In 2013, two of the leading Conservative analysts in the United States, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, argued that the Republican Party, through its rejection of traditional party principles, had fallen well off the spectrum of traditional political positioning and had become a ‘radical insurgency – ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition’.
Yet despite this alleged radicalism, the Republican establishment had for years managed to ensure that their favoured, more palatable primary candidates succeeded in winning the nomination. The unpalatable ones – Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, and so on – were all successfully supressed. In 2016, however, the GOP failed; despite their best efforts to supress him, Donald Trump, the most offensive and distasteful candidate to the Republican establishment, rode a wave of media hysteria and public discontent to win the nomination. As we know, he would go on to win the presidency and propel the Republican party even further off the spectrum.
Fast forward to 2019, and the British Conservative Party had its Trump moment. Only, unlike the Republican Party in 2016, the Conservative Party establishment wilfully encouraged it – many of its MPs even voted tactically to ensure it. Yes, the party overwhelmingly chose to elect Boris Johnson as their leader, a man who they knew to be an offensive and incompetent liar. They did so because they figured a Trump-like celebrity leader such as Johnson had the best chance of winning a general election for them. Their gamble paid off. This was a Faustian bargain, however, because just like the Republican Party in the US, the Conservative Party in the UK has since fallen far off the spectrum of traditional political positioning. In fact, what we have seen over the past year is the gradual Trumpification of the Conservative Party. Let’s start with the obvious.
