Extremists ARE the conservative mainstream now

And Rishi Sunak and Ron DeSantis prove it

A yearning has gripped elements of centrist opinion. Judicious men and women in the US and UK are almost begging the right to be a little less deranged, and return to the traditions of sensible, moderate conservativism.

Looking at the wreck of Brexit Britain, the editors of the Financial Times pleaded with the Conservative government to start behaving reasonably

“Dogma and Johnsonian ‘cakeism’ have for too long bedevilled the Brexit debate. It is time to replace it with more pragmatic realism.”

From a purely self-interested perspective, British Conservatives should take the FT’s advice. Labour’s now standard opinion poll leads of 20 percent plus suggest you will be able to fit the combined strength of the Parliamentary Conservative party into the back of a taxi after the next general election – and still have space for a couple of hitchhikers.  Millions of voters, who thought that the Conservative party allowed middle-class people to prosper, have finally noticed that it has presided over wage stagnation for 11 years, and is now topping that dire record with real wage cuts.

As the lost decade of the 2020s follows the lost decade of the 2010s, the Conservatives are steering the UK from relative to absolute decline.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Rishi Sunak can appear to be the pragmatic realist of Financial Times editors’ dreams. He went to a good public school, and has nice manners. Surely, he will do whatever it takes to revive the economy and his electoral prospects.

If British Conservatism were a pragmatic movement, it would indeed be looking for ways out of the disaster it created. Conservatives would hold intense debates on the need to rejoin the EU (or at the very least the single market), and reverse the four to five percent fall in GDP Brexit brought.

Pragmatic British realists gather near Parliament

Nothing of the sort is happening. Six years on, not one of the Conservative politicians, newspapers and think tanks that backed Brexit so noisily has engaged in honest accounting.  Far from returning to the centre-ground, the British right is caught in a radicalisation spiral familiar to so many of us who grew up on the left.

The spiral begins with a few voices adopting an extreme position, in this instance that the UK should withdraw completely from the European Union – a policy hardly any Eurosceptic believed possible or desirable before 2016. As the hack Conservative politician and journalist Daniel Hannan (now Baron Hannan, if you please) explained in 2015, “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”.

The extremists win – in this instance they secure a narrow victory in the Brexit referendum of 2016.  To strengthen their hold they form  “in” and “out groups – supporters of Brexit and “Remoaners”. To stay in with the in-crowd, Conservatives must commit to ever-more extreme versions of Brexit or face ostracism.

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart,” said James Baldwin “For his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”  

Questioning Brexit has become taboo among conservatives for Baldwin’s reason. To maintain the purity of the true faith, Boris Johnson took the UK out of the single market and the customs union, and made a nonsense of his own nationalism by dividing the UK with a trade border in the Irish Sea.

Sunak is not proposing pragmatic solutions to the UK’s economic crisis or engaging in a hard-headed assessment of national decline. To show he too is “pure in heart” Sunak is kicking the country further down the spiral of radicalisation by proposing to abolish thousands of EU regulations the UK retained after Brexit, and the case law that guided the judiciary when it implemented them. 

After 12 years of public-sector cuts, it is far from clear that the British state has the capacity to produce adequate regulations to cover everything from the handling of dangerous chemicals to workers’ rights. Employers and trade unions warn that “it is hard to conceive of a set of circumstances more likely to lead to confusion and disarray”. The government ignores them. It prefers the risk of chaos to the sin of impurity.

Political commentators, and not only at the Financial Times, still talk as if there is a distinction between” pragmatic” mainstream conservatives and the extremists inside the Conservative party, the Tory press and on the wider Faragist right.

They have yet to grasp those old distinctions dissolved long ago and realise that moderate conservatism is dead and gone. The extremists are the mainstream now.

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Ron DeSanits spreading tolearnace and joy

The same beseeching tone you hear from British commentators was evident in the voice of the British-born American journalist Andrew Sullivan last week. Sullivan is a lovely and committed writer, and his yearning for a civilised conservatism is sincerely meant.

The right could fight the left if only it abandoned the brutality and conspiracism of the Trump years, he wrote on Substack. It should offer the young a generous alternative to progressive witch hunts by

“…unwinding racial and gender obsessions, stop discriminating, encourage live-and-let-live toleration, and allow a free society to sort these things out, without top-down engineering. [It should celebrate] a diverse society — and the unique individuals and interactions that make it so dynamic and life-giving.”

In the US as in the UK, moderate conservativism is not only a desirable but a screamingly obvious electoral strategy. Sullivan’s ideas would appeal to many, including many frightened liberals who dare not speak out for fear of reprisals from the Robespierres of woke orthodoxy. The Republicans are losing elections they could win because their paranoia, racism, attacks on women’s rights. jeering hatreds, and cynical exploitation of half-mad and often wholly mad fantasies repels potential voters. The party has alienated young Americans so thoroughly, one analysis suggested that “72 percent of women ages 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races nationwide” during America’s midterm elections in November. 

Switching to a strategy that might win back the swing voters they have lost, appears the easiest of decisions for conservatives to make. 

Yet because the mainstream American right is as extremist as its British counterpart, Sullivan’s notion that it might embrace live-and-let-live toleration is as incredible as anything QAnon promotes.  Although his appeal is declining  Donald Trump still has a base of 40 percent support among Republican voters. It could be enough to see him through the primaries to become the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election. God help the chances of live-and-let-live conservatism in that eventuality.

At present, the only potential candidate who might beat him is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. To the surprise of no one, he is not fighting progressives by contrasting their authoritarianism with his easy-going tolerance. He is outflanking Trump on the cranky right by supporting the conspiracy theories of anti-vaxxers. He has called on the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to investigate "any and all wrongdoing" with respect to the Covid-19 vaccines.