Establishment Conservatives Must Embrace ‘Populism’ to Survive

If you look around the Anglosphere and Western Europe you will notice that many of the long-established or legacy Right-of-centre political parties are in big, big trouble. There were a host of causes. The chamber of commerce types convinced the party leaders to go down the path of mass inwards immigration. The human rights lawyer brigade compounded this folly by pushing an ‘equality on steroids’ line that pretended all cultures were somehow equal in promoting human flourishing and if you begged to differ, well, you were a racist. Of course, given the obvious differences in cultures’ achievements (medical, scientific, political, democratic, how women are treated, etcetera), this cultural relativism line undergirded the massive inwards immigration of people far more likely to go on welfare, to resort to criminal and political violence, to despise Western liberalism and to despise Jews. And trying to mask this policy error under a banner of ‘multiculturalism’ would only work for so long. We’re past the point of thinking it’s been a net gain. Certainly if you went back to the 1970s and showed people what mass immigration has delivered, I dare say just about no one back then would have voted for it. So that was one giant error by the legacy conservative parties.

Then there was the problem of letting themselves get sucked into the climate doomsterism. Conservative parties allowed China to pump out as much carbon dioxide as it pleased while they supervised the emasculation of industry back home. They sold out cheap domestic energy, for what? For a fraction of a fragment of global fossil fuel reduction while emissions just happen abroad. Going down that road looks pretty stupid today.

Then there was the whole Covid lockdown thuggery fiasco where political parties around the democratic world – and, yes, conservative ones as much as the Leftie ones – opted to ape the illiberal thuggery of the communist Chinese politburo. Idiotic rules. Weaponising the police. Biggest inroads on our civil liberties ever. Schools closed, though the young were at about one 10,000th of the risk of the oldest – fit young people literally had a higher risk of dying from a lightning strike or a coconut falling on their heads. Many, many conservative voters jettisoned their attachment to the legacy conservative parties after that. And did you know that as of right now, Sweden has the lowest excess death rate – start of Covid till now – in all of Europe? This is the hardest measure to game and it sure points to the approach many of us were shouting for from day one. That aside, here in Australia we haven’t even got an apology from the Coalition politicians who did this to us. And that’s true in lots of other democracies. The few jurisdictions where a Right-of-centre party and politician did stand up against the Covid thuggery – say, Florida – have seen huge shifts of support towards that party. Since Covid Florida has gone from a toss-up state to solidly Republican. The rewards of bravery, right? Well, we wouldn’t know here in Australia.

There have been other causes for the plight of the legacy Right-of-centre parties, including no guts to fight the culture wars. However, let’s put aside the ‘why are they in the plight they’re in’ issue. Instead, look at the question of ‘how do we legacy conservative parties fix the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?’ In real life this question shows up in terms of how the established, legacy Right-of-centre parties try to deal with the insurgent, so-called ‘populist’ parties – though no one can provide a remotely persuasive definition of this ‘populist’ derogatory label other than that these insurgent parties are popular with more and more voters and they arose because there were topics (think multiculturalism, Net Zero, lockdowns, etc.) that neither the established Left nor the established Right parties would contest or even talk about. Be honest. It’s really democracy these attackers don’t like.

So most conservative parties around the democratic world have faced this dilemma. In Germany and France and elsewhere in Europe, places with proportional voting, the strategy the established Right-of-centre parties went for was a cordon sanitaire. The established conservative parties would refuse to deal with the populist Right. It’s been a total disaster of a strategy. It meant forming coalition governments with the socialist Left and the Greens. So each election more and more voters deserted the legacy Right party for the populist Right – the populists being prepared to stop the mass immigration, jettison Net Zero and fight the culture wars. It’s been a slow-motion suicide. The established Right parties in France are nearly extinct. In Germany the populist Right is on the cusp of having more voters than the legacy Right. Refusing to deal with the parties talking about what so many voters care about has only increased the popularity of the so-called populists.

In Britain, with its First Past the Post voting system, the Tories thought they were immune to the rise of a party that could supplant them. Wrong! The fault here was that the Tories had allowed its wet, ‘moderate’, Labour-lite wing of MPs to become too powerful. So the world’s oldest political party became the party of mass immigration, who cares what culture they bring with them. It taxed and spent worse than the Lefties. Over half the Tory MPs hated Brexit, despite four-fifths of its own voters voting for it. (Remind you of the Voice, Australians?) The Conservatives even sold out on climate alarmism and every culture issue going – no fight, no commitment to one of the greatest countries in the earth’s history, nothing. So Nigel Farage and Reform stepped in and offered what these Right-of-centre voters wanted. And suddenly the Tories are offering the same menu, including leaving the European Convention. But too late.

And that brings us to Australia, with the exact same story here as in Britain. The Coalition has been every bit as dismissive of its core voters as the Tories up there. But here we have a virtually world unique preferential voting system.It protects the two established parties. When these two function as a ‘uni-party’ it’s brutally hard to do anything. But it’s not impossible. One Nation is now polling at numbers that seriously threaten the long-term viability of the Libs. What to do? Well, the ‘we won’t deal with you, you’re too yucky for us’ strategy is an obvious failure. And something has to be done quickly in my view.

Personally, I’d ignore all the conventional wisdom from the political advisers who got the Coalition into this mess and firstly apologise for past sins. Then I’d announce a host of clear, unwavering policies – while side-lining any Coalition MP who votes against them. Then offer a clear, no-fudging number on immigration (do I hear 80,000 a year anyone?) Promise to repeal all the Labour anti-free speech legislation, even if it requires a double dissolution. And say you’ll pull out of Paris and go for cheap fossil fuel energy. And yes, fight the culture wars, especially in the schools.

You can write the rest of the list. Do those and you can win back the base and your core voters. But time’s a ticking. And the ‘let’s just ignore the populists’ plan has failed everywhere it’s been tried.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.