Republicans have some lessons to learn from the Tories

By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

The Republican faithful are gathering in Milwaukee with two very different emotions. The first is the same deep shock that everybody feels following the bloody assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday.

The second emotion, though, is increasing confidence that victory in November is in the bag.

After all, the Democrats are feuding over whether to replace 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 all coming their way.

Pointing out to Republican revelers that Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives just lost the British 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 Tories got to do with a Republican Party which believes the White House is within its grasp?

The answer is quite a lot. America’s 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.

Margaret Thatcher came to power a year before Ronald Reagan, and Brexit shook the world about five months before Trump’s election.

That history alone should imply that the Tory 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 may be whether the same gremlins drive the Republican machine off the road in 2028 — or this year.

Tories break two important promises

The implosion of British Conservatism has been dramatic. Only four and a half years ago, Boris Johnson, who 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 the 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 Tories suffered their worst defeat in two centuries. That is partly because the Labour Party detoxified itself by replacing the Marxist Corbyn with Starmer, a sensible centrist.

But 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 Corbyn won in 2017).

The Tories 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 Tories issued a whole series of individual pledges that were either impossible or contradictory — such as increasing the number of NHS services while lowering taxes (that pay for the NHS) and cutting the number of immigrants (which the NHS relies on for staff).

Tories have a credibility gap on immigration.

More fundamentally, under Johnson and his successors, the Tories 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 Tories and Republicans to the philosophical founder of conservatism.

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 Britain, the tweedy Harold Macmillan defanged socialism by embracing the welfare state, while in 1950s America, 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 Tories may be the party of the landed classes, but they appointed Britain’s first Jewish prime minister, as well as its first (and second and third) female premiers, and now in Sunak 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 business-like about conservatism. The left can have its dreamers; conservatism is about “the art of the possible,” as R A Butler put it.

Indeed, in more sexist times, the right in both Britain and America cast itself as the sensible “Daddy” party: It will protect the realm, look after your money, keep the streets safe and govern in prose rather than poetry.

The second, more ideological, promise of transatlantic conservatism is more recent: The idea that the right will take the state off your back and increase your liberty. Reagan and Thatcher both drew heavily on the ideas of free market thinkers like 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 Britain Great Again — because Britain was such a basket case in the 1970s.

But 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 privatisation.

That mixture of efficiency and idealism has kept the Tories 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 Britain is less the fact that the Tories lost than the way that over the previous four and half years Johnson and his heirs shredded the two central tenets of modern conservatism — competence and small-state idealism — in a way that will make it extremely challenging to rebuild.

Brexit reinforced hypocrisy

Even before Covid, 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, then 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 Tory 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 European Union 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 Britain 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 United Kingdom — 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 Britain into a nimble entrepot like yesterday’s Hong Kong or today’s Singapore.

But 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 Tories delivered neither. Immigration went up significantly. Taxes rose to their highest level since the Second World War.

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.

UK trade fails to recover in line with peer economies.

The Tories have now fragmented into warring factions, all screaming traitors. 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.

But the group that emerges from the current disaster looking especially bad (and deserves special attention in Milwaukee) is the establishment Tories who went along with Johnson even though they knew that he had been repeatedly sacked for lying and cheating.

Normally pragmatic Tories rejected the reasonable deal with the EU that 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 don’t regard taking Britain out of the world’s biggest trading group and undermining one prime minister after another as pluses on one’s resume.

Trump backers lack foresight

The likes of Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley may one day face the same fate. It’s 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.

But at what cost? American conservatism — especially the Trumpian version that the party is going to embrace 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 “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 will fix them. The Republican Party has become like an American equivalent of Forza Italia, 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 January 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,” admits Mitt Romney, one of the few Republicans to keep his head during the Trump mania.

And 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 decision-making 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 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. But in the long term, they pull in different directions. Trump’s tariffs will inevitably raise the cost of basic goods. And a Trumpian stimulus added to America’s already huge deficit will 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 will 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 Tories 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 Johnson’s earliest backers for the top job in 2019.

But 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 will not win this election; his opponent will 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.

Kamala Harris might come into her own: If so, she would surely be a tougher opponent for Trump than Biden. And there are other even more promising candidates in the wings.

Gavin Newsom brings the might of the Californian machine to bear. Or perhaps Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. While she repeatedly denounces 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 Britain 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.

And 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 Tories — then Trump’s enablers in Milwaukee will 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. But sooner or later, the odds are that the Republican Party will eventually decide that the man they are gathering to enthrone this week was not the unifier of modern conservatism but its dismantler. And, as in Britain, it could take a long time to pick up all the pieces.