Fake Conservatives and Status Quo Parties Are Failing in Britain and Around the Globe
Kurt Schlichter
9–11 minutes
The British Conservative Party, and I use the term “conservative” very, very loosely and solely because that is the actual name of the allegedly right-wing British party, is about to get destroyed in an election. And it should. It’s terrible. It’s conservative the way Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are, which is not conservative at all, and its target voters are tired of it. The Tories had a huge victory just a few years ago, a shattering triumph that turned previously Labour seats into Conservative ones. And, of course, the wets – that’s Brit for “RINO” - squandered the chance to re-Thatcherize Old Blighty. Now, the Reform Party, Nigel Farage’s populist crew, stands a chance of winning seats and could conceivably become the opposition party. This is important to Americans not because Britain is a particularly important power anymore – under the Conservatives, their military has shrunk to the point where the British army could fit comfortably within the Pasadena Rose Bowl – but because what happens over there shows what might have happened here but for Donald Trump and the populist movement taking over our Republican Party.
Some commentary describes this reversal of fortune for the conservatives as bucking the trend. After all, we see leftist parties failing all over the globe. The German leftists are about to lose the next round of elections while their allegedly hard-right party grows in popularity. The upcoming elections stand a significant chance of putting an allegedly hard-right government in power in France. Italy elected a right-wing government – their popular president was the one who had to wrangle Biden in when he wandered away at the G7. Trudeau’s communists in Canada are about as popular as a chancre sore at an orgy. And in America, it looks like our leftist party is about to lose to Donald Trump and his populist movement.
But it’s not correct to look situation at this in old-school liberal vs. conservative terms. What’s happening is not a move towards classic conservatism but a rejection of the status quo regardless of the label of the temporarily ruling party. The old parties on both sides become unresponsive to the needs of the people, instead taking diktats from Davos. In each of these countries, including our own, it’s an ossified, unresponsive, and exhausted ideology that’s being rejected in favor of a more energetic populist movement that is providing answers to the problems that the establishment parties refused to touch for fear of being called racist and not being invited to cocktail parties.
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/06/27/fake-conservatives-and-status-quo-parties-are-failing-in-britain-and-around-the-globe-n2640933
