Conservative funk a matter of self-belief, not ideas

Margaret Thatcher meets with her friend and political ally Ronald Reagan during a visit to the White House.

Nostalgia for a golden age and lamenting the decline from it is characteristic of conservatives, and that’s not all bad provided it spurs us to lift our game rather than fold our tents.

In the glory days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher our economies were strong, our countries stood tall and our parties were confident and united. Or that’s how it seems now, although it didn’t always then. They were great times for centre-right politics: not only did Reagan and Thatcher revitalise their countries and revive the Anglosphere; with St John Paul II, they also overcame Soviet communism, ushering in what was said to be enduring peace between major nations based on universal liberal capitalism.

Except 30 years on, we’ve had an Islamist death cult, a pandemic where the policies to deal with it were worse than the disease itself, renewed Russian militarism in Europe, a new and more complex cold war with another communist superpower, and now a further Islamist death cult threatening a new Holocaust. What’s more, globalisation has meant the deindustrialisation of the West and large movements of people from what was the Third World to what was the First World.

That has been good for most people in poor countries and for rich people in rich countries, but not so good for poorer people in rich countries – and that’s the majority of our voters. So much for the end of history and the triumph of the liberal West.

In the US, one Republican president got his country into economy-draining and spirit-sapping forever wars; and another got the economy moving, only to turn his party into a personality cult. In Britain, five Conservative prime ministers have managed to create the heaviest tax burden in post-war history, despite Brexit-ing from the statist EU. And in Australia, another revolving-door prime ministership produced a Liberal-Nationals government that was more Malcolm Fraser than John Howard, although it did at least manage to stop a wave of illegal migration by boat and repeal an established carbon tax – two world firsts. So yes, not only is it a more dispiriting world but too often conservative parties also have let people down, their strongest adherents most of all.

Disappointment, though, is part of the human condition and our duty is not to find perfection but to seek improvement. Politics is rarely a contest of good versus great or even of good versus bad; often it’s bad versus worse. And every party of government is a coalition, and whether it’s more progressive or more conservative depends partly on the particularity of circumstance and leadership.

Pope John Paul II

Looking at President Joe Biden, does even the most fervent never-Trumper think the Democrat would be better, other than on Ukraine perhaps? Does anyone think British Labour leader Keir Starmer, formerly an enthusiastic barracker for Jeremy Corbyn, would run government better than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? And while the recent Australian Coalition government was far from perfect, Anthony Albanese is starting to make voters nostalgic for Scott Morrison.

The problem with the centre-right parties of the Anglosphere is not so much defective beliefs as insufficient self-belief. This problem has been less a failure of belief than a failure to put beliefs into practice. Not so much because we’d lost faith in the liberal-conservative creed but more because we’d lost faith in our capacity to bring the electorate with us.

A centre-right government acting like a centre-left one can only ever be half-hearted and unconvincing and unlikely to impress voters, who can always tell a fake.

Conservatives win elections when voters think we will make life better for them. We just have to be a clear alternative to the other side in opposition and a competent administration that gets things done in government. Not Labor-lite and not Red Tories.

Rishi Sunak

And that means having policies that reflect our instincts. After all, what’s not to like about lower taxes, greater freedom and smaller government; about support for the family, small business and institutions that have stood the test of time? Parties of the centre-right should have a natural competitive advantage against those of the centre-left provided they’re true to their instincts. The freedom party, the tradition party and above all the patriot party, for that’s what we are, should be the natural party of government.

And if richer people are voting more left while poorer people are voting more right, what’s the problem with that – except for political snobs? It’s the left that sees those who vote against it as “deplorables”. By contrast, the right has a tendency to see those who vote for it as deplorable, some of them anyway, and to try to appease “our kind of people” whenever they’re inclining to vote the other way.

The best way the Republicans could lose the next US presidential election is with a candidate who makes it all about him rather than about the voters. Despite everything, the British Conservatives still could win against an underwhelming opposition were they to unite behind a capable prime minister and take charge of the government they were elected to run.

Divisions on the conservative side of politics are less about what we believe and what we should do than doubts about whether we can succeed. They’re not about whether we should stick to economics or fight the culture wars, because we have to do both.

Increasingly, now the central divide in public life is between those who think Western civilisation is a blessing or a curse. Certainly those who regard climate change as the greatest challenge of our time, safety as more important than freedom, biology as irrelevant to sex, government spending as unconstrained by government revenue and our countries as deeply tainted by their history are welcome to their views, but none of them belongs on the conservative side of politics.

John Howard

Our task is less to feel people’s pain than to give them a lead. So let’s have no more climate catastrophism. Let’s have freer domestic markets and freer trade with like-minded countries. Let’s make immigration working class rather than welfare class, and let’s control it and limit it so there’s less downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and massive pressure on infrastructure. Let’s stop pandering to leftist propaganda that the world’s best societies, the ones people want to migrate to rather than flee from, are somehow the worst.

Let’s restore school standards and value getting a trade rather than an expensive university degree. Let’s have government working with families, not against them. And, finally, let’s wake up to the fact not all countries and movements have the same respect for human life.

The divisions inside the conservative movement are less over what should be done and more over how far we might go, and the right answer is always as far as possible. In a democracy, the path to political success is always practical: that means identifying the problems that worry people most and finding credible and pragmatic ways to make change for the better.

Tony Abbott is a former prime minister of Australia. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered to the Heritage Foundation-Danube Institute in Washington.