Lee Rotherham: The role of Conservatives after the Trump meteorite has landed

Dr Lee Rotherham is a former adviser on international affairs to the Conservative Party and was Director of Special Projects at Vote Leave. 

Had President Trump not already served a first term, the events of the past few weeks would have looked shockingly tempestuous.

Less so on measured reflection.

They are framed by the business that was not so much unfinished as never really begun.

The first term pledge to “drain the swamp” of DC politics was a borrowing of sorts from Ronald Reagan, and not an expression Trump himself particularly liked until he saw it resonate at a rally. Though the phrase launched a thousand placards, it failed to be delivered.

To understand Trump is to first acknowledge the frustration of millions of Americans.

They feel lied to by their government – over the Iraq War, over Hunter Biden’s laptop, over the source of Covid, over President Biden’s competency, and a host of other items. Some on that big list are tin foil hat conspiracies. But others involve now-proven instances of knavish rebuttal by media or politicians. So who can blame them if they feel betrayed by the establishment?

Trump’s policy itself is driven by three overarching and entirely rational considerations. The first is economic; the US runs a ruinous deficit. As a tourist spot, the US National Debt Clock in Manhattan is terrifying for its flickering statistics, but also now that an extra digit’s been added shocking for its lack of novelty. Even Elon Musk has been tweeting favourably about a Democrat President, Clinton, for briefly once balancing the books. As European summit leaders have been finding out, you can’t find spare cash behind the sofa for Ukraine if you are broke.

Trump’s second driver is sociological.

The march on wokeness is a reaction to the tradition of revolutionary Marxist doctrine, which first discredits society in order to supplant it. Legislate for aggressive equality and make it trendy, and you can even get the corporations self-indoctrinating (read Vivek Ramaswamy). Wreck trust in Portland’s Police, and you can decriminalise any act of petty community terror you commit. But at corollary cost; the erosion of personal responsibility takes twisted human form in the public zombification of xylazine addicts.

The third driver is the Chinese Communist Party, now acknowledged as the single overriding US strategic threat.

Even the trade-associated dispute over fentanyl masks concern around the part played by Hong Kong organised crime and the prospect of these gangs being co-opted as a Beijing proxy. The same dispute is also tied into strategic risks arising from Chinese owned infrastructure.

Taking Moscow out of that particular equation comes at a brutal cost, paid for by Ukraine.

This (perhaps usefully) deescalates in some dangerous areas, but at the additional price of rewarding a Putin who conducts live-action CBRN experiments on regime opponents overseas, disposes of presidential competitors, disenfranchises emerging credible political opponents, and turns a blind eye to criminality and murder to sustain elite support.

Metternich the policy may be, but pretty it is not.

Such is the core, and the rest fits in orbit. Viktor Orban in his recent state of the nation speech claimed that USAID enabled “the liberal dictatorship of opinion”. Western elites embraced the twinning of supranationalism and postliberalism, empowering forces that were at their root hostile to traditional and conservative values. All the other good they delivered has come to be overshadowed. In Trump’s brave new world, we have to recognise this perception if we are to save what’s useful in internationalism, to preserve the primacy of the nation state, and to restore public faith in those genuinely pursuing critical humanitarian causes.

But the diorama of Trumpian Populism allows us the opportunity to reflect on other dynamics.

The first is that the cures are often being applied without considering third order effects, with collateral damage that will need fixing later, and which carries risk of reputational damage for fellow travellers across semi- affiliated political movements.

The second is that modern pseudoliberal elites have brought this populist backlash entirely, consciously and arrogantly upon themselves.

The third point, and perhaps the most unanticipated, is that the failures of both these sets of architects now provide a reason for Conservatives to still exist in the modern world – radical but rational. Let’s take some examples.

The USAID budget and its civil servants empowered and subsidised politically correct campaigners. The populist backlash, however, has ripped the heart out of genuine aid programmes dealing with lower order Maslow problems rather than just the trendy and conjectural society building ones. The punch back also fails to distinguish why what’s headlined as a ‘gender’ programme in Kabul may have funding merit while one run by a wom*n’s collective in Amsterdam does not. I explore elsewhere why ‘nuking from orbit’ may be satisfying but is not the intelligent response [https://capx.co/how-to-cut-government-waste], as indirectly acknowledged by Musk himself with his unseasonable joke about having accidentally briefly cut the Ebola projects.

The same applies by extension to higher education. The Left has subverted it; the populist response is to smash up the system; a radical Conservative response means aggressively rebalancing funding, empowering debate, and institutions adopting a duty of care towards students facing aggression.

Angry with the UN? Before you pull out or smash it up, consider the specialised agencies – and grip Whitehall so it stops talking about handing over the UK veto. Furious about Chagos? Maybe don’t wreck the entire system of international law, which may yet be useful to unbalance China’s own increasingly arrogant imperialism, but clear out the FCDO so it robustly represents UK interests rather than diffident lawyers.

Livid about the WHO institutional cover up over China and COVID? Quite right. Don’t let that mean you inhale every ignorant antivax trope, and keep off the bleach. But do retain a healthy Ridleyesque cynicism towards official guestimates treated as gospel, and acts of Wuhan legerdemain.

Feeling empathy with this week’s Trumpian protectionism? Sure, give Trudeau’s Liberals a verbal kicking for letting Canada become the epicentre of the 2SLGBTQIA+ contagion. But remember that Trump is acting as the new Barnier. Blocking free trade decreases competitiveness, and protectionism is slow economic suffocation.

Angry at Defence freeriders, from Ireland to Germany? Trump warned freeloaders last time round but they preferred to laugh at him over NordStream. The answer’s not to destroy NATO. Nor, dear Lib Dem opportunists, is it to chase political integration with Brussels via the back door. It’s to step up to your security obligations.

Rethinking Russia?

The response shouldn’t be issuing hollow press releases over Ukraine, or to casually bandy paper army deployments. Nor is it one embraced by some populists, to pretend the Putin of today is the Blueberry Hill-singing Putin of the 2000s. Today’s man has one eye on the manpower, munitions and money going to Ukraine, and the other on his inflatable escape slide. He is in his seventies. Articles 95.2.b and 98 of the constitution give him his safe retirement, but only provided United Russia stays in power and he gets his vouchsafed life seat in the Upper House with the immunity that goes with it. But that requires preconditions to be sustained. That is a hard nosed negotiating point.

Migration?

Its scale has fractured national identities across Europe, and its pseudoliberal architects deserve (but won’t get) lifetime ostracisation. But the populist response too often leans towards the blanket trope, which dehumanises individuals who are here, and have integrated, and are patriotic. Integration should be encouraged and rewarded; but settled status more readily reversible, and net migration shifted onto more assimilable cultures and brought down into the low five digits.

The list could go on. Constitutional reform. Migration and human decency. Housing. The legal system. Women’s rights. Civil service activism. Big banks. Megacorporations. Across the board the establishment default has failed; the populist response is to JDAM the lot; the role of Conservatives is to fire the precise munitions that get the job done.

But there is a prerequisite. Evolving into this necessary party of radical Conservatism requires Conservatives first to be duly chastened by their own immense past failures. When in power, they balked at surgically removing the very problems others are now slashing at with machetes.

Will the leader of radical diagnostics now step forward?

It was told of the infamous cynic philosopher Diogenes that in the full light of day, a lighted lamp in his hand, he used to go about saying, “I am looking for a man”.

So, it transpires, are the Conservatives.

And by the standards of their latest disappointing handiwork around the margins of their Human Rights policy I fear we still have a bit of a wait.