Despite the evident failure of leftist social theory, so-called ‘establishment’ conservatives have failed to re-shape popular culture. One explanation is that ‘establicons’ blithely accept the moral authority of the ideas upon which their opponents’ ideology is founded.
That a profound malaise has struck conservative thought throughout the contemporary West, particularly across the Anglosphere, is an axiom of the political zeitgeist. Strong circumstantial evidence of this is the peculiar situation in which political outsiders – sometimes obvious non-conservatives such as Wilders in the Netherlands or Trump in the United States – successfully express anxieties that would ordinarily define the fears and aspirations of the electoral centre-right, but which are systematically censored from the political debate by the candidates of more ‘respectable’ parties in the so-called ‘moderate’ centre.
Recent attempts to revitalise opposition to the ‘progressive’ behemoth have obtained mixed results: Despite receiving almost 13 per cent of the popular vote at the last general elections, UKIP won one seat while losing another, and thus failed to increase its strength in the House of Commons beyond a single MP. Even as the third largest electoral force in British politics, the party’s recent and decisive defeat in the Oldham West and Royton by-election dampened any enthusiastic predictions of an imminent shift in the party-political culture of Albion. Meanwhile, faux-conservatives in Canada have been vanquished by the son of an iconic ’60s progressive statesman, New Zealand’s conservative government has assimilated leftist policies for the sake of perceived electoral ‘relevance’, less than impressive candidates for the US Republican presidential elections have been consistently overshadowed by an outsider whose political future remains hotly debated, and Australia’s maverick Senator Cory Bernardi, despite being widely popular among core constituencies of the popular centre-right, remains largely isolated form his governing party’s power centre (for now).
Conversely, the recent elections in Poland have seen the literal eviction of all explicitly leftist parties from its houses of parliament, ushering in a new era in which ex- and post-communists have been wholly ejected from the country’s executive and lawmaking branches for the first time in history. The President and Premier (Andrzej Duda and Beata Szydło respectively) have wasted no time in preparing sweeping reforms, appointments and changes to the administrative sector, security apparatus and the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal, perhaps paving a way to a national renovation similar to that of its southern neighbour, Hungary.[1] With the earlier victory and consolidation of Budapest’s conservative government under Viktor Orbán, this represents an interesting trend towards a nationally assertive right at least in Central Europe, where a genuine third way seems to be gaining popular traction against the cultural imperialism of Brussels and the political imperialism of a revanchist Moscow.
Given the different social background to each of these electoral phenomena, immediate comparisons can only be superficial, necessarily reductionist and may therefore lead a policy analyst to error when attempting to devise a unified theory of how best to confront the political left at the ballot box. No such unified theory exists because local politics are always a function of the local people, their specific history and particular culture. However, glimmers of reactionary success anywhere across the turbulent social landscape of the West can illustrate that, to borrow from the parlance of the revolutionary agitators of decades past: another world – is indeed – possible.
