‘A zombie party’: the deepening crisis of conservatism. By Andy Beckett
The traditional right is clinging on to
power – but its ideas are dead in the water
Conservatism is the
dominant politics of the modern world. Even when rightwing parties are not in
power, conservative ideas and policies set the shape of society and the
economy. Ever since the transformative 1980s governments of Ronald Reagan
and Margaret
Thatcher – with their new fusion of disruptive capitalism and social
traditionalism – the assumption in Britain, the US and far beyond has been that
conservatism is the default setting of democratic politics.
Even when other
parties have been in office, leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have
continued with the conservative project of privatising the state and
deregulating business. For decades, armies of rightwing activists – with rich
financial backers and many allies in the media – have successfully spread and
entrenched conservative ideas. Many of conservatism’s
opponents have come to expect that, somehow, it will always prevail. Despite
the spectacular failure of Theresa May’s premiership and the unpopularity of
her divided party, the contest to succeed her is likely to dominate British
politics this summer, as if the identity of the Tory leader is its weightiest
matter. The Republican Donald Trump, despite the most consistently bad approval
ratings of any modern US president, is widely thought to have a good chance of
re-election. In today’s otherwise unstable, fast-changing political world, conservatism
has an air of permanence.
Yet this aura has led
to an overconfidence about conservatism’s underlying health. In Britain and the
US, once the movement’s most fertile sources of ideas, voters, leaders and
governments, a deep crisis of conservatism has been building since the end of
the Reagan and Thatcher governments. It is a crisis of competence,
of intellectual energy and coherence, of electoral effectiveness, and – perhaps
most serious of all – of social relevance.
This crisis has often
been obscured. The collapse of Soviet communism in the 80s, the apparent
triumph of capitalism during the 90s, the western left’s own splits, dilemmas
and failures, and the ongoing surge of rightwing populism have all helped
maintain conservatism’s surface confidence. Meanwhile, the rightwing media’s
fierce, enduring faith in the ever-more distant politics of Thatcher and Reagan
has helped delay the moment of recognition that those politics have grown
obsolete.... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/28/a-zombie-party-the-deepening-crisis-of-conservatism
