What Happened to the Centre Right?
Moderate conservatism is in trouble
"Oh no, what went wrong?" by Bennilover is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
What has happened to the centre right? It is a disaster in two of the three countries where I follow politics closely (the UK and the US) and is punching under its weight in Spain, the country where I live.
Even if you are in the middle or the left of the horseshoe, you should see the lack of an institutionalist centre right as problematic. Without sensible conservatives applying the brakes to madcap schemes, the hard right has a much easier route to power, followed by the opportunity to take weird and wacky decisions in office.
In order to understand what has gone wrong on the right of the horseshoe, I will refer to what I call the two major games of politics: winning elections and governing effectively. Both are meant to create a feedback loop. Competent incumbents like to run on their records. It is easy enough to make wild promises in opposition, which might lead to electoral breakthroughs now and then, but executing them will always be difficult, making it hard for populists to win re-election. Meanwhile, the opposition will always have its best chance of gaining power when the other side mismanages a recession or is unlucky with the economic cycle.
Game-show primaries
In my opinion, the centre right’s biggest problem when it comes to winning elections in recent years is that its narratives tend to be a little boring. Its pitch to voters often hinges on creating the conditions for good things to happen in society (like a gardener) rather than going back to the drawing board and coming up with a radical new plan (like a designer). It also stresses old-fashioned virtues like good character, public service and patience; and often has a very old-world establishment style. This style of politics can come across as a little stiff, smug and unsympathetic to people who are struggling.
None of the centre right’s narratives will be particularly fruitful when the time comes to think of emotionally engaging slogans, with the odd exception for cutting red tape. There is a clear contrast with the hard right, which is interested in tribalised identity politics and emotional engagement without worrying particularly hard about whether its yarns have any connection with outside reality.
We saw this clearly in the US. Hard-right candidate Donald Trump put all his centre-right opponents to the sword in the Republican Party’s primary season in 2015 and 2016. He treated the competition as a game show and gleefully took out his conservative rivals one by one as he spread conspiracy theories, gave people cruel nicknames and made statements that were completely unconnected from the truth. He probably never expected to win, at least at first, so could concentrate on emotional connection with angry voters in a way that people who were thinking seriously about how to govern after the election never could have done.
We all know what happened next. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who had a stiff and awkward public persona, but sneaked a win in the electoral college. As president, he lied and bullshitted every single day; and mishandled a global pandemic. After losing the next election, he refused to accept the result; and led a cack-handed coup attempt, cementing his position on the far right instead of the hard right. He is running again this year, despite becoming a convicted felon in the meantime. Nikki Haley failed to stop him from the centre right in the primaries earlier this year.
Some people on the right think that Trump is a highly entertaining edge-lord; while many on the left and the centre think he is a disaster. We can all agree that he is highly compelling figure, though. Whatever we think of his policies or statements, it is extremely hard to look away. This is the secret of his success. It is a formula that conventional conservatives, who worry whether their statements happen to be true or not, will always find it hard to match.
“Blow the bloody doors off”
Meanwhile, the UK’s former centre-right Prime Minister (PM) David Cameron had long been troubled by hard-right populists within the Conservative Party, who were themselves worried that the European Union’s (EU) regulatory system would act as a slippery slope to full-on socialism. The idea that we need to kill the world’s largest free-trade bloc in the name of free trade was always a little wacky. Cameron thought that members of this wing punched above their weight in the party and decided to call their bluff.
So, Cameron promised a referendum on UK membership of the EU if the Tories were re-elected in the 2015 election. The vote came 42 years after the country had joined the European Economic Community (EEC). UK membership was endorsed by a referendum two years later; and the EEC evolved into the EU in 1992.
The Conservatives did better than the polls had suggested and Cameron won a majority in the general election of 2015. His manifesto committed him to a referendum on EU membership before 2017; and he pledged to hold one in June 2016. It came just after Trump won the Republican primaries. Cameron’s strategy was based on holding the “big beasts” of his party together with a sensible pro-EU policy, followed by a solid show of unity with Labour, the main opposition party. He failed miserably on both counts.
The key figure was Boris Johnson, a senior Conservative politician with a background in right-wing commentary, who loved great stories, whether they happened to be true or not. He was mayor of London, but had decided not to run again in May 2016, which gave him some free time to get into mischief. He had become a member of parliament (MP) in the 2015 general election. He famously wrote two columns, one backing EU membership and the other backing Brexit (leaving the EU). He decided that the Brexit one was much more fun.
Johnson announced that he would support Vote Leave in February 2016. It had been founded in October 2015 and was designated the official campaign for Brexit in April 2016. It was also backed by another senior Conservative, Michael Gove, who was Lord Chancellor at the time. After the UK establishment issued report after report saying that Brexit would be a disaster, Gove famously said that “the people of this country have had enough of experts.” This populist statement marks the border between the hard right and the centre right.
At the time of the referendum, Labour was led by hard-left stalwart Jeremy Corbyn. He only half-heartedly backed the Remain campaign and was reluctant to share a stage with his tribal enemies from the Conservative Party. His incompetent and lazy approach proved devastating for Remain in a closely fought battle.
Many people (including me) went to bed on the night of the referendum when it looked like continued membership of the EU would win. This changed in the early hours and Vote Leave pulled off an unexpected victory. Gove’s wife at the time, Sarah Vine, quoted a Michael Cain film in the morning: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” For the likes of Johnson and Gove, the Brexit campaign was just a bit of fun. They were almost certainly hoping for a heroic loss rather than a victory.
The result exploded the centre right’s hold on the Conservative Party. Cameron resigned the next day, to be replaced by Theresa May. She had reluctantly supported Remain, but began the moves to leave the EU. She was succeeded as PM by Johnson, who put Corbyn to the sword in the 2019 general election. After a series of scandals, Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, a hard-right politician who only lasted 49 days in power after scaring markets with misguided policy announcements. She was replaced by Rishi Sunak, an establishment figure who had supported Brexit as a bankbencher.
Of course, the experts were right. Brexit was a silly proposal. It has led to very poor results for the UK economy - gross domestic product (GDP) is maybe 5% lower than it would have been. As a result, Sunak led the Conservatives to the party’s worst-ever election defeat earlier this year. The centre right and the hard right now have plenty of time in opposition to fight for the soul of the Tory party.
Cameron’s big mistake was to try and call the bluff of populists. He didn’t realise that populists can gain an edge in referendums in a way that is much harder in a general election. He gambled on three referendums in a row, on Scottish independence, Brexit and a new voting system - something that would have been uncharacteristic of earlier iterations of the centre right. Cameron might have won two out of three, but any Bayesian would have been able to tell him that if you have an 80% chance of success in three unrelated referendums, you only have a 51% chance of winning all three. His gamble was effectively a coin toss!
There are clear parallels between the Trump wing of the Republican Party and the Johnson wing of the Conservative Party. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a fine analysis of bullshit in 2005, which caught the attention of many as the hard right rose to power in the US and the UK. Frankfurt defines bullshit as being the inevitable result of someone being required to talk “without knowing what he is talking about.” Disregarding the views of experts and knee-jerk contrarianism are symptoms that someone is a bullshit artist. Bullshit is much more common on the hard right than it used to be on the old centre right.
There is also a slightly deeper point. Why did conservative voters suddenly become so interested in bullshit? I suspect that part of the answer lies in the second game of politics (governing competently). The centre right always defended two institutions that tend to push in different directions - a market-based economy and the nuclear family. The two aren’t exactly contradictory, but there can be tensions. A market-based economy has its ups and downs, which can cause financial stress for families, particularly if the breadwinner gets made redundant.
Under Newt Gingrich’s leadership, the hard right viciously attacked centre-right Presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his part in multiple corporate redundancies during the 2012 primary campaign. Romney had been a top executive at a private equity firm before going into politics. The Democrat candidate, Barack Obama, picked up the baton in his own successful campaign for the presidency. The message resonated hard for an obvious reason. Research shows that around 40% of Americans have been laid off or made redundant at least once in their careers; and about half of workers in the US worry about losing their jobs.
I have never seen the centre right address these tensions between markets and families in a satisfying way. Tax holidays for families that have babies or adopt would be an idea worth exploring, but this would just be the start. The paradox of market-based economies is that they can hurt individuals and families at the same time that they are good for society as a whole. They are also much better than any alternative that we have tried so far. Although redundancies are painful for all concerned, they do tend to make goods and services cheaper for everyone else.
It is worth mentioning that the tension between the market and families is also present further to the right on the horseshoe. Earlier this month, Trump made an unforced error when he said companies should just fire striking workers. This is illegal; and trade unions are likely to mobilise their members in battleground states to campaign against the Republicans as a result.
There is also another aspect to the answer of what happened to the centre right. In the 1950s, American conservative ideologue William F. Buckley defined a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
By the same token, insurrectional far-right populists are those who think the battle is already lost and the only chance is one last desperate throw of the dice, which - if successful - would lock in the cultural hegemony of its base even if demographics continue to to the other way. We see the same dynamics across Trump’s insurrection on 6th January 2021 and the Catalan nationalist movement, which tried to convince the world than an informal referendum would still be valid if only one side voted.
Sleaze
In general terms, the situation in Spain is a little different from the UK and the US. We need to begin our analysis with the second game of politics (governing competently) rather than the first (winning elections). The centre right-led Popular Party (PP) was in power under José María Aznar from 1996 to 2004. He won back-to-back elections, getting 44.5% in the second one, by uniting the right from liberal centrists all the way through to the hard right (with some grudging support from some sections of the far right too). Christian democrats of the centre right provided much of the PP’s leadership.
The economy boomed during Aznar’s time in power, with GDP going up nearly 75% as Spain gave up the peseta for the euro. The new currency brought much lower interest rates with it, leading to a debt-fuelled construction boom. Unfortunately, many in the PP decided to skim a little off the top. Spain later found out that corruption and kickbacks had been endemic. A number of PP politicians ended up in jail. The PP hit a low point of 16.7% in the April 2019 election after the scale of the problem became known. It has since rebuilt to 33.1% in last year’s election, which the PP won. It was unable to form a government afterwards.
Spanish voters have been fairly unforgiving of corruption in Aznar’s time in government. Although many have since returned to the fold, largely in protest at Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez’s ongoing flirtation with populism, the centre-right party is still punching below its weight given the circumstances.
It is also worth mentioning the first game of politics too. Aznar decided not to run in the 2004 election. The election was due on 14 March; and on 11 March Al Qaeda bombed commuter trains and a station in Madrid. The explosions killed 193 people, with more than 2,000 injuries. The year before, Aznar had taken the extremely unpopular decision of supporting the US invasion of Iraq. Shamefully, the PP tried to blame the bombings on Basque terrorists and deliberately spread misinformation. This backfired badly, delivering a surprise victory to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialists (42.6%), while the new PP leader Mariano Rajoy got 37.7%.
Zapatero mishandled the credit crunch in 2007/8, leading to a long recession. Rajoy was able to become PM between 2011 and 2018, but was bought down by a no-confidence vote as the sheer scale of the PP’s corruption in the boom years was revealed during his time in power.
We can see something similar in Catalonia, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities. The region’s centre-right establishment had long been nationalist, with a strong streak of Christian democracy. As with the PP, there have been widespread allegations of corruption. The former regional president, Artur Mas, pretended to be a populist in 2012, but he was unable to keep control of the forces he had unleashed. Within a few years, his handpicked successor, Carles Puigdemont (a true insurrectional populist), was tweeting photos of himself with letters from judges, promising to completely ignore their warnings. Of course, he ended up running away twice while his side lost three elections in a row, but that is a tale for another day.
Get up again
How can the centre right get its mojo back? I believe any conservative strategists looking for a way back into the game should study the playbook of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional president of Madrid. She has proven that the centre right can still work the old feedback loop between competent governance and winning elections as an incumbent. She has won two out of three elections, but her vote has grown in each one, starting with 22.2% in 2019, when she was able to enter power through a right-wing alliance. She later doubled her vote to 44.8% in 2021 and drove it even higher to 47.3% in 2023.
Ayuso’s main talent is to create a welcoming environment both for investors and immigrants. The economy booms as a result. She also has a populist edge to her discourse without actually becoming a full populist; and isn’t afraid of bare-knuckle brawling with her adversaries. She appears much less stiff than old-school centre-right figures. For example, she has a Depeche Mode tattoo - something that would be hard to imagine on former UK Prime Minister John Major or US Presidential candidate Romney.
The centre left is in a healthy state nowadays, at least partly because leaders like Keir Starmer (Labour leader and the UK’s new PM) have borrowed an emphasis on economic growth from the centre right. The centre right should do something similar and borrow the centre left’s willingness to draw talent from a deep pool.
Around 88% of children in the UK go to state schools. Starmer has just appointed just one privately educated minister after his victory, which makes his leadership team fairly representative of society at large. This is a a stark change from the Conservatives. On average, 60% of Tory Cabinet ministers have been privately educated in recent years, with a record of 81% at a couple of points.
There is no particular reason why the centre right should be so biased towards expensively educated people from upper-middle class backgrounds, who either have or expect to have inherited wealth. If this side of the horseshoe wants to take the fight to the hard right in the future, it should be much more willing to recognise raw talent among people who have had to struggle a little to get where they are.
Any conservative strategists who want to go a little deeper should also grapple with a deeper question too. What reforms can make hard-working families more resilient to the ups and downs of a market economy? If you can’t think of an answer, what experiments can you run to find out what works and what doesn’t?
Finally, the centre right needs to up its game when it comes to the housing market, which can be a point of tension between markets and families. It can be very hard for young families to get a foot on the property ladder due to high prices. Building more homes is an obvious way of hacking the supply side of the supply-and-demand formula. The centre right should take this much more seriously, instead of just representing older people who have already built up equity in their homes.
The comments are closed, as always when I discuss populism. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. Please note that I will publish next week’s column a little earlier than usual due to personal logistics. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Institutionalism and the hard right
Further Reading
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the third anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon and X (formerly Twitte) are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.