The president's greatest responsibility is to protect all our people from enemies foreign and domestic. Here at home, the worst enemy we face is economic the creeping erosion of the American way of life and the American dream that has resulted in today's tragedy of economic stagnation and unemployment.
One of the great debates of our time is about how much of your money should be spent by the state and how much you should keep to spend on your family. Let us never forget this fundamental truth. The state has no source of money other than the money people earned themselves.
Little trip back in time there to the unmistakable voices of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and whether you agreed or disagreed with them, there is no doubt the ideas of the conservative movements they led in the US and UK dominated the policy agenda for years on foreign policy and the role of government in people's lives. Here we are decades later, and conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic still echo Reagan and Thatcher on some things, including
low taxes. But today's loudest conservative voices, like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, have far different priorities and a much different sound. On day one, we will begin working.
On an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall.
And we're gonna get home with all one nation program, aren't we. That's what we can do. That's what we can do if we get Brexit dug. But we can only do it if we get Brexit dug. That is what one Nation Conservatives do. That is our vision for the country to the.
Niceteen Bloomberg Opinions. Global business columnist Adrian Wooldridge argues in a new column that conservatives hard turn toward populism and the politics of anger have left Tories in the UK and Republicans in the US far from the ideas that shaped the Anglo American conservative movement, and not necessarily for the better.
The old conservatism has been replaced by a new and much more unstable sort of conservatism that is all to do with the nation state, national conservativism, expanding the role of the state, tapping into cultural resentments.
And he asks, can conservatism find itself.
Again, basically to have a conservative party or a Republican party that goes back to some of the older traditions, such as respect for tradition, respect for institutions, respect for decency and behavior.
I'm WESTKESOVA today on the big take Adrian Woodridge and where Conservatives go from here. Adrian, it's nice to see you, very nice to be here. And I think it's fitting that I'm sitting here in Washington, DC and you're in London because we are talking about conservatives in the UK and in the US.
Yes, a transatlantic meeting to discuss a transatlantic movement.
What made you want to write about this? When I think about summer reading, it's not really going back into the history of conservatism.
I wrote this because I've been thinking for a long time about how conservatism in both the United States and in Britain is in the crisis. Then we saw all these interesting data points. Parliaments held Boris Johnson in contempt of Parliament for lying to Parliament over various parties that he had during lockdown.
The Eyes to the Right three hundred and fifty four, the Nose to the left seventh.
Then we have Trump being put on trial for purloining various Topsy.
Document confirmed this hour that Donald Trump and his lawyers have just been informed about twenty minutes ago that the former president needs to be at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday at three pm to be processed on federal charges.
This, of course would be.
So all of these these sort of crises going on, well, this isn't just a series of arbitrary events. It's something that points to bigger patterns of the breakdown of the conservative movement. So I decided to say what is going on here? And it struck me also that conservatism has
changed in a very radical and fundamental way. That back in the nineteen eighties, when Conservatism was sort of triumphant around the world under Reagan and Thatcher, consertism stood for a series of things such as small government.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
Such as letting business do its own thing, such as standing up to global communism.
As the modeled arguments of those who've been induced to believe that Russia's intentions are benign and that ours are suspect. All who would have us simply give up our defenses and the hope that where we led, others would follow.
These were things that made sense within the conservative tradition, but were also very well related to the problems that we're facing. The world. Now conservatism has almost stood on its head. We have doubts about smaller government, we have certainly big doubts about going abroad to thi terrorism, and a sense that the Conservative Party had become in many
ways anti business parties. So the problems with Conservatism are not just problems to do with a few individuals, and they're not just problems entirely just to do with populism, the sort of Trump and Boris Johnson sort of populism. They're to do with something more fundamental, something to do with a change in nature of conservatism that the old conservatism, conservatism is of small governments, standing up to communism, letting business have its head, has been replaced by a new
and much more unstable sort of conservatism. There's all to do with the nation state, national conservativism, expanding the role of the state, tapping into cultural resentments. So I wanted to try and explain.
That, Adrian. It's interesting then you mentioned Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, because during the eighties when they were both in power, it seemed like a lot of the intellectual energy was on the right, where the right was coming up with the big ideas.
Absolutely, I mean, the thing about Ronald Reagan and missus Thatcher is that they were absolutely in tune with the mood of the times, which was that the state was too big, we needed to cut it back, that business was too confined, we needed to give it more freedom, and that the big issue was how to have a muscular response to the Soviet Union and as it was then, Soviet expansionism. So it was in tune with the times.
But all of these things, shrinking the state, having a muscular defense, being pro business were in tune with very deep, longstanding conservative values. So conservatism seemed to be the answer to the problems. And there was an enormous ferment of ideas, very many debates, as you say, but all of the intellectual energy of that period was on the right, and
the left was simply responding to the right's ideas. After there, when Tony Blair comes along in Britain and Bill Clinton comes along in the United States, they basically adapt and adopt the framework that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan laid down. They make it a bit more human, smiley faced than the rest of it, but they don't really interfere with
the fundamental principles that have been laid down. It's astonishing to think back on the nineteen nineties as how much the Republicans hated Bill Clinton, because actually he was really a Republican in all sorts of ways. He was certainly more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower.
Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life.
He believed in cutting the size of the state. The age of big government is over. He believed in welfare reform, education reform, taking on various sorts of vested interests within the left. But he also believed in freeing up the markets, particularly freeing up the financial markets for capital for financial and business interests. So he was very conservative Fick, and the same with Tony Blair.
We believe in our relationship with business and industry there is a third way, a new way between some command economy, state control of industry, and the politics of laisse fair. This third way seeks a partnership between government and business, but this time limited to certain key specific objectives whose aim is not to undermine the market, but to enhance the dynamism of the market.
One of the quotations that's associated with Tony ba from Peter Mandelsson is that I'm intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. You know, this was a very different age from the one we're living through at the moment, and hence the problems that this synthesis, this Blair Clinton Reagan Thatcher synthesis created. Then those ideas begin to fall apart or begin to be tested in all sorts of interesting ways.
And it's really the falling apart of the Thatcher Reagan consensus or synthesis that prepares the way for populism.
And so you write about this pivot, this sort of turn where even though the ideas and the right had seemingly won, it began to unravel.
Nonetheless, Yep, it collided with reality and it completely unraveled. It unraveled first in terms of practical experience, that people began to get angry that their incomes were stagnating, and they began to be angry that the endless wars were not producing the promise benefits whilst imposing costs on poorer people. And they got angry that the rich were getting richer.
And that particularly happens with the financial crisis when you have a huge systemic crisis in the financial system, the costs of which are borne by mortgage holders and certainly not by the bankers who caused the problem in the first place. So you then get an upsurge. An upsurge first of all in popular opinion that people began to get angry with what's going on. So you have the arrival of populace. Populace saying that this system, this synthesis, must be torn apart.
And at the heart of this seems to be the idea of grievance that someone is to blame for the ills in your life and they need to be held to account. In the US, with the rise of Donald Trump and in the UK with the sentiment over Brexit, there seemed to be a very big focus on immigrants who were coming to take your job, as opposed to elites who were rigging the system.
I think there's a bit of both, actually, but the immigrants are certainly very very important. The idea is that there's a big influx of people, that those people will either take your jobs or reduce the price of labor, reduce your wages. In the United States, you have a surge of immigration from South of the border, although that immigration has been going on obviously for a long time
and in large numbers in Britain. Because of the accession of countries such as Poland into the European Union and the system of free movement that the European Union allows, you get a big surge of mainly Polish immigrants into
the economy. On the subject of who their grievance is directed against, there's certainly grievance against the immigrants, but there's the question of who is responsible for this, particularly in Britain, and the people who held responsible are the the faceless elites who've allowed this big immigration to take place, who have taken control of our borders away from us and given it to the European Union. So the elites are being held responsible and accountable for a lot of decisions
that they've made in the past. So it's grievance, its anger, it's populism, but the elites are certainly in the frame.
And so when these populace took charge in the UK and in the US, what's also really interesting is they didn't directly attack a lot of the problems that people said they wanted, for instance, with tax cuts. Tax cuts went to the top as opposed to going to the bottom. It perpetuated the Reagan Thatcher idea that cutting taxes at the top will trickle down to the rest of us.
Absolutely, and that's partly because these conservatives are a coalition of different interests as the populaces who come along and under the new people, but there's also the old elites or the old wings of those parties who want to continue with the Reagan Thatcher policies that you have before. So you have a weird coalition on the one hand where populists will help the poor. On the other hand, you know, we're the party of business and will help business.
And this is particularly extraordinary in the case of Trump, because Trump talks about building the wall. No wall was built. He hadn't talked about lowering taxes for the rich, but he certainly did that. And in Britain you have the same thing, on the one hand, taking back control on behalf of poorer people, on the other hand continuing with
tax cutting policies. So particularly with Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson is a very interesting person here because Boris Johnson declares that his policy is to have his cake and eat it, and so what he does is to increase public spending in order to deliver all the benefits that he's claimed that Brexit will deliver for the poor or the less
well off. But he also continues with a tax cutting and what that does, of course is push up borrowing and enormously annoy his chancellor, who lives next door in Britain, and creates a lot of tension between the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. As one of the subtexts this constant fight between the chancellor who doesn't believe that there's a magic money train you can cut taxes or keep taxes low and increase public spending, ad infinitum.
After the break, populous take aim at what Adrian calls the pointy headed elites. I always thought that Donald Trump had won great luxury as a president, which was that his policies, especially having to do with the economy and tax cuts, didn't necessarily help the people who voted for him the most, and yet they really loved him because he addressed other issues.
Absolutely, I think that the politics is increasingly not just about material things. It's increasingly about sort of your sense of yourself. It's about your sense of dignity. It's about the sense that you're being listened to, and it's about the sense that you're not being looked down upon. So in Britain with Brexit, a lot of what drove it was the idea that pointy headed elites looked down on you.
And the more that those pointy headed elites said that Brexit would be an economic disaster, which it has been, the more people said, well, you're saying that because you look down on us, and so they continue to rally behind Brexit. Well, Trump had that in spades because he didn't really, as we've said, deliver on the wall and the rest of it. He did deliver on tax cuts, but he acted like this blue collar billionaire, as he said,
you know, he had all these blue collar tastes. He acted in this sort of offensive rather matcho way, and people thought that he was just like an ordinary bloke. And again the more that the elites were defended by this pattern of behavior, the more his troops rallied behind him. Now, this has left the Republican Party with a very concern problem, essentially, because your system is more responsive to the grassroots than our system. Boris Johnson was eventually got rid of primarily by his MPs.
It moves so how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world.
Who wouldn't tolerate his behavior, his lying, his lad mouth bluster anymore. So they had the mechanism to get rid of him, because members of parliament can vote out their leader. The leader of the party serves at the pleasure of members of parliament. In the United States, the presidential system,
you can't do that. So many many people, money people, senior Republicans, congressional people would like, would desperately like to get rid of Trump, but as long as he's popular with the party base, with the primary voters, they can't do that.
You mentioned something important, which is people didn't like the idea that they were being looked down upon, and you write that it also as an extension of that has been about people who used to be in charge. They were the ones who were dominant in society. They were on tapp. No longer feel that way that others are coming in to take their place.
Yes, so it's a very complicated story for conservatives because many people at the heart of the conservative establishment and of the Republicans establishments in the United States are being pushed aside by powerful global forces. Used to have sort of local business people, chamber of commerce, people as very powerful people within the Conservative Party or the Republican Party. People who are sort of who run a local factory, who run a local law firm, who are the sort
of the pillars of the local community. They felt that they were in charge of their communities, and they also felt that they were well represented by their party. Now they're being pushed aside by a complex set of people. That's partly big business, which is replacing small business. So they've got giant global law firms replacing local law firms. You've got great giant global corporations replacing local corporations. People such as the economist Thomas Piketty calls the Brahman elite.
These are the people who go to the Ivy League universities, go to Oxford and Cambridge, work in the professions. Those people are increasingly turning against the Republican Party or the Conservative Party, and so there's a sense that people who used to run the show are being displaced. So on the one hand, I said that populism earlier was powered by a lot of people who let felt left behind,
particularly working class people. But there's also a sense of these middle class people stallworts of old fashioned conservatives and I'm sure supporters of Ronald Reagan and missus Thatcher who feel that they're no longer in charge of their countries.
More than five hundred bills restricting the rights of LGBTQ plus people have been introduced across the country this year. Seventy seven of those bills. We also see in the US a very hard turn against LGBTQ people, big movement against abortions, these culture war issues that have taken the place of economic issues and other sort of policies when it comes to animating voters.
Absolutely, if you look at Thatcher and Reagan, Thatcher really didn't care about these sort of social issues. Shoes all about economics, and she was actually extremely liberal with her cabinet ministers, many of whom had all sorts of affairs
and love children and issues such as that. And Ronald Reagan, although he claimed because the evangelical Christian right is very important for the Conservative coalition, although he claimed to be very concerned about abortion, he didn't really do anything about it. He focused again on economic issues. Now, the current wave
of Republicans and conservatives is very different from that. They put culture issues right at the center of what's going on, and they put the selection of Supreme Court judges who sit in judgment about a lot of these things really high up in the list of priorities. So Trump, we said that he didn't do that much for his voters. Well, he didn't do that much for his voters economically, but on the culture issue he did do a lot.
We're talking about all of this, of course in the context of the US in the UK, but we're seeing this in many other places too. We've of course seen it in Hungary, in Poland, in Greece very recently and waiting in the wings in France, in Germany and in other places. And so this sentiment, this populist right wing sentiment is present really across Europe now.
Oh absolutely. And again it has the same things. It has a very strong cultural element that this emphasis on minority rights has gone too far. It has a very big anti business sentiment that the business serves a tiny elite, not masses, and a very strong, of course, nationalist element. It's nationalist conservatism rather than globalist conservatism. You can see Italy, I think has just shifted yet more to the right.
Rome Italy about to see the country's most right wing government since World War Two, Georgia Maloney. She is the leader of the Brothers of Italy party and.
She is the biggest of the most interesting of these shifts is France, where the National Front has been slowly, slowly, slowly increasing its vote with every election.
President Emmanuel Macarol has warned nothing is impossible, as Poles suggests that his far right rival Marine La Penn is closer than ever before to winning the presidency.
And it would not surprise me if in the lex presidential election, Marine Lea Penn finally gets what she's been looking for for decades and wins it. And you know, we've recently seen big, big riots in France. But again it's a sense that the country is out of control. Forces of globalism, of disorder, of immigration, violence are taking over and we need to take back control by having a strong man to do it.
When we come back, a different way forward for the conservative movement, Adrian, after defining the nature of this new very muscular populism, you then go on to write that it hasn't really been very good for conservatism. Why do you say that.
I say this partly because populism, muscular populism, is not my personal politics, but also because it's not solving the problems that it cames to address. So Brexit claimed to take back control. Not only is it not taken back control. You know, we see the problem with illegal refugees continuing,
it's a global problem. But we also see the British economy suffering very significantly from Brexit, and we also see small businesses, which were really at the forefront of anxieties about the old economy, actually suffering more than big businesses. Big businesses have got the muscle to take on a more complicated trading system. Smaller businesses are drowning under paperwork
that's been created by moving out of the ear. We've seen, of course, Trump not addressing the economic problems of poorer people, and I think that the solution is not to ignore the noises the complaints, but to have much more tailored economic policies which address the economic plight of poorer people, to take their concerns about their dignity and status much
more seriously than we have. But also basically to have a conservative party or a Republican party that goes back to some of the older traditions, such as respect for tradition, respect for institutions, respect for decency in behavior, and respect for the sort of the given take, which is the
essence of a liberal society. So not quite going back to Reagan and Thatcher, but going back to the twin questions of how do we get the economy working for the majority of people rather than through a minoritive, but also how do we restore the checks and balances, the dignities, the decent behavior that ought to be at the hearts of a successful liberal political regime.
Are conservative politicians going to want to return to an idea where they're debating ideas, where there is much more civil discourse. It seems like, if anything, we're moving very quickly in the opposite direction.
I think there's a big difference between the United States and Britain at the moment. In Britain you have very sensible, centrist conservative prime minister in the form of Rishi Sunac, who has a very different style, a very different temperament, and a very different set of policies from Boris Johnson. And Boris Johnson's nationalist, populist conservativism is at the moment fairly solidly defeated. Whether it comes back or not is
a very interesting interesting question. I suspect that if the Tory Party loses the next election, well it loses not terribly, then it remains a centrist sort of party and it will look to put together a sort of centrist coalition. If it loses badly, I it's humiliated in the polls, then you will have a further shift to the populace right. They say Boris should come back, or somebody swell a Bravaman, his current Home Secretary and very right wing should come
back in that way. In the United States, as far as I can see, at the moment, you know Trump is leading the pack, although his legal problems may make that difficult. But then again, as far as I can see, the number two person is Desantas, who is very much in the same sort of sort of camp, fighting for the same sort of voters. And you do have structurally, because of the primary system, a system which gives an enormous amount of power to the most engaged or the
most right wing commentators. So I see an effluorescence of idea is, many of which I disagree with. I see an efflorescence of populist sentiments in the United States or continuing populist anger in the United States, and a more complicated position in Britain which could pull British conservatism away from the very Trumpian American conservatism.
Adrian, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolino. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Frederica Romanello is our producer. Our associate producer is Zenebsidiki. Hilde Garcia
is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.
H