US conservatives are routing the failing Left. The Tories can learn from their success
The Conservative Party has some big choices before it. But it isn’t just whether it wants to be led by Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak. The choice is whether it wants to stagger along as another centrist political party, or whether it wants to actually win some conservative victories. It could learn something about the latter by looking to the successes of the conservative movement in America.
American politics today is dominated by a generation of Leftwing politicians who are all in, or fast approaching, their 80s. They are out of ideas and out of successors. If you look at the bench of Democrat politicians likely to replace Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi it is very thin pickings indeed. Can anyone imagine a great wave of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg?
The Republicans, by contrast, are bursting with younger talent. Some of which may even be about to see off the monster of Mar-a-lago, Donald Trump, who has not yet announced his presidential bid.
But whether Trump runs or not, there are major challengers to him. Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN, has been making it clear that she is running for the Republican nomination. Yet all eyes are on the Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis. A poll out this week, taken in the primary battleground state of Michigan, showed Desantis and Trump neck and neck among Republican voters. Other recent polls have shown Desantis polling above Trump.
There are reasons for this. Some are obvious. Trump has serious opposition to his candidacy not just among swing voters but among some Republicans too. The drip of revelations from the admittedly highly partisan January 6 committee has begun to have an impact. Many Republicans may still like Trump, but it is clear that he is a millstone around their party as well.
Desantis, by contrast – at not much more than half Trump’s age – spells a break from the past as well as a continuation of it. These things are not mutually exclusive. The 43-year-old could thank Trump for some of the good things he achieved, but promise to take it from here without the overweight baggage that Trump has come to be.
Best of all is that, as Governor of Florida, Desantis has some serious successes behind him. He was the Governor who during Covid made sure that his state did not lock down. It was an exceptionally tough call, made in spite of the consensus in most of the other states and indeed most other countries. Desantis spoke to medical experts but he concluded that Florida should stay open. And it did. And not only did it not have any great excess mortality rate (when compared to size and age of population) it has had a boom of people from other states choosing to visit, or even move to, the free state of Florida.
On other issues Desantis has been a hero to many conservatives. In America, as in Britain, the Left fights an endless, comprehensive culture war. It tries to reframe everything, making things everyone knew until yesterday into things that nobody can say today. Desantis plays them at their own game. When the college athlete Lia (born William) Thomas knocked biologically female athletes off the top podium in a college swimming competition earlier this year many people were outraged. Thomas has been nominated for awards for “women’s swimming” and much more. Desantis has responded by signing a declaration saying that Florida recognises the women who came second and third as the people who actually came first and second.
Of course, a portion of the Left then howled at Desantis. How could he be so bigoted? How could he be so petty? In fact, he is simply asserting what everybody would have asserted until about three years ago. Nothing he has done is bigoted. Nothing he has done is hateful. He has simply asserted a truth and stuck to it.
It is the same with other “culture war” issues. Major American corporations have kept injecting themselves into political debates. When the state of Georgia recently passed legislation on voter ID (asking that voters prove who they are when they show up to vote) the Left denounced it as “racist”. For reasons too ridiculous and obvious to get into, major corporations threatened to boycott the state. Georgia looked in trouble for a bit.
Then earlier this year they tried the same thing on Florida. Desantis wanted to pass a bill which would prevent young children, including kindergarteners, from being taught gender nonsense – like the idea that there aren’t two sexes but in fact about a million different genders (always expanding) and that our species is essentially hermaphroditic. The Left pretended that the bill would ban anyone from mentioning gays in the classroom or would be a sort of American Section 28. They called it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as though that was remotely what the bill was saying. Disney, among other corporations, got into the fight. And Desantis did something almost unheard of in the culture wars. He fought back.
Disney happens to enjoy a whole set of tax and other advantages from being in Florida. Desantis made it clear that these were now up for negotiation. If Disney was to become a politically intrusive company, they could lose their favourable status. It was a terrific move, for it reminded the Left that there is a cost to forcing yourself into politics, taking a side and lying about the side you are against. For this and other moves Desantis has become a hero to many. They will be the basis for any leap for the presidency.
In Britain, our conservatives don’t always like this sort of talk. They watch the Left play remorseless culture wars and then wimp out from responding in kind. Boris Johnson was well placed to push back against many of the Left’s advances in the UK. He did nothing.
But as Kemi Badenoch has shown, the Right can, and should, push back. In her position as equalities minister Badenoch made her name by rejecting the Left’s race-based educational ideas. She resisted forcibly and comprehensively the Left’s insistence that Britain is a “systemically racist” country. And she pushed back against her predecessor Penny Mordaunt’s ludicrous idea that people must be said to be biologically whatever it is they claim to “feel” to be that day.
This is not a side show. It is part of a path to victory. To show that conservatives will not just be pushed around, but that conservatives will fight back. And that while nothing is more important than the economy and economic growth, the cultural underpinnings of our country matter too. Desantis has shown it matters in America, and is popular. Badenoch has shown it can work here, and is popular. I hope whoever wins the Conservative leadership takes that lesson too.
There are votes to be won in vehemently defending traditional values, but it requires politicians brave enough to grasp the opportunity