, at a conservative event. But at the National Conservatism II conference in Orlando last week, Fear And Loathging In Las Vegas was everywhere: the mood the night before kickoff had that exact sense of giddy incipient lunacy.

For my adult life, being both young and a conservative has been deeply, irretrievably cringe. Not so here, where the modal attendee was a bearded, trim, often tattooed male Hunter S. Thompson fan, under the age of 25. NatCon II was where Conservatism Inc. met Conservatism Ink.

The Conservatism Ink guys sported blue blazers and Richard Spencer haircuts. They made the bar noisy and excitable, added youth and buzz to events — and were notably absent from the centrepiece panel, in which the event’s organisers attempted to craft a ‘new fusionism’.

Here, conference organiser and Burke Foundation chairman Yoram Hazony took to the stage alongside the Catholic integralist writer Sohrab Ahmari, whose 2019 article ‘Against David French-Ism’ saw the first full-scale battle within the American Right, between the liberals and the then still emerging ‘post-liberal’ strand.

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For Ahmari, David French epitomised a Right-liberal thinking that conceded too much territory. By accepting the liberal idea that moral values should be kept out of the public square, the argument goes, conservatism merely becomes a strategy for losing more slowly. Instead, Ahmari states that the Right should aim for “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”.

It’s hard to see, though, how this stance can easily be made to square particularly with Ahmari’s co-panellists Dave Rubin, a noted libertarian, and Douglas Murray, the ne plus ultra of anti-woke right-liberalism.

For me, this event encapsulated the NatCon’s quandary: what kind of alliance, if any, is possible between liberals and post-liberals? And, crucially, ordered to which values? Everyone on the panel was unenthusiastic about wokeness, at pains to stress that they weren’t rabid authoritarians, and seemingly unsure about how to resolve the question of how state power could align with moral values, without treading on at least some of their friends’ toes.

Hazony argued that America could and should re-Christianise its public square, and simply manage some kind of ‘carve-out’ for groups such as gay people and orthodox Jews. Murray, meanwhile, argued that the Church only had itself to blame for mass secularisation. (He didn’t quite say they were all nonces but it was heavily implied.) Ahmari, perhaps the lone post-liberal on the stage, was surprisingly conciliatory.

Afterwards, Conservatism Inc. raved about the discussion. At the bar, though, where they were ignoring the whole event, the Conservatism Ink bros were less sure. They drank bourbon and muttered that with anti-woke liberals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali on-board, nothing would ever change. Too big a tent means a lack of focus. 

It wasn’t just the Gen-Z raw-eggs-and-dank-memes boys. “I was into this before it was cool” is the abiding cry of hipsters the world over, and it was (more or less explicitly) everywhere over the three days of conference. But if the the purists of NatCon I were complaining about liberal entryism, this isn’t just about new money coming into the movement. It’s also an effect of how radically the political backdrop has changed since 2019.

Between Brexit/Trump in 2016 and the pandemic in 2020, there was a widespread feeling that something new was needed to replace the technocratic ‘double liberal’ consensus. And indeed, since then something new has emerged, in the wake of Covid-19. It’s just not what was envisaged.

Back in 2019, people were dreaming about ordering Western state power to a more substantive moral programme than that of empty individual freedom and consumerism; a new, human-scale politics of meaning and necessary limits.

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And behold, the pandemic state of emergency did indeed shatter the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures where necessary. In other words: all politics is now post-liberal. 

But inasmuch as we have achieved consensus on what ‘the common good’ means, it doesn’t extend much beyond ‘public health’, understood in bare terms as the preservation of physical life: lockdowns, masks, vaccinations and so on. The new Western normal is one of authoritarian regimes now visibly reluctant to relinquish their grip on a state of emergency.

But these regimes are more, not less, technocratic — and there’s been no new politics of meaning. Instead, the last year and a half have felt like a relentless assault on everything that makes us human: interpersonal bonds, organic social organisations, in-person contact.

This situation has confused the hell out of the loosely post-liberal caucus who made up the intellectual backbone of NatCon I in 2019. It aimed to revive a more substantial nationalism capable of incorporating realist foreign policy; industrial policy; patriotism beyond divisive racial politics. There was a Republican in the White House; I’m told policy debates were detailed and impassioned. You never knew what might trickle up to actual centres of power. 

And the liberal mainstream was sincerely shocked by their suggestion that maybe state power and moral values should be aligned. Now, though, there’s no longer any need to make that case: in response to the pandemic, states across the West have enthusiastically seized power.

The pre-pandemic post-lib pipe-dream was of a revived human-scale politics of meaning, to challenge the bloodless grip of technocracy and its mantra of never-ending progress. Post-liberals were happy to talk about limits and state power as means of pursuing such a politics of meaning. Now, plot twist: existing post-liberalism has ordered state power to a set of moral values that 2019’s national conservatives really don’t like.

So the ‘state power’ bit is settled in principle. (Though for conservatives under Biden, the question of how to obtain it for themselves is both open and, they’d argue, urgent.) The ‘moral values’ bit is a bitter battlefield — even within the national conservative caucus.

With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that the programme trended negative: toward focusing on what we can all agree we don’t want. Along with Hazony’s sincere but inconclusive panel effort at shaping a ‘new fusionism’, this meant plenty of speakers whose primary argument was not for anything particular so much as against wokeness. Playing conference bingo with a friend, we were obliged to delete ‘cultural Marxism’ from our cards a few hours in because it came up too often. 

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To my eye the most interesting attendees were those who sought to address the how of power, or the what of values — without simply relapsing into complaints about wokeness. Informally, perhaps the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin (also known as Mencius Moldbug) qualifies here. He ran a kind of three-day mobile conference plenary, in which (seemingly without ever needing to draw breath) he addressed a little flock of the Conservatism Ink bros who followed him like ducklings.

Elsewhere, New Founding’s Matt Peterson outlined a plan for a commercial and cultural startup, aimed at propagating a positive lifestyle vision for the American Right. It was a for-profit entrepreneurial approach to moral renewal that felt both very American and somewhat baffling to a Bongland ex-Lefty.

More intelligible from my perspective was the session on ‘Worker Power’. Here, Oren Cass of American Compass joined Brian Dijkema of Cardus and Sean McGarvey of NABTU to discuss the sometimes vexed relationship between conservatism and trade unions. There’s been a lot of noise from the American Right about how the Republicans are now a multi-ethnic, working-class party, and Marco Rubio did endorse Amazon unionisation efforts in Alabama back in March. 

Even so, the souvenir conference mugs were, somewhat ironically, made in China; and attendance at the ‘Worker Power’ session was sparse. This spoke to one of the conference’s real tensions: what relation does this would-be counter-elite actually have to the masses? One approach to this question came from Hungary’s soft-power outreach team, who were present in force at NatCon. Balázs Orbán, Minister of State to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office (no relation), gave a presentation that positioned Hungary as a successful model for actually existing national conservatism.

Orbán boasted of Hungarian growth, lack of anti-semitic violence, church and synagogue renovation and improving birth rates. These, he argued, demonstrate that national conservatism with Hungarian characteristics is not, as Western liberals like to claim, a totalitarian dictatorship but in fact a popular regime that’s delivering what the Hungarian people want and need.

Whether you nod along with this framing of Fidesz probably depends on your political commitments. But from this perspective, an elite whose values are aligned with those of the masses can use authority to implement those values responsibly throughout the regime. What’s unclear, though, even among sympathetic conservatives, is how applicable the Orbánist model might be in the West — and particularly in America. 

It’s relatively easy for a reigning elite to align values to state power in a homogeneous nation of 10 million people. It’s far from obvious how this might be achieved in a deliberately decentralised, pluralistic nation of 300 million people, with a highly individualistic founding ideology that’s constitutionally allergic to state-mandated values.

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Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

Chris Rufo’s Leninist strategy for ‘counterrevolution’, which I’ve discussed here, offered part of the answer, in the playbook he proposed for getting American conservatives to win the culture wars. In Rufo’s view, the aim of such a counter-elite should be galvanising and providing language and representation for a mass that Rufo sees as subjected to the top-down imposition of alien values by a narcissistic, nihilistic Left-authoritarian state. 

Meanwhile, the writer Mary Eberstadt looked straight past Conservatism Inc., instead making a heartfelt address to Conservatism Ink in the name of shared values as such. She argued that the young have been robbed by ‘zero-sum progressivism’ of everything that gives life a ‘higher purpose’: family connections, faith, belonging, a cultural patrimony.

Taken together, Rufo’s right-Leninism and Eberstadt’s empathetic politics of meaningful relationships felt like the public and private facets of this movement’s better part. Eberstadt brought a deeply matriarchal quality to proceedings. 

She’s emerging as a compassionate figure in a sometimes dour or combative 21st-century American conservatism, and I hope her voice continues to be heard — especially by the Conservatism Inkers her talk addressed. After all, Rufo’s Right-Leninist vanguardism in the name of shared conservative values will make little sense if it’s pursued in the name of a people who don’t actually have any shared values.

But if Rufo and Eberstadt together comprise top-down and bottom-up facets of something approaching a workable, effective and ethically-grounded conservatism, there are plenty of other visions for where this version of the right goes next: Thielite space fascism, Bitcoin exitism, libertarian anti-wokeism, hard-edged nationalism, doctrinaire Catholic integralism or simply reabsorption by the neocon blob. 

It’s a heady and at many points self-contradictory brew, in which the central question — whose values? — remains undecided, a dilemma that will either prove the movement’s greatest strength or weakness.

After three days in bat country, I stumbled to bed on the last night past a swarm of Conservatism Ink chanting ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ in the hotel bar. I left with an abiding sense that national conservatism has money behind it, but also plenty of punk energy and belligerence.

Suggested reading

Why the Left won't let go of Brandon

By Kat Rosenfield

As ever, money will play a huge part in what happens next. And there are plenty of boomercons with fat chequebooks, who would like to see room on the ark for at least ‘our’ kind of liberal. In particular, as far as the neocons are concerned, it’s noteworthy that there’s been some debate over whether foreign-policy realists were well enough represented on the roster — especially given how central debates over US military obligations have been to shifts on the Right since Trump.

There are probably plenty as well who would like to see the more punk end of this movement defanged, and Conservatism Ink toned right down. Meanwhile, the Gen-Z right-wingers now flocking to this corner of politics have altogether wilder and stranger ideas, that often owe more to the fringes of the Weird Online Right than the Founding Fathers. And they’re the ones with the energy: they still got up at 6am to lift. Even after all that bourbon. 

Who will win? My best guess is that in the short term we’ll see this movement re-absorbed by the DC blob. Then there’ll be full-scale revolt by Conservatism Ink when they are, in aggregate, old enough to wield power. And then we really will be in bat country.