Liz Truss, the new prime minister of
Britain who may not be the prime minister for long, is by general agreement out
of touch with reality.
Her big gambit upon
succeeding Boris Johnson, a mini-budget crowded with tax cuts, looks like a
policy debacle, recklessly inflationary and fiscally destabilizing. As
politics, the mini-budget looks even dafter. At the moment, the electoral sweet
spot for right-of-center governments in the Western world is a mixture of
cultural (not religious) conservatism and relative economic moderation — an
anti-libertarian right-wing politics, favorable to the welfare state and
skeptical of immigration, that appeals to constituencies buffeted by
globalization and anxious about national identity.
اضافة اعلان
This is the style
of politics that just elevated Giorgia Meloni’s populist movement in Italy and
that has brought right-wing populism into the mainstream of Swedish politics.
It is also the politics that the Republican Party is perpetually groping toward
without quite getting there.
But Truss has gone
in the opposite direction, not just with her tax-cut push, but with a push for
expanded immigration — a double-down on a 1980s growth prescription, a Ronald
Reagan-Margaret Thatcher nostalgia trip that has carried the Tories away from
their own constituents and earned her party absolutely apocalyptic poll
numbers.
Is there anything
to say in defense of the stumbling prime minister? Only this: When politicians
return, with seeming irrationality, to ideas that seem zombielike and
ill-suited to the present moment, it is often a sign that the problems of the
present moment just do not have clear solutions. The defaults of the past may
be wrong, but at least they feel attractively familiar.
This is European
conservatism’s predicament at the moment. It can win power because the old
establishment, the supposedly sensible center, helped create and failed to
solve three interconnected problems. First, globalization and European
integration enriched the core more than the periphery, the metropole more than
the hinterland. Second, wealth, secularization and economic stagnation drove
down European birthrates, threatening depopulation and decline. Third, the
preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic
diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and
native backlash — even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.
Only the populist
right talks consistently about all three problems; thus its current political
advantage. But does the populist right know how to address them? Not exactly.
At the moment, the electoral sweet spot for right-of-center governments in the Western world is a mixture of cultural (not religious) conservatism and relative economic moderation — an anti-libertarian right-wing politics, favorable to the welfare state and skeptical of immigration, that appeals to constituencies buffeted by globalization and anxious about national identity.
Johnson, Truss’
ill-fated predecessor, promised a rebalancing of investments that would benefit
the neglected non-Londonian regions of Britain, and you could argue that a
larger rebalancing is what all these problems should provoke. A shift from
public spending on the old to spending on young people and parents. A shift
from welfare spending to industrial policy. A shift from relying on immigrants
to boost your gross domestic product to investing in domestic growth and
regional renewal. A shift from deregulation on behalf of finance to
deregulation on behalf of young families who presently cannot afford to buy a
home.
But each of these
ideas requires extreme care with the details — What kind of industrial policy?
What kind of family policy? — and many of them might take a generation to bear
fruit. Meanwhile, a lot of conservative voters have an interest in the status
quo; they do not like how things have changed, without acknowledging how they
have contributed to the problems.
Older voters,
especially, are likely to resist rebalancings that trim their pensions or the
value of their homes, even if such a rebalancing is necessary to restore the
societal vigor that they miss.
Then add in the
spending limits suddenly imposed by inflation and the wartime energy crisis,
and you have a scenario in which populists might end up as right-wing
custodians of the same sclerosis that helped bring them to power — ruling as
defenders of a fusty chauvinism rather than actual tradition (because a
secularized continent is not actually traditional), preserving a museum culture
for as long as possible against further waves of immigration, with some of the
rage against a civilizational twilight that Meloni offers in her fiery speeches
but no actual plan to turn societies with empty cradles and budget shortfalls
around.
The authoritarian
danger in this kind of populist politics would not be the aggressive
warmongering fascism of the 1930s. It would be the fictional Warden of England,
the dictator who governs a childless, dying England in P. D. James’ prophetic
novel “The Children of Men”, promising his aging subjects peace, order and
nostalgia in the twilight of the human race.
To feel a little sympathy for Truss’ back-to-1980s gamble,
then, you just have to consider that alternative scenario. Facing a European
future that is so plausible and grim, it is not surprising that some right-wing
politicians would seek refuge in the happier, simpler future once promised by
the past.
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