How Aristocratic Excesses Infected Conservatives

By the middle of the first decade of this century, what the Greek historian Polybius called aristocratic excesses were commonplace in Western democracies. Being both democratic (by giving all citizens the right to vote) and aristocratic (by concentrating power in the hands of a few), representative democracy risks both democratic and aristocratic excesses. But because it has historically coexisted with a form of economic organization of capitalism that creates large-scale inequalities, and because it has been undermined since the twentieth century by the rise of technocratic national and international institutions, it has long been vulnerable to the problem of aristocratic excesses.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the resulting dangers were largely obscured by the democratic triumphalism generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the reliance on finance-led economic growth and the EU’s moves to end national democratic political competition on some economic issues, notably pan-European migration, brought the problem of aristocratic excess to the forefront. In Europe, the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005 to the EU Constitutional Treaty shattered any presumption that European voters were comfortable with the drift of elected power. Then, the crisis of 2007–08 drew visceral lines between those who benefited from 21st-century global capitalism and those who paid its price. It also accelerated the already steep decline in homeownership rates.

“There is a scenario in which the most counterproductive legacy of the Conservatives is yet to come.”

From the moment he took over as party leader in December 2005, David Cameron showed himself to be ill at ease in a political world where the problem of aristocratic excess had to be contained. Indeed, he much preferred that the Conservatives no longer need to rebuild a cross-class coalition by playing on the social conservatism and Euroscepticism of working-class Tory voters, rather than on deindustrialisation, the toxic legacy of the Thatcher era. True, the 2010 Conservative manifesto paid lip service to the idea that there should be no return to finance-led growth in the post-crisis world. But in practice, Cameron largely assumed that the party could govern as if the relationship between rulers and ruled had not changed since Blair’s heyday. When he proposed changes to planning laws, it was to facilitate expansion, not new housing. If there was a strategy to revive the economy, it was Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s attempt to secure Chinese investment to address Britain’s declining infrastructure and make the City of London a financier of China’s Belt and Road project, just a few years before Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 plan prompted all Western states to rediscover industrial policy.

It was this same refusal to see how broken consent to the Union was that allowed Cameron to let the Scottish government campaign for independence for months in 2014 before making a panicked vow to deliver more devolution, as if Westminster were indifferent to the outcome. Saved by Alex Salmond’s failure to find a solution to the nationalists’ monetary problem in a post-eurozone crisis EU, Cameron was then lucky to find an SNP that was popular but not materially capable of delivering independence. Now, with only slightly more votes than in 2010, the Conservatives could eliminate the Liberal Democrats who are too lax about the prospect of Labour-SNP cooperation in Westminster without having to address the medium-term existential problem facing the party.

Cameron seemed fully aware, from the outset, of what had changed since the 1990s only in relation to the EU. Judging that sooner or later the UK’s semi-detached position would be put to the democratic test, Cameron made several attempts to restore EU membership before betting on an early referendum. But Cameron, and indeed the entire British political class, had no idea how to operate in this kind of politics where strategic difficulties were directly confronted rather than evaded. Having bet on his own powers of persuasion, Cameron then abandoned all notions of prudence by banning contingency arrangements for an exit vote while promising to implement a decision he had no intention of following through on. The culmination of this failed assessment was Osborne’s attempt to terrify voters by threatening a punitive budget to appease financial markets.

Then came Theresa May, whose honeymoon period began because she seemed able to subordinate her own personality to the new political reality. For a few fleeting weeks in the 2017 election campaign, her promise to deliver Brexit by staying in the EU seemed to finally restore a broad cross-class coalition to the party. But when the spectacular failures of the second half of that campaign revealed the near-total absence of Conservative voters not only among millennials but also among the youngest members of Generation X, the specter of medium-term demographic extinction began to loom.