The essential complaint of populists is that democracy is a noble ideal from which we have strayed. To be precise, it has been killed off by a hyper-progressive, self-serving, out-of-touch establishment—a betrayal that has occurred most of all at the expense of Europe’s native working-classes. In the 21st century, any conservative-minded counter-elite worth its salt must either act in the interests of these people or resign themselves to the only plausible alternative: indefinite left-wing political domination.
Bear in mind, too, that the Left of this century will be nothing like the Left of the last. The genuine heirs to Keir Hardie and Clement Atlee, well-represented by ‘Blue Labour’ figures like Lord Glasman in Britain and paleo-leftist parties like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, do not have demographic momentum on their side. The 21st century Left will consist of activists more inclined to condemn Winston Churchill as a racist, genocidal maniac than to smile at the thought of having served in his war cabinet, as Atlee himself did.
At least since Tony Blair, Britain’s former party of the proletariat has been consciously dependent on minority voting blocs, having ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial, ethnic, and religious grievance. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Blair, once had an unwise moment of candour in the Evening Standard, admitting that under New Labour mass immigration was partly “intended … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
The same strategy has been pursued by almost all the major left-wing parties across Europe and North America. Both Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are on record gloating about the involuntary demographic transformation of the United States. In the case of regime journalists, it is even more on the nose. Only recently, Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post opinion writer and talking-head on MSNBC, posted to her 700,000 followers on X: “There are nearly 500,000 Haitians in Florida. Someone should start running ads.”
No doubt when she finds herself on the backfoot in other contexts, Rubin is exactly the kind of dishonest actor to insist that Haitians have assimilated wonderfully into American life. Were that the case, of course, she would not be encouraging Democrats to make appeals to them as a distinctive sub-group. Nobody ever does this with German-Americans or Huguenot-descended Brits. Such blatant ethno-politics is nothing short of subversion.
Alas, it has been remarkably successful. In Britain, well over 70% of ethnic minorities swing to the Left. A similar pattern holds in the United States, as in other countries that have pursued reckless immigration policies without the consent or interests of their own people in mind. California used to be a fairly competitive state, the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but this is true no longer. Decades of demographic churn have seen to that.
I for one am in favour of noticing these facts and adjusting accordingly. The failure of the mainstream Right to do any such thing is staggering. As the consequences of mass immigration, among other unpopular policies, have played out, the loyalties of the native working classes have dramatically shifted. The entire axis of politics has turned. Yet the centre-right has been too busy reheating the talking points of the 1980s to notice. Populists parties are capitalising because their mainstream rivals have not bothered to do so.
Considered collectively, it is true, these populists do encompass a rather varied smorgasbord of ideological positions. These include everything from the supply-side Thatcherism of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to the more dirigiste approach of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national, from the lifestyle liberalism of Geert Wilders to the pro-actively traditionalist family policy of Victor Orbán’s Fidesz, from the uncompromising Atlanticism of Giorgia Meloni to the more sceptical, ‘America-First’ posture of one Donald J. Trump. What unites this otherwise disparate set of movements is a desire for social, cultural, and indeed demographic security at a time when identity, not economics, has conquered all before it to become the main issue in our politics.
While inequality and the disruptive effects of globalisation are an important part of the story, mass immigration is the main driver of this seismic change. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” is playing out not only between competing geo-political blocs, but within Western democracies so suicidally open-minded at the border, they have invited balkanisation upon themselves. Meanwhile, as we confront a new breed of radical Leftist, more interested in weaponizing racial resentments than nationalising the ice cream industry, much of the mainstream Right continues to act as if we are up against old-fashioned socialists like Michael Foot—a veritable museum piece, born in Plymouth as long ago as 1913.
While it has become commonplace to describe populist voters as hailing from ‘left behind’ towns and neighbourhoods, they are in fact more up to speed on what politics is now about than the politicians who claim to represent them.
Little wonder that a populist backlash, led by insurgents like Farage, is gathering steam. While Reform UK won just five seats at the recent election, it is not a coincidence that the party came second, most often to Labour, in 98 others. There are whole swathes of working-class voters waiting to be pinched from Sir Keir Starmer—or indeed roused altogether from a just sense of disillusionment to vote for a truly patriotic party. Key to accomplishing the “political revolt” that Farage has declared will be rejecting strategies that were not only treacherous when pursued by the Conservative Party, but also losing and ineffective.
After all, the electoral consequences of demographic change were clear enough 20 years ago. The case of America—roughly a decade ahead, or perhaps I mean behind, when it comes to swivel-eyed experiments with diversity and multiculturalism—is instructive. In 2000, George W. Bush lost 10 of the 15 states with the most foreign-born residents. Meanwhile, he swept to victory in all 10 of the states with the smallest share of foreign-born: Montana, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia, South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
Nevertheless, under the influence of strategist Karl Rove, the Republican party establishment, right up until the Trump revolution, continued to fish around obsessively for minorities while neglecting the very voters that had guaranteed their political fortunes from Dwight Eisenhower onwards. The only Democrat in the post-war era to win more white votes than his Republican rival was Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 landslide.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not calling on right-wing parties to adopt a whites-only approach or to tar all minorities with the same scornful brush. This would be both wrong and counter-productive. Apart from anything else, there are a fair few immigrants, typically first-generation, whom Eric Kaufmann describes as “ethno-cultural traditionalists”: non-native individuals who sincerely love their host countries.
But crucially, ethno-cultural traditionalists of foreign extraction love their host nation because they associate what is good about the country with its historic people, not with a David Cameron-style laundry-list of ill-defined abstract values. Such minorities want to preserve the British people, or indeed the Irish people, in the same way that I would want to preserve the Japanese people if my heart ever moved me to live in Tokyo. What I am saying, then, is that conservatives, be they populist or mainstream, should not be seeking to seduce minorities at the expense of the interests of their more reliable voter base. The American Left never goes out of its way to court evangelicals or gun-owners. This is because, for all their faults, they are cunning political strategists who realise that these are solidly Republican constituencies.
Electorally speaking, they hunt where the ducks are. It is about time that we did likewise.
This article is based on a speech delivered at New Direction Academy, a series of seminars and panel discussions held in Dublin between 16-19 September 2024.
In Defence of Winning Strategies
Jim Watson / AFP
The essential complaint of populists is that democracy is a noble ideal from which we have strayed. To be precise, it has been killed off by a hyper-progressive, self-serving, out-of-touch establishment—a betrayal that has occurred most of all at the expense of Europe’s native working-classes. In the 21st century, any conservative-minded counter-elite worth its salt must either act in the interests of these people or resign themselves to the only plausible alternative: indefinite left-wing political domination.
Bear in mind, too, that the Left of this century will be nothing like the Left of the last. The genuine heirs to Keir Hardie and Clement Atlee, well-represented by ‘Blue Labour’ figures like Lord Glasman in Britain and paleo-leftist parties like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, do not have demographic momentum on their side. The 21st century Left will consist of activists more inclined to condemn Winston Churchill as a racist, genocidal maniac than to smile at the thought of having served in his war cabinet, as Atlee himself did.
At least since Tony Blair, Britain’s former party of the proletariat has been consciously dependent on minority voting blocs, having ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial, ethnic, and religious grievance. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Blair, once had an unwise moment of candour in the Evening Standard, admitting that under New Labour mass immigration was partly “intended … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
The same strategy has been pursued by almost all the major left-wing parties across Europe and North America. Both Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are on record gloating about the involuntary demographic transformation of the United States. In the case of regime journalists, it is even more on the nose. Only recently, Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post opinion writer and talking-head on MSNBC, posted to her 700,000 followers on X: “There are nearly 500,000 Haitians in Florida. Someone should start running ads.”
No doubt when she finds herself on the backfoot in other contexts, Rubin is exactly the kind of dishonest actor to insist that Haitians have assimilated wonderfully into American life. Were that the case, of course, she would not be encouraging Democrats to make appeals to them as a distinctive sub-group. Nobody ever does this with German-Americans or Huguenot-descended Brits. Such blatant ethno-politics is nothing short of subversion.
Alas, it has been remarkably successful. In Britain, well over 70% of ethnic minorities swing to the Left. A similar pattern holds in the United States, as in other countries that have pursued reckless immigration policies without the consent or interests of their own people in mind. California used to be a fairly competitive state, the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but this is true no longer. Decades of demographic churn have seen to that.
I for one am in favour of noticing these facts and adjusting accordingly. The failure of the mainstream Right to do any such thing is staggering. As the consequences of mass immigration, among other unpopular policies, have played out, the loyalties of the native working classes have dramatically shifted. The entire axis of politics has turned. Yet the centre-right has been too busy reheating the talking points of the 1980s to notice. Populists parties are capitalising because their mainstream rivals have not bothered to do so.
Considered collectively, it is true, these populists do encompass a rather varied smorgasbord of ideological positions. These include everything from the supply-side Thatcherism of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to the more dirigiste approach of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national, from the lifestyle liberalism of Geert Wilders to the pro-actively traditionalist family policy of Victor Orbán’s Fidesz, from the uncompromising Atlanticism of Giorgia Meloni to the more sceptical, ‘America-First’ posture of one Donald J. Trump. What unites this otherwise disparate set of movements is a desire for social, cultural, and indeed demographic security at a time when identity, not economics, has conquered all before it to become the main issue in our politics.
While inequality and the disruptive effects of globalisation are an important part of the story, mass immigration is the main driver of this seismic change. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” is playing out not only between competing geo-political blocs, but within Western democracies so suicidally open-minded at the border, they have invited balkanisation upon themselves. Meanwhile, as we confront a new breed of radical Leftist, more interested in weaponizing racial resentments than nationalising the ice cream industry, much of the mainstream Right continues to act as if we are up against old-fashioned socialists like Michael Foot—a veritable museum piece, born in Plymouth as long ago as 1913.
While it has become commonplace to describe populist voters as hailing from ‘left behind’ towns and neighbourhoods, they are in fact more up to speed on what politics is now about than the politicians who claim to represent them.
Little wonder that a populist backlash, led by insurgents like Farage, is gathering steam. While Reform UK won just five seats at the recent election, it is not a coincidence that the party came second, most often to Labour, in 98 others. There are whole swathes of working-class voters waiting to be pinched from Sir Keir Starmer—or indeed roused altogether from a just sense of disillusionment to vote for a truly patriotic party. Key to accomplishing the “political revolt” that Farage has declared will be rejecting strategies that were not only treacherous when pursued by the Conservative Party, but also losing and ineffective.
After all, the electoral consequences of demographic change were clear enough 20 years ago. The case of America—roughly a decade ahead, or perhaps I mean behind, when it comes to swivel-eyed experiments with diversity and multiculturalism—is instructive. In 2000, George W. Bush lost 10 of the 15 states with the most foreign-born residents. Meanwhile, he swept to victory in all 10 of the states with the smallest share of foreign-born: Montana, Mississippi, Wyoming, West Virginia, South Dakota, North Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
Nevertheless, under the influence of strategist Karl Rove, the Republican party establishment, right up until the Trump revolution, continued to fish around obsessively for minorities while neglecting the very voters that had guaranteed their political fortunes from Dwight Eisenhower onwards. The only Democrat in the post-war era to win more white votes than his Republican rival was Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 landslide.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not calling on right-wing parties to adopt a whites-only approach or to tar all minorities with the same scornful brush. This would be both wrong and counter-productive. Apart from anything else, there are a fair few immigrants, typically first-generation, whom Eric Kaufmann describes as “ethno-cultural traditionalists”: non-native individuals who sincerely love their host countries.
But crucially, ethno-cultural traditionalists of foreign extraction love their host nation because they associate what is good about the country with its historic people, not with a David Cameron-style laundry-list of ill-defined abstract values. Such minorities want to preserve the British people, or indeed the Irish people, in the same way that I would want to preserve the Japanese people if my heart ever moved me to live in Tokyo. What I am saying, then, is that conservatives, be they populist or mainstream, should not be seeking to seduce minorities at the expense of the interests of their more reliable voter base. The American Left never goes out of its way to court evangelicals or gun-owners. This is because, for all their faults, they are cunning political strategists who realise that these are solidly Republican constituencies.
Electorally speaking, they hunt where the ducks are. It is about time that we did likewise.
This article is based on a speech delivered at New Direction Academy, a series of seminars and panel discussions held in Dublin between 16-19 September 2024.
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