Those Guardianista Ohio-botherers for whom American politics remains an unhealthy obsession have been sleeping even more smugly than usual these last few nights. Clutching their The West Wing box sets tight to their breasts as they dream sweet dreams of over-turning the over-turning of Roe V Wade, the progressive obsessive can reflect happily on the failure of an expected Republican ‘Red Wave’ to materialise in this week’s mid-term elections. They can smile at the likely dead heat in Congress – much better than a predicted big majority for the Grand Old Party – and the sheer amount of egg the Orange Evil One has got on his face. Plus ca change.
In fairness, it was a poor night for Donald J. Trump. Holed up at Mar-A-Largo, rejecting Nigel Farage’s calls, he was forced to watch on Fox as the candidates he backed failed to win across the country. Many were cast in his image. The people of Pennsylvania – one of the states to seal his victory in 2016 – chose John Fetterman, a Harvard-educated parody of a working-class thug who is still recovering from a stroke, over Trump-backed Mehmet Oz, a doctor famous for being on Oprah. In the Senate and House, Trump-backed candidates faltered, and may have cost his party Congress.
Now, readers, I am not usually tasked with reporting on American politics. I have an abiding interest in it. But it is also a truth, universally acknowledged, that one is not truly accepted into the politico-hack fraternity before you can produce an under-researched, over-enthusiastic takes on what is happening to the benighted descendants of those mis-guided eighteenth century rebels. After all, I started off at ConHome writing about the late, great P. J. O’Rourke. My hackery is in honour of him. Yet with him gone, I am even more afraid of our continental cousins than usual.
Nevertheless, for all my squirming, there are some interesting parallels that can be drawn between the American situation and their own. They explain why both the Tory and Republican leadership may look across the Atlantic with some state of envy. You should be familiar with Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida. He was re-elected this week by nearly 20 points – a huge increase on the 0.4 per cent he squeaked home by in 2018 – turning Democratic counties red and winning 57 per cent of the Latino vote. This is – yikes, an Americanism – a big deal.
Pre-DeSantis, Florida was a swing state. His winning by so much is like a Tory MP turning Watford into a safe seat in one Parliament. DeSantis has made himself hugely popular. He saw out Covid without major restrictions, flew illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard (Tuscany for a progressive elite who don’t have passports) to – yikes again – “own the libs”, and went to war with Disney’s wokery and won. Although he is not perfect, he is the future of both the Republicans and the Republic. He would beat Biden by a landslide, and would be the best President since Reagan.
Hence why the G.O.P men in grey suits might be a little envious of our situation. If, as expected, Trump announces he is running next week, they face exactly the Totentanz that we have just swerved. Trump and Johnson parallels are over-done. Yes, they are both New Yorkers with three wives and a famous victory in 2016. They are talented campaigners with interesting hair and a unique interpretation of Christianity. But as one university of friend of Johnson told me, Johnson has written more books than Trump has read. He is thus sufficiently self-aware that he dropped out, rather than bringing hell.
Trump is many things – good and bad. But self-aware? So a painful, self-destructive contest between DeSantis – a former ally – and him looms. By contrast, when we Tories had a leader we wished to be rid of, MPs stitched it up so that the potentially pro-Johnson membership were excluded, and a Sunak coronation ensured. Was it anti-democratic? Certainly. Has it caused lasting anger? Definitely. Was it preferable to Johnson and Sunak splitting the party in two? Five thousand per cent yes.
Indeed, for Trump read Johnson, and for DeSantis read Sunak. The Governor of Florida, so the cliché goes, offers Trumpism without Trump. Sunak is attempting to do something similar. His Cabinet and ministerial choices – and the appointment of Onward’s Will Tanner as the Downing Street Deputy Chief of Staff – show he sees reassembling Johnson’s 2016 and 2019 coalition as the only route to success. DeSantis and Sunak both differ from their respective predecessors by promising delivery, not just campaigning success. Trump and Johnson fronted the revolution. Now it takes the sensible chaps to actually deliver it.
What this suggests is that the profound shift in centre-right politics since 2016 has become baked in for both parties. To the left on economics, to the right on social issues – you should know the drill. But this is an area where we have something to learn from our Indian-slaughtering and burger-munching chums. The victory of J. D. Vance in Ohio, the author of the great Hillbilly Elegy, highlights the success of the most interesting section of the American right today: the New Right. Essentially, these are the folk who have spent the last six years giving Trumpism an intellectual sheen.
The movement does not have a single hymn sheet, but a common – yikes trifecta – vibe. They share a broad set of approaches to policy and discourse. They are on the side of working people against the elites. They are for government intervention, and distrustful of global capital. They want to see the right lose its ties to free-market liberalism, take on the Blob who stuff our institutions and pull our culture to the left, and stage a revolution against a political order that is sterile and failing. New Right think-tanks and outlets are springing up everywhere – and they are even getting write-ups in Vanity Fair.
Despite the claims of Will Lloyd to have spotted the New Right at this week’s Reasoned student conference, we don’t have an equivalent movement over here. Yes, he have teenage Tory oddballs with interesting dress sense and fruity views. But they are a constant. We have Onward to push forward the levelling-up agenda, and they are very talented. But they are not culture warriors aspiring to ape Julian the Apostate. Our think-tank archipelago remains immensely useful. But it is rooted in the – the last one, I promise – neoliberal consensus. At their worst, they look too much back to 1979, and not forward to 2024.
Too often, our equivalent agenda is associated with individual thinkers – like Dominic Cummings or Nick Timothy – or commentators – like the self-declared Anglo-Futurist Aris Roussinnos of UnHerd, or the post-liberal economist Paul Collier – rather than being formalised. None of them would describe themselves as being part of a particular movement. The ambition of those New Right think-tanks across the pond is to train up the next generation of staffers and wonks for the next Republican government. We should be doing the same. Munira Mirza’s excellent Civic Future initiative is a guide. Nonetheless, that is non-partisan, and rightly so.
Those of us who want to see the British right change – and who don’t want a repeat of the neoliberal Gotterdammerung of Truss’s 49 days – need to shape and create that movement. We might not be Catholic integralists or Stuart restorationists, like some of our more entertaining American allies. But if we do want to fight the culture war and win, and produce an economy that offers dignity and security rather than simply growth at all costs, there is much we can learn from DeSantis, Vance, and their various intellectual out-riders. Obsessing about American politics is clearly not only for the Left, as I clutch my copy of Hillbilly Elegy to my breast.