Why Tories and Republicans can’t do populism properly

A photograph by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press has been doing the cruel rounds. In the centre, US president Joe Biden sweet-talks a pair of hurricane-hit Floridians. Slouching into frame, as though recently turned away from a country club, is a hangdog Ron DeSantis. The misgivings some Republicans have about the Florida governor as a presidential candidate centre on his unTrumpian lack of lustre. Here is the visual distillation of their point.

Bear in mind the context, though. Biden, a Democrat showing locals the benign power of the state, is in his element. DeSantis, a small-government man having to take federal aid of a kind he once voted against, is far out of it. This is the stiffness of an ideologue meeting unco-operative reality. UK premier Liz Truss, another laissez-faire zealot in statist times, knows the ordeal.

Six years since populism broke through in the UK and US, it is clear that neither Tories nor Republicans will ever be able to do it properly. They can offer the hard cultural edge of Italy’s right. They can subvert constitutional norms with the facility of Poland’s or Hungary’s. What they can’t do, at least for long, is the economics. They can’t build a paternalistic state and put it in the service of the average worker. The liberal individualism that France calls “Anglo-Saxon” will come through in the end.

Consider the record. Boris Johnson’s concern for the depressed regions of England circa 2019 petered out. Trump’s rustbelt programme contained more — those tariffs on China — but his main feat of lawmaking was a tax cut that might have come from a generic Republican. It was going to take time for these capitalist parties to recruit thinkers and cadres of a more interventionist bent. But each is if anything moving in the other direction. The US right’s unofficial base is now income tax-free hedgie magnet Florida, where the cultural paternalism comes easy (see the curbs on what schools can teach about sex) and the material kind comes not at all. Truss beat Rishi Sunak among Tory grassroots by framing him as statist sellout. As though to repent for her own doctrinal heresy in subsidising household energy bills, she cut taxes until the bond markets squealed.

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The media has to simplify to explain. There is no journalism without generalisation. Still, it has been an analytic travesty all these years to group the Anglo-American right with the likes of Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen — who would restore the French wealth tax — in an undifferentiated autocratic blob. (Vladimir Putin, too, was routinely classed as part of it. Even before Johnson and the Republicans became the keenest backers of Ukraine against him, that judgment was laughable.)

A cavalier way with the rules of the political game is all that glues this supposed club together. When it comes to the substance of government — who gets what? — the libertarian Anglos are plainly distinct from the dirigiste continentals. The former can hardly be said to be populist at all.

And what a relief that is. Their small-state instincts put a cap on the electoral success of a feral generation of Tories and Republicans. The GOP in particular could do a lot more injury to the constitution if it shuffled a tad left on economics. Declare a truce with Obamacare, tax super-high earners to fund infrastructure and the party could have a realignment somewhere outside the bench of the Supreme Court. The politics of Trump and the economics of Eisenhower might be an unanswerable electoral offering.

DeSantis is the problem in miniature. He sends immigrants to Cape Cod and other liberal enclaves. He is tongue-tied on the question of the president’s democratic legitimacy. But he can’t complete the three-card trick of populism. He can’t add economic protection to cultural reaction and constitutional chicanery. It goes against his Freedom Caucus and Club for Growth rearing. Nor, on a lasting basis, and by British standards of public spending, can the Tories. Their equivalents in France wouldn’t hesitate. There is something reassuring here about the “stickiness” of national cultures and philosophic traditions.

Since 2016, these two parties have been denying their essential nature. They have savoured their new role as tribunes of the workers: they like the veneer of heartland grit and perhaps even the vicarious masculinity. But they can’t follow through intellectually. They can’t offer the bread element of populism. And voters don’t live by circuses alone. Flattery of the masses but not tangible help for them: the spectacle is enough to conjure Churchill’s line about an opponent. “[He] loves the working man,” said the old lion. “He loves to see him work.” — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022