Conservatism Is In Crisis — But Can Be Rescued
The doctrine shaped by Thatcher and Reagan is in deep trouble. It’s time to get past the grassroots anger.
Illustration: Hokyoung Kim for Bloomberg
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan marched arm-in-arm to global triumph. The leaders of the UK and the US shaped an activist yet efficient type of conservatism that unleashed business at home and stood up to tyranny abroad. It managed to draw on the time-honored instincts of the doctrine while also addressing pressing contemporary problems. Their successors — not just John Major and George H.W. Bush, who replaced them in office, but also Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who came after — tweaked a few details while preserving the ideological synthesis. For three decades, as the Iron Curtain melted away, privatization and deregulation spread around the world.
In recent years, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have also marched arm-in-arm but not even their most slavish fans would describe the result as a triumph. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservatism is in the grip of a general crisis: a crisis of praxis, identity and direction. It goes deeper than the considerable personal and legal problems of Johnson and Trump; and it is more troubling than the Republican and Conservative parties’ romance with populism and the politics of anger. That entanglement — while dominating the news — was itself a symptom of a pre-existing malaise.