The Bear’s Lair: The apocalyptic danger of the center-right

Western civilization has declined a long way since its 1991 triumph with the fall of most of Communism. The hard left bears little responsibility for this decline; they have had only a modest share of power. Even the center-left does not bear all the responsibility, their tenure has included some decent governments such as that of Bill Clinton in the United States, and even bad center-left governments, such as Tony Blair’s or Joe Biden’s, offered hope of redemption through an opposition victory. Most of the damage, which has ranged from decline almost to cataclysm, came from governments of the center-right. It is the slimy center-right, opportunistic and unreliable, who must be fought for civilization to succeed.

Whether a political system is first-past-the-post or multi-party, the center-right has a disproportionate share of power and plays a malign role in thwarting genuinely hopeful initiatives. In a two-party system, the center-right acts as a drag on the right-wing party, blocking its initiatives and watering down its policies. If as in the U.S. House of Representatives currently, the right-wing party’s majority is small through leftist gerrymandering and outright election fraud (e.g. in California), dissident nominally center-right representatives such as Mike Lawler (R.-NY) have a grossly disproportionate power. Whereas staunch rightists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.-GA) or Thomas Massie (R.-KY) have nowhere to go when they disagree with a party initiative, the Lawlers of this world can and do frequently destroy their party’s initiatives entirely by allying with the leftist opposition party to negate the right’s modest majority. This huge hold on the levers of power also gives them disproportionate say when picking a Speaker, an extremely important office in the U.S. system. Even though the vast majority of the party can want a strong conservative such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R.-OH) the Lawlers can force the party into the weak-tea Rep. Mike Johnson (R.-LA) with consequential damage to the success of the party’s initiatives.

In a multi-party system, the center-right can be even more damaging, by refusing to work with the right-wing party on spurious grounds, instead allying with the left to pursue socialism and block dissent. The Austrian Freedom Party appears to have fought off such an attempt, which blocked it from reaping the reward of its September 2024 election victory; the German AfD looks likely to be blocked from power after the next election by even an above average leader of the CDU-CSU coalition, Friedrich Merz. Merz seems to prefer yet another interminable extension of Germany’s perpetual socialist government (Angela Merkel was no conservative, or even capitalist), even though that renewal will bring only further erosion of Germany’s industrial strength through environmentalist lunacy.

The center-right is dangerous in three respects. First, it weakens and often blocks important right-wing initiatives that could push policy in a better direction or at least block it from moving leftwards. Second, center-right politicians can often be foolishly seduced into voting to major left-wing initiatives, usually by being thrown a minor legislative bone for their district that is of absolutely no long-term importance. Third and most important, when voters come to vote, center-right politicians, being members of the rightmost electable party, provide the electorate with no alternative to their feebleness.

The 2024 British General Election was an example of this. The Conservatives had achieved very little in their 14 years in power, and after “Squishy Rishi” Sunak’s intraparty coup were a thoroughly unattractive alternative, but there was no possibility of voting a more robust approach into power. Accordingly, the electorate, to punish “Squishy Rishi” and his minions, voted the Labour party into power, even though the Labour party’s policies were even worse than Squishy Rishi’s. The electorate is now fated to suffer accelerating political and economic decline under Keir Starmer until 2029, but this is Squishy Rishi’s fault, not that of the voters.

The historical list of center-right failures and betrayals is a long one. Sir Robert Peel was the first exemplar of the genre; his sudden conversion to Catholic Emancipation in 1829 split the Tory party and led to the unnecessary end of a fine tradition of government, while his Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 split the party again and produced a locked-in economic policy of unilateral free trade that over the next 90 years was to prove truly disastrous for Britain. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt’s intellectually nonsensical “progressivism” after his accidental accession to the Presidency on the murder of the great William McKinley split his own Republican party, let in the Democrats and led to funny-money big-government “reforms” that have bedeviled us to this day.

The list of center-right destroyers of British power and prosperity is a long one, from Benjamin Disraeli nationalizing the tech sector through Arthur Balfour blocking Joe Chamberlain’s tariff campaign to John Major and the recent bunch of clowns essentially reversing all the reforms that Margaret Thatcher had painfully wheedled through. In the United States, notable lowlights were Dwight Eisenhower’s abandonment of traditional Republican policies and acquiescence to destructively high taxes through the Bush family’s multiple betrayals of their voters’ interests and beliefs. Germany too has suffered from the syndrome, with Helmut Kohl forcing post-communist East Germany into a woke socialist model and Angela Merkel’s Komsomol approach to economic policy being notable recent examples that have lowered Germany from Europe’s bastion to its invalid. In France Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac were notable examples, both of whom weakened France’s position in the world.

As Britain has witnessed since 1990, center-right parties that block the right can produce a left-wing monopoly, that inevitably drifts further left if it is faced with no serious opposition. Quite often, institutional barriers to better government are put in place such as the British Conservative Campaign Headquarters’ control over candidate selection, which since 2007 has resulted in a steady elimination of the right from the nominally “conservative” party. The EU bureaucracy has also become a doughty protector of permanent left-wing rule, so Europe’s economy has since 2007 been locked in steady decline, with only the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe continuing to show growth. Climate change has also been used to lock in socialism, again with the acquiescence of the center-right; the modest evidence of global warming over 200 years has been used to push a plethora of dozy Stalinist policies, each more damaging than the last, with center-right leaders like Merkel in Germany and the 2010-24 fools in Britain promoting this Marxist garbage.

The solution is to elect genuinely right-wing governments, which solution electorates are gradually working out for themselves. In multi-party systems, if a center-right leader refuses to work with the right-wing party, he must be replaced – as has just happened in Austria and must happen in Germany if Merz is foolish. In two-party systems, either one party must be captured by an anti-establishment figure (as happened blessedly in 2016, after decades of Republican failure and decline since 1988, with the nomination and election of Donald Trump). If that solution is not available, as in Britain where all the right-wing leaders in the “Conservative” party were ousted by their constituencies at the 2024 election, then a new party must be formed, as has happened with “Reform” in Britain. Traditionally, such a new party would have little chance of electoral success for decades, but if the electorate’s anger is sufficient, there is hope of a quick electoral breakthrough. After all the Labour party achieved this in 1918-23 (in the opposite direction) after the electorate rightly rejected the Liberal party that had got them into the civilizational catastrophe of the First World War. The U.S. Republicans’ success in 1854-60 is another example.

Trump’s latest victory, assembling a new ethnic and class coalition to oust the status quo, and winning young voters through its mastery of social media such as TikTok, shows that it can be done. The motto for those wishing to accelerate this trend must be “pas d’ennemis a droite,” so extremists and eccentrics should be welcomed into a big tent. Conversely, they should regard new apparently attractive centrists with the deepest suspicion. The world does not need any more Boris Johnsons!

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)