Boris Johnson Cracked The Code For A Reagan Coalition In Great Britain It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.
As I came back from my office at the university, the cab driver was asking me about what I teach in politics a day before the British elections. A big NewCastle guy, with an affable Northern accent, this guy voted Remain in the European Union elections and has been a lifelong voter for Labour.
For those who have no idea about the electoral map of the United Kingdom, the entire Midlands and North of England are traditional working-class Labour voters since Margaret Thatcher broke the back of trade unionism in the 1980s. These people were taught in their households, in no uncertain terms, that voting for posh urban southern Conservatives is a cardinal sin and they have more in common with the Scots north of the border than their fellow Englishmen down south.
This guy, however, said that he would vote for Conservative Boris Johnson, reluctantly: “What’s the point of a vote, if the results are not even honored? We voted for Brexit as a country, even when I voted for Remain. Chin up and move on.” It was then I knew Labour was toast. If a traditional Anglican working-class bloke from NewCastle can vote Conservative, even in anger or apathy, then we are living in a very different world.
The election results are still coming in as I write, and the Conservatives are on course to get a bigger majority than Thatcher’s. No word can adequately express the result. A rout, a massacre, a thumping—nothing explains the political earthquake that just happened.
It also highlights a few important trends that should be urgently studied and emulated by conservatives across the world. The former Eton-Oxford Classics scholar, former successful two-term mayor of liberal London, former editor of world’s oldest English magazine The Spectator, a chubby cosmopolitan blonde who can recite The Iliad in ancient Greek and lecture on the usage of ascending tricolons in the speeches of Winston Churchill, has just cracked the code of outright long-term conservative majority. This is the Reagan coalition of Britain at work.
QuoteAdded to that was the Corbyn effect. No matter how radicalized the universities are, traditional working-class people are patriotic. They won’t likely support a man or a woman who hates his or her own flag. Whether it’s those taking the knee in the United States, or the ones supporting Hamas in the United Kingdom, they’ve given a key lesson that Conservatives should not only remember, but implement. Loyalty to the land beneath your feet, regardless of culture, race, or background, is a uniting and winning factor.
Quote This election consolidates that hypothesis that the old definitions of left and right are obsolete. It hasn’t mattered which political party’s badge was before your name in the last 20 years. The fundamental difference in Western politics now is cultural, and is between Westphalian sovereignty and unifying nationalism on one hand, and complete individualist internationalism and rule by technocratic institutions on the other.
It's been my experience that here in the US conservatives are having a difficult time accepting this. The political labels of thirty years ago are outdated and nearly meaningless today. I think the author is exactly right here.