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Conservative Party Uselessness On Both Sides Of Atlantic

Britain's Tories are in a deep hole -- and in terms of ideas, the GOP is right there with them
Screen Shot 2022-12-30 at 10.04.47 PM

That's Rishi Sunak, the Tory PM of the United Kingdom. Hard to swing a dead cat in Britain today without hitting a gloomy Tory voter. If an election were held next week, the Conservative Party would lose in a landslide. Lord David Frost's latest Telegraph column is about how the Tories can win people back. Excerpts:

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Those who advocate a focus on stability, on calm, on managerialism, often seem to believe current political and economic forces must be accommodated, not changed. If you think the Conservative brand is irrevocably damaged, that young people will never vote Conservative again, that health costs will always go up, that people always want higher spending, then obviously you will go down the road we have seen in recent years.

But politics is about more than adapting to the environment. It is about changing it, about persuading, and about acting so voters can believe that another reality is possible, that minds can be changed, that problems can be solved. That often requires confrontation not appeasement, determination not conciliation.

Here's a part that stood out to me, as a US conservative voter:

Third, we need to rebuild confidence amongst our voters. Here one thing is crucial. I have spent virtually every weekend this autumn speaking to Party members and Conservative voters. They believe the country’s institutions have failed them.  They simply do not trust the country’s establishment to do the jobs they have been given – to police the streets, to protect our borders, to heal the sick, to educate the young in a non-political way, to protect free speech, and not to give in to every fashionable social doctrine. Worse, they don’t think the government understands or cares how they feel. Indeed I suspect they think many ministers, far from trying to solve the problem, are part of it.

Of course, specific policies this year are important too – crucially, solving the Channel boats problem and bringing down immigration generally, but also worthwhile anti-strike legislation, no fuel duty increases, blocking the Scottish gender reform law, and getting a genuinely defensible outcome on Northern Ireland, not some shabby compromise.

But it’s also about style. This government has an establishment feel about it. If it wants to restore confidence it must show it speaks for the people and does not instinctively defend “the way things are”. In short, it must become populist again.

Now, let me ask you conservative readers: Do you believe that America's institutions have failed you? Do you trust America's establishment to police the streets, to protect our borders, to heal the sick, to educate the young in a non-political way, to protect free speech, and not to give in to every fashionable social doctrine? Do you think the Republican Party understands or cares how you feel? Do you believe that the GOP leadership, far from trying to solve the problem, is part of it?

True, the GOP is out of power in the US, while the Tories are the government in the UK. Still, though, Lord Frost's observations about his own party could apply in large part to the conservative party in the US. Could it be that there were people in this past election who might have voted Republican, but didn't think the party was serious about change -- as opposed to empty sloganeering among the would-be populists, and business-as-usual among the Usual GOP Suspects?

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Not sure. What I am sure of is that the GOP didn't give people a real reason to vote for them, aside from Not Being Democrats. That's enough for me, most of the time, but what a sorry situation that is. "I guess I'll have to vote for the guy who won't say a word about the dragification of kids, because he's better than the guy who sends out press releases celebrating it."

Maybe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the man we're looking for. After a truly obscene Christmas drag queen road show came to Florida, DeSantis announced a state investigation to see if it broke any laws. Here's some footage of this same show, when it appeared earlier in the month in Austin:

The point is not that obscene drag shows for kids are the most serious problem facing America. The problem is that overall, the culture -- especially woke capitalism -- is sexualizing children to a disgusting degree, but the leaders of the conservative party are sitting there with their thumbs up their backsides, terrified of being called bigots. All the things that Lord Frost finds wanting in the UK Conservative Party are also problematic in America. I care far more about protecting America's borders than I do about filthy drag shows for kids, but if Republicans can't even pluck low-hanging, uh, fruit like that...? If they have no freaking clue what to do about the woke-ification of American education, and think somehow that, as Mitch McConnell put it the other day, funding the war in Ukraine is the No. 1 priority for Congress -- more important even than the future of America itself -- well what is the point of having a conservative party? I ask you.

Maybe Republicans and Tories are afraid of younger voters. See graphs on the left:

Maybe, though, people would really like to have a serious alternative to the Left parties. Seems to me like DeSantis might just offer that. We'll see.

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Martin Terrell
Martin Terrell
Spot on as usual. From the British perspective, I thought the Republicans were - in part - changing to become more populist, and prepared to fight for common sense conservative principles. Britain’s Tories haven’t even tried despite being in power for 12 years and with a strong parliamentary majority for the last two years. Apart from Lord Frost they cannot see that the times have changed, and they are like malfunctioning robots that cannot compute this. Young voters have no time for them, older voters feel badly let down and won’t - this time - vote for them just because the other lot a worse.
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    Theodore Iacobuzio
    Theodore Iacobuzio
    The strength of the medicine (Trump) indicates the virulence of the disease. That's why ordinary people were so delighted by Trump's debate performances in 2016. I mean, does anybody in his right mind really, I mean really, think Marco Rubio is Presidential timber? Or think that Jeb Bush stood for anything at all? Trump turned out to be far worse than anybody who held his nose and voted for him could imagine. Thank God he's cooked. But anybody on the Right politically knows that the Republican Party as currently led remains a satrapy of the Democrats, grateful for favors and not much more.

    Pace Lord Frost, Peter Hitchens has been saying for 10 years that the Tory Party is dead, get on with it, bury it, and start anew. The last time I was in the U.K. was early 2019 and at least regarding London I thought it was time to turn off the lights. This wasn't lively squalor like New York in the '70s and '80s. It was dead squalor. Dreadful.
    schedule 1 year ago
      JON FRAZIER
      JON FRAZIER
      Rather, Trump is an opportunistic infection ravaging an already weakened patient.
      schedule 1 year ago
      Martin Terrell
      Martin Terrell
      Similar echoes on Unherd today: https://unherd.com/2023/01/will-conservatism-survive-2023/
      As it's a Bank Holiday today, I have time to read the comments - a lot of people all saying much the same thing.
      schedule 1 year ago
JON FRAZIER
JON FRAZIER
As Millennials age more of them probably will vote Republican. The older one gets the more one becomes in one's life and the less one likes radical ideas to upset apple carts and rock boats. But that also means a vote for a sensible center-right party that more or less hews to the stratus quo, not bomb throwers and house burners on the radical right.
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    Theodore Iacobuzio
    Theodore Iacobuzio
    And "sensible center-right" means figleaf amnesty, playing chicken with Putin, and compulsory mutilation of troubled children? Where's my bomb? I'm ready to throw it.
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      JON FRAZIER
      JON FRAZIER
      None of us get to rule the world according to our own desires. Iron law of existence: Adapt or die.
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        Fran Macadam
        Fran Macadam
        Maybe John is right. Not much has changed. Perhaps it's simply long experience that's opened my eyes to the fraudulent nature of that which I was once loyal to.
        But I do think that the seeds of destruction always there have not only germinated but taken root. Adapt or die? That only works until death takes each one of us, to face judgment. In some cases adaptation is just counsel of going along to get along, the advice to Pilgrim by Mr. Worldly Wiseman.
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          Theodore Iacobuzio
          Theodore Iacobuzio
          All right. Let's go there. Would Frazier counsel "adapting" in Germany in the '30s? That's why reaction is the only course we can take. There is, it has been demonstrated, NOTHING the Left can't be counted on to propose and use any means to implement. Nothing.
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          JON FRAZIER
          JON FRAZIER
          We are no where close to Germany in the 30s. Or to the USSR in the same era. We gave some bumps in the road, annoying ones to be sure, but they're not yawning craters.
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    Jonesy
    Jonesy
    Two problems; millennials aren’t getting married and having children and the center right is the reason we are in this mess. Hard right doesn’t equal radical right.
    schedule 1 year ago
rksyrus
rksyrus
Great comment piece; how does Rishi in every photograph manage to look so... Fishy?

Here's a question: since when are politics driven by voters? “The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The average voter is uninformed and interested only in their own problems. Each time the question about immigration has been asked voters in USA and UK and elsewhere have emphatically said "less" and they've gotten ever so much "more" and lumped it.

If you want different policies, get a different class of rich, powerful, politically active elites, or keep rowing against the current.
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    Theodore Iacobuzio
    Theodore Iacobuzio
    Your last sentence deserves to be expanded, but, sorry, I think the "average voter" is well informed. It's the average American who doesn't care.
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Zenos Alexandrovitch
Zenos Alexandrovitch
"but the leaders of the conservative party are sitting there with their thumbs up their backsides, terrified of being called bigots."

Except one who said "wear (being called a bigot) as a badge of honor."

And you, Rod, dedicated yourself to pushing for establishment thumb-bums.
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Fran Macadam
Fran Macadam
I was forced to travel but made no effort to vote for the lacklustre war mongers hell bent on sending more of our declining incomes to destructive overseas wars. The Republican party seemed more exultant about enhancing its own political fortunes than addressing the misfortunes of citizens.
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    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    To be fair even to Republicans. A party has to have electoral success before it can do anything .
    schedule 1 year ago
Henry Clemens
Henry Clemens
I thought Jeb Bush was sound, conservative in views (I presumed he too would, e.g., have given us solid judicial appointments), tested, competent to be our chief diplomat at a time when the international system needs an American president who is neither a laughingstock nor someone whose instincts are to trash alliances. But the Republican voters thought otherwise. For some reason they were amused by lines like "low energy Jeb" and there is always an anarchic anti-"establishment" element which Trump certainly stimulated and from which he benefitted. But real disgrace is not that Trump was president, but that the American electorate thought he ought to have been.
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    Fran Macadam
    Fran Macadam
    Yeah the electorate's unwashed opinions are deplorabl
    schedule 1 year ago
      Fran Macadam
      Fran Macadam
      Yeah the electorate's unwashed opinions are deplorable. Jeb would have continued Deep State elite preferences steady as she goes. Anything else is ... treasonous. As any Epstein intelligence blackmail operation to control leaders would reveal.
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    Bogdán Emil
    Bogdán Emil
    The Clinton and Bush families both needed national housekeeping, Trump swept both of them out. He proved we have enough capacity for self- government to not select obvious dynasts all the time, that we have the self-confidence to allow a truth-telling populist fool an occasional turn at the wheel. We are a proper demos. The idea that the emergence of one man could alter our fundamental democratic character is laughable. Trump is mortal, the collective judgment of the American people elevated him, it can dethrone him, and will certainly outlast him.

    I'm also thinking Hungarian PM Orbán is correct: had Trump been president this year, Putin likely would not have attacked Ukraine.
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      JON FRAZIER
      JON FRAZIER
      You have a solid point about dynasties: good riddance. But I am severely skeptical about Ukraine I see a Trump presidency as no bar at all to Russian aggression.
      schedule 1 year ago
      Jonesy
      Jonesy
      Agreed. There would have been no talk of NATO expansion and Russia would not have been treated as an enemy.
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        JON FRAZIER
        JON FRAZIER
        There was no plan for NATO expansion in 2021. Ukraine was not a candidate for NATO membership. But Putin by his not-so-splendid little war did spark some NATO expansion: Sweden and Finland of his northern flank. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
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          Bogdán Emil
          Bogdán Emil
          2008 NATO Bucharest Summit Declaration, paragraph 23

          "NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. Both nations have made valuable contributions to Alliance operations. We welcome the democratic reforms in Ukraine and Georgia and look forward to free and fair parliamentary elections in Georgia in May. MAP is the next step for Ukraine and Georgia on their direct way to membership. Today we make clear that we support these countries’ applications for MAP. Therefore we will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications. We have asked Foreign Ministers to make a first assessment of progress at their December 2008 meeting. Foreign Ministers have the authority to decide on the MAP applications of Ukraine and Georgia."
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          JON FRAZIER
          JON FRAZIER
          That was in 2008, not in 2021. In 2021 Ukraine's membership was automatically ruled out because it was subject to a territorial dispute with Russia-- Putin's seizure of Crimea and the Donbass ensured that Ukraine could not become a NATO member. He had no need to invade the country if that was his concern.
          Look, it's pretty blindingly obvious that Putin's invasion was done for the sake of seizing even more territory, perhaps even the whole of the country (though I'm open to arguments to the contrary on that latter). This has been a purely aggressive war, based on no realistic threat to the Russian homeland (which after all is armed with nuclear weapons, thereby ensuring its inviolability).
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    Theodore Iacobuzio
    Theodore Iacobuzio
    JEB! lost because (a) beneath that seemingly bland and benign affect was a smug assurance that it was his turn; (b) more substantively because he would have done zero about the border, in fact could be trusted to let 'er rip, just as Joe has done; and (c) everybody was sick of that family.

    The second, the border, is the most important. Besides a make-or-break for the country, this is a winning issue for the Republicans which is precisely why they will push amnesty lite, their pockets stuffed dough from the Club for Growth. The emperor had no clothes. All Trump did was point.
    '
    Nor does this excuse Trump from having trusted Paul Ryan and then done nothing when he lost the legislative branch. I voted for him twice, and the first time I didn't think he was as lazy and unfocused as he obviously is. But he's done and it's time to move on.
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    Jonesy
    Jonesy
    No we were still living with the quagmire his brother created and had no interest in granting amnesty to people who didn’t give a flying fig about our sovereignty and laws. Plainly put, he is a squish and commands no respect.
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