The Week the Populist Right Decisively Lost Ground
And what we can learn from it
Last week marked perhaps the first time the populist right decisively lost ground, since it first became a phenomenon in 2016, with the first election of Trump. Firstly, polls taken around the 100-day mark of the second Trump administration generally found unusually negative approval ratings for Trump, a big turnaround from the neutral-to-mildly positive ratings of the earlier part of this year. Republicans are now reportedly getting nervous over next year’s midterms. Then the Canadian elections happened, where the Liberals won a decisive victory against the Conservatives, turning around what was predicted to be a landslide defeat for the Liberals just three months ago. Finally, on the weekend, the Australian elections took place, and the incumbent Albanese Labor government won in the biggest landslide in half a century against the conservatives, in what was originally tipped to be a close election. In both elections, Trump was a major factor that came up again and again. Canadian Liberal leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney is of course widely known for standing up to Trump’s repeated bullying of Canada. Both opposition leaders, Pierre Poilievre and Peter Dutton, were often painted as Trump-lite by supporters of the respective incumbent governments, and the election results have been widely interpreted as a decisive rejection of what Trump represents in both Canada and Australia. The victories of Carney and Albanese also marks a clear end to the global trend of center-left incumbent administrations losing to right-wing challengers, a trend that arguably peaked last November when Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and hit its finale in February when Olaf Scholz’s SPD was defeated in Germany.
So do we live in a different world now? It might be a bit too early to say that, given that Trump still has more than three and a half years in the White House. However, it is clear that the populist right is getting a stronger pushback, and the political ‘right’, in general, is in a bit of a crisis. The truth is, many Americans voted for Trump in November thinking that he would be like how he was in his first term, but instead they got something very different. While Trump 1.0 was more similar to a typical Republican administration, Trump 2.0 has been dominated by ‘New Right’ ideologies, likely because many of the people in the second Trump administration, from the Vice President down, are true believers in such ideology. It is clear that many people aren’t liking what they are seeing. The New Right may have its own strong base of supporters, but it doesn’t have the broad-based appeal of old-school conservatism. This, I think, represents a definite limitation of the New Right, one that might prove to be its undoing in the next few years.
This is a discussion I had with my friend June about what we are currently seeing. June is a fan of conservative philosophy and conservative and libertarian-ish ideals, but she is skeptical of what she is currently seeing in the political ‘right’.
Tara: You say you generally agree with ‘conservative philosophy’ and hold ‘conservative and libertarian-ish ideals’, but you don’t really like what you see of the political ‘right’ at the moment. What do you not like about the ‘right’?
June: I think they are not really practicing conservative values. They are divisive, irrational, and sometimes even hateful. They also often don’t respect the rule of law or the importance of consensus, if they don’t get their way. This is not conservative. It is radical and destructive. It is certainly not the conservative values I grew up with. And I know that many people who believe in true conservative values really don’t like what the right stands for right now.
Tara: Tell me more about the conservative values you grew up with, and how they differ from today’s ‘right’.
June: It’s things like caring for families, caring for each other. It’s things like maintaining healthy communities, so people can thrive. It’s about keeping with the spirit of traditions, which includes having love for each other. This certainly isn’t what the right-wing culture warriors are doing. And it certainly doesn’t include mindless destruction of long-standing institutions and safeguards, the denigration of experts and what they have to offer, and the refusal to listen to and consider different points of view, and bring about social consensus. ‘My way or the highway’ is the least conservative way to approach controversial issues.
Tara: Interesting point about the culture warriors. I agree that they self-identify as conservative but they’re not really conservative by historical or serious philosophical standards. Indeed, I think this is creating a major problem for ‘conservative’ parties around the world. Many moderate old-school conservatives have said time and time again that they want to steer clear of the culture wars, even as the New Right is pretty much leaning in, following the lead of Trump.
June: I think Trump is a bad influence on the right. They were by no means perfect, but they certainly weren’t like this back in 2015. Under Trump, the right has no use for conservative values or philosophy. They just want to ‘own the libs’. Which, again, is not what conservatism is. I’m worried that new generations are growing up, thinking that Trumpian culture wars is what conservatism is. It’s poisoning their minds.
Tara: I think it’s worth talking a little bit about ‘what conservatism is’, or in a broader sense, ‘what the right is’. Conservatism, rightly understood, is the cannon of philosophical thinking that goes back to thinkers like Edmund Burke, who have basically nothing in common with the reactionary culture warriors we have today. On the other hand, I have long held that the ‘right’, as we know it, is an artificial social construct that lumps in genuine conservatives, libertarians, and seriously reactionary people like the Trumpian New Right, people who have very little in common with each other otherwise, except that they are not the left. It is this artificial construct that we need to challenge. From what I’ve seen, the space to challenge this construct only seems to open up when the ‘right’ is decisively defeated, like in the recent Australian election. As you can see in that example, people actually come out and try to define and defend what they see as true conservative values, or true classical liberal values, saying that their party needs to return to those values, and stay away from the culture wars.
June: On the other hand, after last November’s Trump win, in America the Republicans have leaned all in behind Trump, without much room for such critical thinking. This is why I’m thinking that, perhaps, a decisive defeat of the right as it currently exists is the only way we will have the room for such important discussions. And these conversations are really worth having, because the replacement of the meaningful tradition of conservatism with mindless reactionary culture war ‘own the libs’ politics would be a real tragedy of historical proportions.
Conversation to be continued…
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
