LONDON — Republicans can solely think about what it will really feel prefer to win 4 nationwide elections in a row — wielding govt and legislative energy for greater than a dozen years.
Franklin Roosevelt, who died early in his fourth presidential time period, had that type of tenure.
He used it to construct the trendy welfare state.
What might conservatives accomplish with a chance like that?
The reply from throughout the Atlantic is: not a lot, if Republicans make the errors Britain’s Conservative Get together has made since 2010.
That yr the Conservatives returned to energy after greater than a decade of Labour Get together dominance, although the Tories wanted assist from the UK’s third-largest occasion, the Liberal Democrats, to type a authorities.
The Tory-led coalition turned an outright Conservative majority in 2015, and though the occasion was diminished to only a legislative plurality after the 2017 election, the latest contest, in 2019, noticed the Conservatives win a commanding parliamentary margin of practically 50 seats.
Conservatives additionally gained the most important share of the favored vote that any occasion had taken because the 1979 election that made Margaret Thatcher prime minister.
But right now the Conservatives totally anticipate to lose the subsequent election — and what’s extra, a lot of them say they should.
The occasion’s issues hint proper again to the start of its present lease on energy.
David Cameron, prime minister from 2010 to 2016, needed the occasion to be one thing apart from what its voters demanded.
The voters needed Brexit.
Cameron allowed a referendum on Britain leaving the European Union however campaigned to stay in it.
An economically globalist, socially liberal Conservative Get together was Cameron’s dream: He was the prime minister who gave Britain same-sex marriage.
It was a dream that meant socially liberal voters would have three events to select from — Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems — and social conservatives would have none.
Cameron hoped to attraction to younger voters and concrete professionals, and the GOP additionally wants to enhance its margins with these teams.
However Cameron’s try and outflank the opposite events with homosexual marriage failed as a result of the identical younger Britons and educated urbanites that social liberalism was supposed to draw had been repulsed by the financial nationalism of the Conservative Get together’s base voters.
There are far fewer social conservatives in Britain than there are in America.
However what good did it do Cameron’s occasion to jot down them off?
And solely with the utmost reluctance did the Conservatives try and ship what financial nationalists requested of them.
Cameron resigned after the Brexit referendum, merely to get replaced by one other Tory chief, Theresa Could, who had additionally opposed Brexit.
Not till the occasion lastly embraced Brexit wholeheartedly with Boris Johnson as chief did it reap the electoral rewards of being on the favored facet of the difficulty.
Johnson delivered Brexit — and the 2019 landslide.
However that was it: Johnson had no different populist playing cards to play past Brexit and his larger-than-life, virtually Trump-like persona.
With out Brexit, Boris Johnson was simply one other David Cameron, socially liberal and extra occupied with inexperienced rules than blue-collar jobs.
Johnson imposed strict COVID lockdowns — then got here beneath fireplace for violating the restrictions himself.
If Johnson didn’t know the place to take populism after Brexit, the occasion as a complete had completely no thought the place to go after the COVID scandal toppled Boris.
The occasion ever so briefly made Liz Truss prime minister, hoping she could be one other Thatcher.
However Thatcher had been a social conservative in addition to a tax-cutter, and when markets reacted badly to Truss, she had nothing to fall again on — not populism, financial nationalism or social conservatism.
Now Rishi Sunak is the Conservative prime minister, not as a result of he has any robust right-of-center philosophy however reasonably as a result of he lacks one: He’s simply acceptable sufficient to sufficient of the occasion’s factions. He’s everybody’s second alternative.
And so, predictably, his occasion is ready to be the second alternative on the subsequent election, with Labour retaking energy not on account of its personal deserves however as a result of the Tories stand for nothing and have succeeded in subsequent to nothing.
The GOP faces the identical issues and, until it learns from the Tories’ follies, the identical destiny.
One distinction is that personally liberal Republicans generally have the smarts to ship what socially conservative voters need — Donald Trump is a living proof.
However Republicans, together with Trump, are in peril of winding up like Boris Johnson in the event that they merely react to populism and nationalism, as a substitute of charting a future past voters’ current discontents.
The Tories handled Brexit like the top of the story, when actually it was simply starting.
Social conservatism and one thing like populism are the place to begin for right-leaning politics right now.
That doesn’t imply forgetting what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher received proper or ignoring the demographics of the long run.
But it surely signifies that conservatives should first do the job they’re elected to do — after which do extra.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Fashionable Age: A Conservative Evaluate.
