The US Republican faithful this week gathered in Milwaukee with two very different emotions. The first was the same deep shock that everybody felt following the bloody assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump on Saturday last week.
However, the second emotion was increasing confidence that victory in November was in the bag. After all, the Democrats are feuding over whether to replace US President Joe Biden with a less geriatric candidate, and the coming contest is being fought on friendly territory for the right: the economy, immigration and the perils of a dangerous world. There might even be a clean sweep, with the presidency, Senate and House of Representatives all coming their way.
Pointing out to Republican revelers that then-British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives just lost the election to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in a historic landslide might seem quaint, irrelevant or downright rude. What on earth has the fate of the hapless Conservatives got to do with the Republican Party, which has the White House so clearly in its sights?
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
The answer is, quite a lot. The US’ conservative movement (which we once dubbed “The Right Nation”) and its British equivalent have marched in lockstep since the 1980s — with the British Conservatives usually a bit ahead of the Americans. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher came to power a year before former US president Ronald Reagan, and Brexit shook the world about five months before Trump’s election. That history alone should imply that the Conservative car crash is worth a closer inspection than most American conservatives, fixated first on Biden’s mental condition and now on the ghastly events in Pennsylvania, have given it.
However, the really worrying thing for the Republicans is how British conservatism veered off the road. Look under the hood of the Trumpian supremacy; plenty of uncomfortable mechanical similarities exist. The only question might be whether the same gremlins drive the Republican machine off the road in 2028 — or this year.
BROKEN PROMISES
The implosion of British conservatism has been dramatic. Only four-and-a-half years ago, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, whom Trump himself had christened “Britain Trump,” won a landslide 80-seat majority with the most Trumpian cocktail that has ever been served up to the British people. There was a focus on white working-class voters and a determination to “get Brexit done” however much that discombobulated overseas allies and the traditional ruling class. Johnson trounced Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn, and commentators talked about a new Conservative hegemony based on harnessing the forces of nationalism and working-class patriotism.
Yet on July 4, the Conservatives suffered their worst defeat in two centuries. That was partly because the Labour Party detoxified itself by replacing the Marxist Corbyn with Starmer, a sensible centrist. However, the election was much more about the collapse of the Conservatives than the advance of Labour: Starmer’s share of the vote barely improved on 2019’s (and was lower than what Corbyn won in 2017). The Conservatives lost this time, because their supporters deserted them, either staying at home or joining the throng of voters across the country who were so desperate for change that they voted for whoever (Liberal Democrats, Reform or even the Greens) was best positioned to eject their local Conservative. The West’s most successful political party had become so hated that anybody else would do.
The cause was broken promises. In 2019, the Conservatives issued a whole series of individual pledges that were either impossible or contradictory — such as increasing the number of National Health Service (NHS) services while lowering taxes (that pay for the NHS) and cutting the number of immigrants (which the NHS relies on for staff).
More fundamentally, under Johnson and his successors, the Conservatives ended up breaking the two basic electoral promises that have underpinned modern conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic: competent government and a smaller state.
The first vow — of basic competence — stretches back through generations of managerial-looking Conservatives and Republicans to the philosophical founder of conservatism. English philosopher Edmund Burke thought good government was about preserving tradition while also embracing necessary change: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of conservation.”
That has been the heart of the right’s success on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, in postwar UK, the tweedy, then-British prime minister Harold Macmillan defanged socialism by embracing the welfare state, while in 1950s US, then-US president Dwight Eisenhower embraced the New Deal by building homes and freeways. The right has always co-opted new people as well as new ideas. The Conservatives might be the party of the landed classes, but they appointed the UK’s first Jewish prime minister, as well as its first (and second and third) female prime ministers, and Sunak as its first Hindu one.
If talent development and change management sound a bit like CEO-speak, then that is appropriate. There has always been something businesslike about conservatism. The left can have its dreamers; conservatism is about “the art of the possible,” as the first British secretary of state R.A. Butler put it. Indeed, in more sexist times, the right in the UK and the US cast themselves as the sensible “Daddy” party: It would protect the realm, look after your money, keep the streets safe and govern in prose rather than poetry.
The second, more ideological, promise of trans-Atlantic conservatism is more recent: The idea that the right would take the state off your back and increase your liberty. Reagan and Thatcher both drew heavily on the ideas of free market thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. For Thatcher, who carried a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in her handbag, defeating global socialism was about “Making the UK Great Again” — because the UK was such a basket case in the 1970s. However, this creed was global rather than parochial: Thatcher and Reagan thought freedom had to be advanced all the way around the world, whether it be through outmuscling the Soviet Union or privatization.
That mixture of efficiency and idealism has kept the Conservatives in Downing Street and the Republicans in the White House in most elections since 1980. The right has survived lackluster leaders, innumerable scandals and the occasional election defeat — and still dominated politics.
The worrying thing for conservatives of all sorts about the UK is less the fact that the Conservatives lost than the way that over the previous four-and-a-half years Johnson and his heirs shredded the two central tenets of modern conservatism — competence and small-state idealism — in a way that would make it extremely challenging to rebuild.
HYPOCRISY
Even before COVID-19, Johnson looked like an astonishingly incompetent prime minister, incapable of translating his overblown rhetoric into concerted action. When the pandemic struck, idleness and chaos were reinforced by hypocrisy, with staff in Downing Street holding wild parties even as Johnson banned regular people from meeting outside. His successor, Liz Truss, almost blew up the British economy with a dash-for-growth “fiscal event” and was forced to resign after just 49 days, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. Sunak then took on what one Conservative described as the “poisoned chalice for the whole party.” He stopped some of the chaos, but not enough.
At the heart of that dysfunction was Brexit — something that Sunak and Johnson had supported. Leaving the EU was never an efficient thing to do. Economically, cutting yourself from your main trading partner is seldom a great idea. Diplomatically, decades of patient work putting the UK at the center of three concentric circles — the EU, the US and the emerging world — were blown up in an instant. Worst of all for Burke, the supposedly patriotic cause of Brexit called into question the very idea of the UK — by making it more likely that Scotland and Northern Ireland, which both voted against Brexit, would leave.
Brexit also blew up the idealistic “small government” side of conservatism. For some of Thatcher’s disciples, Brexit’s promise of “taking back control” was a way of turning the UK into a nimble entrepot like yesterday’s Hong Kong or today’s Singapore. However, for most of the “Red Wall” voters in the North that Johnson lured in, Brexit was about protecting their way of life against globalization, not welcoming it in.
Even a competent administration would never have been able to do both. In the end, the Conservatives delivered neither. Immigration went up significantly. Taxes rose to their highest level since World War II. Regulations increased. Businesses gave up on the European market, because the form filling got too much, and lorries queued for miles at Dover. Government cost more and delivered less.
The Conservatives have now fragmented into warring factions, all screaming traitor. The ultra Brexiteers are insisting (much as ultra socialists used to do in the 1970s) that the only reason why Brexit has failed is that it has not been pursued hard enough. However, the group that emerges from the current disaster looking especially bad (and deserves special attention in Milwaukee) is the establishment Conservatives who went along with Johnson even though they knew that he had been repeatedly sacked for lying and cheating.
Normally pragmatic Conservatives rejected the reasonable deal with the EU that former British prime minister Theresa May forged and then signed up for the worse one that Johnson and the ultras delivered. They then supported the deeply flawed Truss for the leadership and cheered the doomed policy of sending refugees to Rwanda. Many of these erstwhile pragmatists are now trying to get jobs in the private sector — and discovering that most businesspeople do not regard taking the UK out of the world’s biggest trading group and undermining one prime minister after another as pluses on one’s resume.
LACK of FORESIGHT
The likes of US Senator Marco Rubio and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley might one day face the same fate. It is true that Trump delivered some key Republican demands during his first presidency, such as conservative Supreme Court judges, lower taxes and a bonfire of regulations. However, at what cost? US conservatism — especially the Trumpian version that the party embraced in Milwaukee — looks worryingly like Johnson’s concoction of four-and-a-half years ago.
Trump is even further removed from Burkean good government and Hayekian small-state idealism than Johnson was. A tradition of good government has been replaced with the reality of a personality cult. While Reagan and Thatcher were both disciples of coherent philosophies, Trump’s bible is his own The Art of the Deal. On a host of issues from the border to Gaza to Ukraine, the Republican platform is simply that the great leader would fix them. The Republican Party has become like an American equivalent of Forza Italia, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s movement.
Just consider for a moment the compromises that each of the tribes that make up the Right nation have made purely to serve Trump. Religious conservatives are now supporting a thrice-married man who sleeps with porn stars and worships Mammon. Fiscal conservatives have made their peace with a man who wants to expand the national debt in much the same way that he overleveraged his own businesses. Free-trade conservatives are now in lockstep with one of the great protectionists. Law-and-order conservatives are lined up behind a convicted felon who launched an insurgency in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Haley and an army of Wall Street Republicans once declared that they could no longer support a man who refused to honor the basic democratic principle of the peaceful transfer of power. Now they are queuing to kiss his ring.
“A very large portion of my party doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” said US Senator Mitt Romney, one of the few Republicans to keep his head during the Trump mania.
Just imagine, what happens to good-government conservatism if Trump wins? At least in Johnson’s case, instability was merely a byproduct of incompetence. In Trump’s case, creative chaos is the CEO’s trademark management style: Instinctive decisionmaking that sometimes pays off but, at its worst, drifts into lawlessness.
Trumpism also suffers from the same ideological problem as Brexit: promising incompatible things to different people. The “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) world includes businesspeople who want lower taxes and lighter regulations, and working-class people who want cheaper goods and job protection. Sometimes, these two ends coincide: The early years of Trump’s presidency saw an improvement in living standards and a stock market boom. However, in the long term, they pull in different directions. Trump’s tariffs would inevitably raise the cost of basic goods. A Trumpian stimulus added to the US’ already huge deficit would lead to inflation and market instability.
The contradiction between the two main ideas of foreign policy is even deeper. The first notion is a classic Republican one: America is in a Cold War with an indomitable foe — with China replacing the Soviet Union. But the second idea is America First: The US should extricate itself from global alliances that let other countries free ride on American power. Eisenhower and Reagan won the previous Cold War by uniting as much of the world as possible against Moscow, at the cost of both American lives and treasure. Clobbering your allies with tariffs and disparaging alliances like NATO will not help the US beat China. There is a reason why Beijing and Moscow would rather have Trump.
“So what?” many of those flocking to Milwaukee say. “We will win this election and then deal with all these contradictions in four years — after Trump has followed Biden into retirement.”
That sounds like many British Conservatives five years ago who argued that Johnson was a short-term expedient. Indeed, if Republicans need any tips on the perils of thinking that way, they can ask Sunak on his inevitable lecture tour whether he regrets supporting Brexit and being one of Johnson’s earliest backers for the top job in 2019. However, the Republican denouement could come sooner — if the Democrats change course. For despite all the emotion and adoration swirling around Milwaukee, the truth is that, just like Johnson four-and-a-half years ago, Trump would not win this election; his opponent would lose it. Trump’s main advantage, even after this traumatic weekend, is simply that he is not Sleepy Joe.
Seven in 10 Americans are double haters — they want anybody other than Trump or Biden. Trump’s fanatical MAGA base belies the fact that he is disliked or distrusted by many key constituencies the Republicans need to win this year, not least suburban women who remember not just what he did to abortion rights, but also the way he separated children from their mothers at the border.
Consider, for instance, the following thought experiment. Imagine that Joe Biden resigns in the wake of the Republican Convention, and the Democrats decide to have a controlled race. US Vice President Kamala Harris might come into her own: If so, she would surely be a tougher opponent for Trump than Biden. There are also other even more promising candidates in the wings. California Governor Gavin Newsom brings the might of the Californian machine to bear. Or perhaps Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. While she has repeatedly denounced any calls for her to replace Biden, someone else with her magic formula of pragmatic reform (“fix the damn roads”) and no-nonsense style could step forward.
The lesson from the UK this month is that conservatism — especially if it looks chaotic and reckless — is vulnerable to a challenge from the center-left. A contender with that ideology would make Trump look old and crotchety. A moderate governor with a decent record of pragmatic governing might mean that all those MAGA ideas that the Republicans are now signing up for look extreme. Suddenly, rather than having Sleepy Joe’s record on inflation and immigration under the microscope, the focus again would be on the Republicans, and their excesses and convolutions in the Trump era.
If that comes to pass — and the Democrats end up doing to the Republicans what the British Labour Party has done to the Conservatives — then Trump’s enablers in Milwaukee would have some difficult questions to answer when they go off to look for jobs in the private sector.
Why did you think it was reasonable to support an armed invasion of the Capitol? Why did the party of business embrace a gospel of chaotic indebtedness? And why, when there are so many good things about American conservatism, did you give them all up for one not particularly conservative man? That reckoning might not happen this year. However, sooner or later, the odds are that the Republican Party would eventually decide that the man they gathered to enthrone this week was not the unifier of modern conservatism, but its dismantler. As in the UK, it could take a long time to pick up all the pieces.
John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
The return of US president-elect Donald Trump to the White House has injected a new wave of anxiety across the Taiwan Strait. For Taiwan, an island whose very survival depends on the delicate and strategic support from the US, Trump’s election victory raises a cascade of questions and fears about what lies ahead. His approach to international relations — grounded in transactional and unpredictable policies — poses unique risks to Taiwan’s stability, economic prosperity and geopolitical standing. Trump’s first term left a complicated legacy in the region. On the one hand, his administration ramped up arms sales to Taiwan and sanctioned
The Taiwanese have proven to be resilient in the face of disasters and they have resisted continuing attempts to subordinate Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nonetheless, the Taiwanese can and should do more to become even more resilient and to be better prepared for resistance should the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) try to annex Taiwan. President William Lai (賴清德) argues that the Taiwanese should determine their own fate. This position continues the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) tradition of opposing the CCP’s annexation of Taiwan. Lai challenges the CCP’s narrative by stating that Taiwan is not subordinate to the
US president-elect Donald Trump is to return to the White House in January, but his second term would surely be different from the first. His Cabinet would not include former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former US national security adviser John Bolton, both outspoken supporters of Taiwan. Trump is expected to implement a transactionalist approach to Taiwan, including measures such as demanding that Taiwan pay a high “protection fee” or requiring that Taiwan’s military spending amount to at least 10 percent of its GDP. However, if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) invades Taiwan, it is doubtful that Trump would dispatch
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has been dubbed Taiwan’s “sacred mountain.” In the past few years, it has invested in the construction of fabs in the US, Japan and Europe, and has long been a world-leading super enterprise — a source of pride for Taiwanese. However, many erroneous news reports, some part of cognitive warfare campaigns, have appeared online, intentionally spreading the false idea that TSMC is not really a Taiwanese company. It is true that TSMC depositary receipts can be purchased on the US securities market, and the proportion of foreign investment in the company is high. However, this reflects the
RSS