Liz Truss doesn't understand modern conservatism
Social and cultural populism + economic moderation is today's winning formula for the right.
Political trends often move in sympathy with each other on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s a reason why the 1980s were the era of both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism, and why the 1990s were the decade of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s Third Way liberalism. More recently, Brexit and Trump both came to their culmination in 2016, presaging a new era of conservative politics which was based much more strongly on identity than economics. It looked like a permanent realignment was underway, one which was rearranging the political map and making it much tougher for the left to win power. And then, photobombing the scene with margarita in hand, came Liz Truss.
Truss and her chancellor (the second most important figure in any British government) Kwasi Kwarteng are not actually from our new era. In fact, it seems like they’ve been on the Moon since before Mitt Romney went down to defeat in 2012, if not since the 1980s. They are “Reaganites” and “Thatcherites” who are convinced that what the British people need more than anything else is a dose of supply-side shock therapy. Shortly after assuming power, they announced a massive tax giveaway to the rich, even removing a cap on bankers’ bonuses. When even the financial markets reacted negatively to this supposedly “pro-growth” agenda, it set off a currency crisis which saw sterling fall to its lowest level ever against the dollar. The government then announced that it intended to slash Britain’s already chronically underfunded public services in order to convince the markets that the UK’s debt is sustainable.
I think if you had tried to pitch a satire of the Tory party based on this plotline to a TV producer a month ago, they would have laughed you out of their office. Handouts to bankers paid for by cutting health and education are too obviously a parody of the Tory image as “the nasty party” to be politically sustainable. And lo and behold, the latest polls show that Truss has had a catastrophic impact on her party’s political fortunes - if an election was held today, Labour would win the largest majority in Britain’s history.
Truss and Kwarteng have made plenty of errors here which you can read about in the newspapers, but I feel that their most fundamental error has gone relatively unremarked upon. And that is their failure to understand the essence of what modern conservatism is.
To simplify somewhat, modern conservatism in the UK and the U.S. has always consisted of two strands in tension with one another. The first strand is what we might call the conservatism of bankers. This is the part of conservatism focused on pro-business policies and tax cuts for the wealthy. The other strand is what we might call the conservatism of the people. This is the type of conservatism that stresses nationalism, “traditional” cultural and social values, and speaking up for “ordinary people” against what it casts as condescending elites.1
In some senses it is a miracle that a movement based on these two strands sticks together at all, given that the conservatism of bankers often produces economic policies that directly harm ordinary people. But it has become particularly difficult to maintain this coalition in recent years because as Western economic power has declined relative to the rest of the world and income inequality has grown, the bankers’ policies appear more directly harmful to ordinary people. As an example, look at changing views of trade. With the U.S. no longer the world’s leading manufacturing power, free trade no longer looks like such a good idea, and neither party now strongly endorses it. Britain has responded to its own deindustrialization by cutting itself off from the largest free trading bloc in the world, hoping somehow this will restore an economic model which in reality is gone for good.
Immigration is another example. Because Republicans are so proud of being the “party of Reagan” but nowadays are also virulently anti-immigrant, the left loves to mock the modern GOP by pointing out that Reagan was hugely in favor of immigration and even granted a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people. And it is absolutely true that the conservatism of the bankers was pro-immigration because it provided a cheap and exploitable workforce. But as the white working and middle-classes have lost relative status and wealth in recent years, the conservatism of the people has instead cast immigrants as direct economic competitors who ought to be excluded from the country altogether.
In these ways and others, over the past decade the balance of power within conservatism has moved decisively away from the bankers and towards the conservatism of the people. Brexit, which cut Britain off from international markets and was opposed by all large business groups, was the most obvious sign of this in Britain. In the U.S., Trump, took a pivot leftwards on economic issues. In the 2016 primary, support for Trump was correlated with economic liberalism, and for good reason - as a candidate he abandoned decades of Republican talking points about the need to privatize Social Security and Medicare and pledged to stand up for “the forgotten man”.
In government, Trump’s record was more complicated. Beyond trade wars - which actually harmed American workers - his commitment to economic populism was wafer-thin. His signal legislative achievement was a large tax cut for the wealthy, paid for out of the deficit. But even though Trump got swept along with this traditional Republican agenda, what he never made the mistake of doing was allowing his fiscal conservatism to become the defining feature of his movement. Instead, he issued a steady stream of socially conservative, culturally conservative and flat-out racist commentary designed to appeal to the conservatism of the people and distract from the fact his actual policies were those of a plutocrat. It was a strategy, as one book has put it, of “let them eat tweets”.
Which brings us to Liz Truss.
Liz Truss, who opposed Brexit, has a steadfast commitment to the conservatism of the bankers which does not appear to have been fazed or even touched by the transformation of the Anglophone conservative movement over the past decade. She failed to learn the lesson that the winning combination for conservatives today is social and cultural populism + economic moderation. If right-wing economics is to be pursued, then it has to be obscured by a cloud of fulmination about all things “woke”, absolutely not placed front and center of the movement. Truss has failed to learn this lesson. Consider just the following:
The day after announcing his disastrous mini-budget, Kwarteng had a champagne reception with many of the financial speculators who benefited from the planned tax cuts;
A minister in Truss’ government has said that he aspires to abolish inheritance tax;
The chair of the Conservative Party told voters worried about their energy bills to “either freeze or go out and get yourself that dream well paid job;
The government is considering sharp cuts to welfare and public services;
Asked about cuts to public services, Truss responded nonsensically: “We’re cutting public services to increase spending on public services”.
It’s completely predictable that this performance has led to dismal approval ratings for the Tories. How Truss came to misunderstand the conservative zeitgeist so badly is a more difficult question. She entered Parliament in 2010, so certainly she ought to remember the austerity wars of the early 2010s. If she was paying attention, she ought to have seen how Barack Obama demolished Mitt Romney in 2012 by labelling him as a rapacious plutocrat, and how the Democrats have struggled to battle Donald Trump’s conservatism of the people since 2016. She will certainly stand forevermore as an object lesson in why the Tory party ought to reform its leadership elections to include a much more diverse slice of the population - if faced with anything like a representative primary election, Truss would have realized her current policies are political suicide.
As for the British left, they ought to be rejoicing. The formula of social and cultural populism + economic moderation has proven extremely difficult for the left to tackle all across the world. A conservative movement whose core identity is based on plutocratic economics ought to be, by contrast, almost pitifully easy to beat in today’s political environment. But this lesson is so obvious that it is likely that even Liz Truss will eventually learn it as well, and lean back into the culture wars at full velocity. She might then manage to smuggle a watered-down version of her agenda in under its cloak. But most likely the damage has already been done, and her party will have to either eject her or go down to defeat at the next election. She is more likely to be a blip - even an accelerant - in the transition to this new era of conservatism than she is to reverse the trend. In fact, in just a few short weeks, Truss seems to have finally toasted the credibility of the conservatism of the bankers - for good.
Note that I’m definitely not saying that the “conservatism of the people” actually represents the true interests of ordinary people or is even taken by the majority of them to do so. It’s a phrase used to describe a particular type of conservatism which views itself as speaking up for what it views as “ordinary people” (which in truth is not everyone) and is taken by at least one slice of the population as doing so.