Everybody move to the right!

Why extremism is the fate of conservatism

The Lowdown is available on Apple (see below), Spotify, Amazon, and all other podcast hosts

Please listen to this week’s Lowdown podcast interview with Professor Tim Bale, the country’s foremost authority on the Conservative party, as we talk about how extremists are radicalising conservatism.

Below is my best take on why Conservatives are in an extremist cycle.

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The lost cause of British conservatism is like the lost cause of the US Confederacy. Myth-making and evasion dominate the writing of Conservative intellectuals just as they dominated the self-justification of the defeated American south.

To Confederate sympathisers the south did not lose because it was defending slavery. The southern states were a victim of an attack on their rights by the north, a position still maintained today by Nikki Haley and other right-wing politicians seeking southern votes. 

Equally, today’s Conservative writers insist that they are not going down to a potentially catastrophic defeat because Conservatism betrayed the UK by imposing Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss on a country in no condition to take any of them.

No, the right is losing because it is not right-wing enough.

It feels mean to pick out examples when there is so much special pleading to choose from. But as readers need evidence, here is the pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs (an old friend of this Substack).

 Writing in the Telegraph  Tombs says that the Tories “have lost much of their middle-class vote and their working class vote too”. So they have. But Tombs hastens to add, not because of Brexit being a disaster, or Johnson turning Downing Street into a pub, or unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy but because along the way the Conservatives embraced policies that Tombs and the Telegraph don’t like.

 “High taxes, mass immigration, projects like HS2 and hasty attempts to impose net zero”.

There is no need for right-wingers to ask hard questions of themselves. They weren’t wrong. They were betrayed by cowardly politicians and the civil service.

Henry Hill, the deputy editor of Conservative Home, who was writing in the Guardian this week, exemplifies the determination of modern Conservatives to avoid a reckoning with what they have done.

He asks a good question: how did the Tories go from a landslide victory in 2019 to what looks like being a landslide defeat in 2024.  But once again he does not blame Brexit, or Boris Johnson, or Liz Truss or any policy or politician right-wingers endorsed but too many immigrants and too many tax rises.

The modern right-winger is always the victim and never the aggressor. He does not harm others; others harm him.

The great southern novelist William Faulkner wrote in the 1940s about how we use fantasy to blot out history.

To men of his generation the worst moment in the history of the south was on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederates were still in the civil war. But then the southern high command ordered Major General Thomas Pickett to lead his men in an insane charge uphill against entrenched Union positions.

The battle was lost, and eventually the war was lost too.

Faulkner wrote

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances.”

For every Tory boy today, there is an instant when it is not yet ten o’clock on that October morning in 2022.  Kwasi Kwarteng has not delivered his mini budget. It hasn’t happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin …

It is easy to mock. And just because it is easy does not mean one should do it. But once you have stopped laughing at them, it’s worth noting that the future of conservatism is one of perpetual motion to the right.

If American conservatism is dominated by the Donald Trump personality cult, British conservatism is dominated by the Brexit cargo cult.

You cannot say that Brexit has failed and remain a Conservative. It is heresy. Taboo. Question Brexit and the shamans of the Tory tribe will curse you, and its warriors will pick up their clubs and spears and drive you from the warmth of the campfire into the cold, darkness of the real world.

In this know-nothing atmosphere I can see four reasons why Tory radicalisation is inevitable

1/ The power of fantasy