Maybe a Republican has a chance to become governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. But probably not. Of the two Republicans battling for their party’s nomination, one is an unimpressive county sheriff who speaks in the dullest of Republican slogans, and the other is Steve Hilton, whose campaign tract Califailure is badly written, poorly argued, lazily researched, barely edited, and entirely uninspiring.

Hilton’s inability to write an inspiring political tract was an odd discovery, because his most prominent role in British politics was doing strategy and communications for David Cameron. Since then, he has remade himself as a Fox News commentator, and now has designs on the governorship. Califailure, then, has taken on new importance since its publication in March.

Not only is it totally unserious as an analysis of the Democrats’ bad policies, it also fails as political messaging. It’s a book written to exercise the emotions of Hilton’s Fox News audience, but a message designed for the geriatric ideologues and fantasists who watch Fox News is not going to break the Democratic Party’s death-grip on California politics. It will do little to help people truly understand the policy disasters that have befallen California, and it will persuade few California voters who aren’t already Republicans to vote against Democratic rule. What Califailure will mainly do is convince faithful Fox viewers in Tennessee and Colorado and Michigan that the cartoon portrait of California they get on Fox News is the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s closer to the truth than a cartoon portrait should be, but it’s still a cartoon portrait.

You can see Hilton’s role as a talking head taking over his duties as an author in the table of contents of Califailure. After a short chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton goes on a run of nine chapters whose titles are words that will resonate as incendiary insults with Fox News viewers: “Elitism”, “Narcissism”, “Maoism”, “Climatism”, “Socialism”, “Bureaucratism”, “Compassionism”, “Cronyism”, and “Incompetism”. For those words that aren’t already recognized “-isms” (unlike Maoism and Socialism), Hilton affixes “-ism” to them to indicate that these aren’t just governing tendencies or pathologies but full-blown “ideologies” of their own. For example, the Democrats who run California aren’t just incompetent. They have turned incompetence into a belief system. Thus “Incompetism”. Translating the stubborn pathologies of California’s Democratic governance into discrete and conscious systems of belief serves Hilton’s interest as a Fox News commentator, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the underlying forces of political idiocy that afflict the state.

Take “Elitism”. If you remember what happened in California during Covid, and you have a feel for Hilton’s way with a political message, you can guess where his “Elitism” chapter is heading: it’s heading out for an expensive dinner at the French Laundry. The French Laundry is the famous Wine Country restaurant (three Michelin stars) where, in November 2020, Gavin Newsom and his wife were joined by rich friends and powerful colleagues to celebrate Newsom’s 50th birthday. Even as he was demanding that California residents wear masks when they were inside stores and other public buildings, and limiting California restaurants to outdoor dining, Newsom and his party dined maskless and indoors.

I suppose this is an example of elitism, and the fancy-restaurant destination, as well as Newsom’s status as a pretty-boy scion of a rich and politically connected family, make it a satisfying reason to reach for your pitchfork. But the fact that powerful people think the rules they apply to others don’t apply to them is a fairly generic lesson of politics. Power corrupts, even when it’s attained by popular vote, even in places that aren’t California. Hilton is just rabble-rousing here, eliciting familiar tones from his bell, cueing readers to froth in the clinically predicted ways.

A more telling example — also dating from the lockdown era — appears near the end of the “Elitism” chapter. Hilton points out that expensive private schools, such as those attended by Newsom’s own children, were holding regular in-person instruction while “public”, government-run schools were still doing online instruction, holding classes via Zoom session. “So why didn’t he insist that public schools educating the majority of California’s students open for in-person instruction, and not just the schools attended by his children and the other children of the elite?” He doesn’t answer this question. He takes it to answer itself. And the answer is the title of the chapter in which it appears: “Elitism”. People in the elite like Gavin Newsom just take themselves to be better than the rest of us, and so they get to follow different rules. It’s an ideology.

More from this author

Will AI drones fill the DOGE void?

By Matt Feeney

But a much better, much more concrete and parsimonious, explanation for why public schools persisted with phony video schooling, in which kids didn’t learn anything, is the strength of teachers’ unions. Teachers at public schools are unionized. Teachers at private schools generally aren’t unionized. Unions took a maximalist view of the Covid risk their members faced. This was not reasonable, from either an educational or a public health standpoint, but from the standpoint of the institutional game that teachers’ unions are always playing, it was totally comprehensible. It’s what you’d expect.

The challenge for a book about the many failures of California governance is not to find the best insult for teachers’ unions. It’s to understand why teachers’ unions have so much power that they can force a disastrous pandemic policy onto students and their families with no resistance, indeed with the full complicity of the other major powers in state politics. The answer is not mysterious. Local teachers’ unions are members of the California Education Association (CEA), and the CEA is one of the most powerful forces in California politics. Since the CEA basically sets its own agenda within the state Democratic party, and since that party has a monopoly of power in the state, the CEA can pursue its favored policies enviably free of electoral or institutional constraints. In other words, the so-called elitism in Hilton’s private school example is entirely downstream of the power of unionized public school teachers, which is entirely downstream of the fact that Democrats have total control of state government.

This line of causality — from the Democrats’ unopposed power to the state’s pathological governance — is pretty obvious and direct in the case of the CEA. In other areas Hilton covers, the connections are a touch more subtle, but they’re far from obscure. For instance, in his “Compassionism” chapter he describes some of the now-familiar examples of progressive officials in California seeming to favor chaos and crime over mundane public order maintained by police officers. Hilton uses “Compassionism” to describe a vague mental condition — an ideology, yes, but also a sort of mental illness, in his treatment — from which California progressives supposedly suffer that leads them to tolerate chaos and oppose measures to control it.

But the destructive and weirdly selective compassion expressed in the state’s Democratic policies — summoned for the criminal targets of police power but withheld from the victims of these criminals — reflects internal political dynamics predictable in one-party rule, in which the strongest pressures are applied from the ideological fringe. I’ve described this phenomenon as it affects my own city of Oakland — progressive politicians facing no electoral constraints from their Right, only the threat of shaming from activists to their Left for their lack of ideological purity. Both social status and political survival in this sort of one-party governance depend on submitting to puritanical ideologues. At some point in the moral bidding wars that drive progressive politics, it becomes socially and politically treacherous for even sensible officials to concede, for example, that the police should enforce the law.

The strange thing about Califailure is that, though it begins with a chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton doesn’t use this basic electoral fact to frame his treatment of California’s bad governance. For the sake of his TV audience, he treats his various pathologies — “Elitism”, “Compassionism”, and so on — as independent variables, freestanding causes that explain the bad governance. But he can’t decide how they explain it. He mostly seems to think that progressives just inherently have these “diseases”, as if one is drawn to Leftist politics as symptomatic expression of clinical Cronyism or whatever, but sometimes he suggests that they take on these mental illnesses willingly. “The pathology of Narcissism,” he writes, “is tailor-made for an elite class that believes its own utopian fantasies can replace… mundane reality….” Tailor-made? On one hand, this is terrible writing, another instance of the crude, sloganeering prose that makes up Califailure. On the other hand, it reveals the trick Hilton is trying and failing to pull off, using the polemical language of sickness but also wanting the sick people he’s talking about to be fully deserving of his scorn because they’ve somehow, consciously chosen their diseases, as a man chooses the cut of his suit. Narcissism is a mental illness and an ideology. Compassionism is an ideology and a mental illness.

Suggested reading

Gavin Newsom versus the Nimbys

By Richard Hanania

In either case, Hilton treats the excesses of progressivism — his nine silly “-isms” — as independent causes of California’s problems, which allows him to yell about them as he yells about things on TV. But, again, these excesses are better understood as effects of one-party rule. In this context, a party’s extremists hold a potent advantage in negotiation and persuasion precisely because of their extremism. When there’s serious inter-party competition, though, those extremists lose this structural advantage. Faced with electoral competition, party leaders are more likely to resist the influence of purists and ideologues whose favored policies alienate moderate voters.

We Californians don’t get to see this happen in state politics these days, but we have gotten recent glimpses of it as our Governor, who seems to be readying a 2028 run for President, reacts to the demands of national politics, where elections are competitive and moderate voters matter. Indeed, my city has enjoyed direct benefits from this altered political logic. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want national voters imagining rampant crime and homelessness when they hear his name, and so he’s made several high-profile moves in recent years that have angered the Left-wing of his party. Among these moves was dispatching a large contingent from state law enforcement to aid the Oakland Police Department — shrunken and “defunded” by extreme progressives on our city council – as it struggled to fight a devastating crime wave. This worked, and, in working, it showed electoral competition to be a healthy antidote to fanatic-driven policymaking in our one-party city.

But why is there no electoral competition? Why do Republican candidates no longer have a chance in statewide elections? If California’s absurd governance is an effect of Democratic control, shouldn’t a book about that absurdity direct a little curiosity at the other party’s performance through these years of dysfunction? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. Hilton assigns no blame to the Republicans for their own weakness. Instead, he blames the Democrats. His “One Party Rule” chapter briefly examines the effects of Democratic dominance on Republicans, and he makes a pretty good case that the Democrats have gamed the supposedly non-partisan system for drawing districts for the State Assembly, in the classic manner of partisan gerrymandering. If districts were drawn in a truly non-partisan manner, he points out, the Assembly should be around 40% Republican, reflecting the usual Republican vote in statewide elections. Instead, Republicans hold only 22% of Assembly seats.

This is a fair point. But why should the Republican share of the state electorate be capped at 40%, especially when Democratic rule has made the state into a national laughing stock? Why can’t the Republicans grab enough voters disgusted with the crime and the dysfunction and the overall idiocy to make statewide elections competitive again?

Hilton directs no criticism or even advice or encouragement towards his fellow Republicans on this matter. And these voters exist. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state’s Republican Party is more ideologically uniform than its Democratic Party. In other words, conservative Democrats are much more numerous than liberal Republicans. But there’s nothing in Califailure about winning over those ambivalent Democrats from their malfunctioning party.

He could have made his book a true provocation to Democratic voters frustrated with their party by focusing on the self-satirizing details of progressive governance and messaging, which are generally hidden from everyday people precisely because there’s no viable opposition party to broadcast these things. That is, instead of the few brief passages he devotes to the specifics of progressive policymaking (especially in his worthwhile “Bureaucratism” chapter), he could have filled his entire book with such things in their infuriating and irrational specifics — the petty, hostile, relentless regulation and taxation of small businesses; the rich payouts to Left-wing NGOs that work to perpetuate rather than to mitigate their pet disasters; the proud non-enforcement of basic criminal law; the unimaginable waste of environmentalist dreams like our bullet-train-to-nowhere, and progressives’ crippling efforts to make us the greenest country in the world when we’re not even a country.

Hilton touches on these things, but his research is lazy and haphazard. He’s easily distracted. He’s more interested in issues that agitate his national audience of Fox watchers than with the concrete troubles of us beleaguered Californians. He can’t help dredging up worked-over culture-war tropes, so that you can forget sometimes he’s even writing about California. His “Narcissism” chapter includes a long rant about the activist neologism “LatinX”, in which he rebuts the need for such a term with a hilariously earnest and misplaced digression on Spanish grammar. It’s as if he’s seeking relief from the shallowness of his own book through a fantasy of being a linguistics professor. His “Maoism” chapter is consumed with Stanford University and the authoritarian Leftism of its administrators. Stanford is technically located in California, but the maddening things happening there are happening at every elite university in the US. These campus issues are national issues. They illustrate nothing about California’s failed governance.

Indeed the focus on rarefied Stanford hints at a sort of elitism in Steve Hilton’s worldview, and in the ways of the state Republican Party he hopes to lead. This elitism, ironically, mirrors that of the state’s ruling Democrats. Just as the Democrats’ insulation from electoral competition allows them to indulge the elitist, utopian fantasies of their activist base, the Republicans’ impotence in this competition enables a similar dynamic, in which ideological purity and fidelity to elites in the national Republican party displace hard thinking and compromise about bread-and-butter issues that affect everyday Californians. Once you decide that statewide victory is off the table, you can let go of difficult, impure politicking and settle into the easier business of placating activists who vote in primaries, parroting the themes of Republican celebrities in Washington, and playing up abstract culture-war fights.

As Mike Madrid, former political director for the state Republican party, said in 2023, “The Republican Party is really not trying to be a viable political party anymore in California. It’s kind of content being this small, regional, marginalized social movement, and for the moment that’s what it is, and that’s probably what it’ll be for a very long time.” You can see how this arrangement would suit individuals at the core of the Republican party, as it suits those on Democratic side. Those people are already where they want to be, enjoying the quantum of reliable influence they’ve been given in our unhealthy equilibrium.

And, in the composition of his dashed-off book, you can see Steve Hilton bidding to secure his own place in this arrangement. Nothing in his book suggests he’s serious about actually winning the statewide election he’s made himself a side-character in. Despite the book’s title, Califailure doesn’t read like something addressed to California voters at all, who will find its fixations only occasionally and vaguely connected to the concrete problems of their state. He’s talking to nationwide consumers of partisan media, who relish their Schadenfreude about liberal California and like to have it reinforced periodically from their TV sets. He’ll still be talking to them after the next election, and still as someone who doesn’t hold political office, and, if his ridiculous book is any indication, he’s perfectly content with that.

Now Trump is trying to scare California, sparking fresh fears about abuse of power. Yet Moltani also voted for Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor seen on the Right as an emblem of progressive elitism, the figure at the center of the President’s explosive confrontation with the state. So, like millions of his fellow countrymen, this Sikh entrepreneur highlights both the key role of illicit migration in shaping the United States and the unpredictable electoral churn in Western democracies as populism reshapes politics.

Moltani, though, doesn’t recognize the shaven-headed man with a British accent who has just interviewed him about retail theft and soaring energy costs. It’s Steve Hilton — the former advertising man who tried to modernize the British Tory party before fleeing to the US in 2012 to become a Fox News presenter and Trump cheerleader. Now, in his latest reincarnation, he is campaigning to become the Republican governor of a state dominated for two decades by the Democrats.

Hilton’s campaign feels a long way from the Cameron days when he was talking about hugging hoodies. Quite the contrary, he has recently been to Los Angeles where he filmed campaign videos about the city’s “tense and menacing situation” of civil unrest. Trump is provocatively targeting anti-ICE “troublemakers”, though Hilton claims to be baffled by journalists seeing this as an issue revolving around their President.

“The real story,” he tells me, “is the total inability of California’s government to protect people, communities and small businesses from the violent, activist-driven mob. No one is ever held accountable.” He abhors the vandalism and destruction of small businesses that has taken place. And he describes the collapse of civilized standards of life in Los Angeles angrily: “the overwhelming smell of piss and shit everywhere you go that’s become normal.”

This “obsession” with Trump is absurd, he claims, given the way America’s second city is being allowed to collapse into “squalor and decay”. The real questions, he says, surround Newsom’s failure to stop protests escalating out of control. “Instead you see how our authorities seem incapable — or unwilling — to control violent criminal behavior. Why didn’t Newsom call in the National Guard immediately? Instead, he was issuing pathetic political statements, pandering to the Left, to the activists who the Democrats really represent, rather than protecting the law-abiding majority. It feels like a civilizational collapse.”

Once Hilton pushed claims about “Broken Britain” under New Labour; today, it is “civilizational collapse” in California under the Democrats. These are themes I heard repeatedly during the three days I spent on the campaign trail with him as a multitude of tangled issues around immigration and violence kept cropping up.

It might seem that he has embarked on a quixotic quest — especially when his fight could pitch him against former vice president Kamala Harris. After all, this state is the bedrock of American liberalism. But even Newsom admits the Democrats’ brand has become “toxic”, as bureaucracy drives out businesses, the high cost of living forces out families, and growing encampments of mentally ill and addicted citizens expose the failure of progressive politics. But given that Trump managed to flip 10 of California’s 58 counties last year, and with voters backing a measure making it easier to prosecute theft and drug crimes, Hilton’s “positive populism” might find a fair hearing. But success will depend on his navigating the endless waves of political turbulence stirred by the President while persuading people such as the gas station boss in Huron that he is a suitable person to run the world’s fourth biggest economy.

Hilton is leaning into the hustle, deploying skills honed on prime-time television. “The next revolution is going to be the California revolution,” he tells a meeting of farmers and funders, referencing the name of his former Fox News show. “People say it’s impossible — you’ll never have anyone but Democrats. Bullshit. They want us to give up, they want us to be demoralized, they want us not to fight back. I’m here to tell you I’m sick of this. I moved here with my family in 2012. This is my home. I raised my family here; I started a business here. I am here because I love this place and I’m sick of seeing the soul, the spirit of California, being crushed.”

His life story is sold as part of his pitch for the state’s top job. He talks about his Hungarian immigrant parents, his time in American politics, his teaching at Stanford, his pride in becoming a US citizen four years ago. He jokes about his accent — although one admirer at a fund-raising dinner confided to me that it makes every Brit sound smart to them. Driving around the state in an orange truck emblazoned with his name and “Golden Again” campaign slogan, this unlikely candidate gamely dons a Stetson, clambers on a horse at a ranch and poses for the endless selfies that are now routine for anyone in the public eye. He seems to easily embrace his new role as an American politician, his energy never flagging over the endless interviews and dinners.

Hilton rides in a truck emblazoned with his ‘Golden Again’ campaign slogan. Credit: Ian Birrell 

Hilton’s core campaign message is simple: that his home state symbolizes an American dream that has curdled under the one-party rule of hard-Left Democrats. His hatred of red tape and visceral disdain for an overbearing state is familiar to anyone who has worked with him — as I did in the early days of Cameron’s regime. As one mutual colleague once told me, outsiders would see a liberal Tory with his T-shirts and bare feet, yet he was often the most devout ideologue pushing Right-wing radicalism in a coalition government. Cameron sniped in his memoir that Hilton’s ideas were “one part brilliant to several parts bonkers, the latter of which included cutting the civil service by 70%”. When I mention this, he laughs and says it was really 90% — making Elon Musk look like a statist wimp.

There are plenty of targets for him in California, where an expanding thicket of red tape has led the state to be deemed the worst in the country for doing business as well as having the highest poverty rates. “It’s bottom of every list you want to be the top of and top of every list you want to be the bottom of,” Hilton intones frequently.

In these initial weeks of his campaign for an election 17 months away, Hilton is criss-crossing the state to reach beyond Fox News viewers — the channel is watched by about two million Americans daily — and establish himself as a serious contender. He travels from roundtables in San Francisco to massive farms in the agriculture belt. In a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, I listen as his audience complains about rent controls, vacant properties in the city and newly arrived migrants milking the welfare system. In the farmland, they bemoan the water restrictions and labor laws impacting their efforts.

It is often forgotten that California’s agricultural sector is the biggest in America with all its almonds, cows, grapes, pistachios, and strawberries — all helping the state overtake Japan in economic size but all the while heavily reliant on migrant workers. During a visit to the world’s biggest cheese-making plant in Hilmar, Hilton questioned the use of undocumented migrant labor, and asked why they could not attract more American workers. “It’s a harder job than most people are used to — cows have to be milked daily,” replied one man. Another claimed that Californians were deterred when they can collect $50,000 a year in state and federal benefits. “We have able-bodied Americans living off the government and we need to reduce that safety net to the people that truly need it,” said Matt Budine, the president of Progressive Dairy, a consultancy involved with 13% of US cows.

Yet Budine was skeptical about Republican claims that these jobs would be filled by local people even if they paid six-figure salaries and improved facilities in fields. Most Americans, he tells me, have been “conditioned” to look down on such work, and it would take decades to change such attitudes. “If the migrants are kicked out and it becomes problematic for dairy producers, then we will put in robotic dairy milking systems — big carousels that only take four workers for 8,000 cows versus four workers for 1,000 cows. The jobs go away. It costs more money.”

What about his attitude to climate change? After all, he once voted Green and was the architect of the Tory slogan “vote blue, go green”. He bats aside any suggestion of shifting views, insisting there is a big difference between the green agenda of environmental protection and the Left’s “monomaniacal” zealotry on climate that has led to California’s energy prices being the highest in the US. At one point he jumps out of the truck to shoot a video showing a big solar farm sitting by tomato and melon fields. “That will do very well,” he says, walking back to the vehicle. “It’s just so ridiculous ripping out crops for this. It’s all done by private equity.” It’s the perfect example, he says, of how “insane” Democrat policies end up harming the environment while setting undeliverable targets that hurt local interests. It’s not green, he says. It’s stupid.

It is odd watching Hilton in this latest incarnation: a Republican candidate campaigning to save California. The sun-kissed state does have profound problems, yet traveling alongside him much of it seems far from ruined. And I am unpersuaded by his arguments for Brexit or Trump, let alone his claim that these two populist movements might further his ideals that have not altered over the past 20 years.

Certainly, a Republican victory in California next year would be the ultimate rebuke for the desperate Democrats. And while it seems unlikely, only a fool would make predictions amid the turbulence of our current moment. And now this state of 40 million people — with its veneer of progressive politics and great wealth masking chronic problems — has been sent spiraling by the President into the center of a bitter showdown over America’s future. “It’s now or never for California,” says Hilton. “We’ve got the best shot of winning for a long time because I think people sense we can’t go on like this.” On this point at least, he is surely right.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

More from this author

What if we gave children a vote?

By Polly Mackenzie

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

Suggested reading

Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

Suggested readings

There's no such thing as Left versus Right

By Peter Franklin

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

More from this author

The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

More from this series

Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

Suggested reading

Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

More from this author

Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

More from this series

As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

Well, perhaps not –  if you listen to some of the populists themselves. Steve Hilton, previously a key advisor to David Cameron, is one of them, and he has emerged in recent years as an increasingly consequential figure as a result of his weekly American television programme, The Next Revolution. His latest book, Positive Populism, presents a compelling argument for such a revolt, and gives American populists a solid agenda with which to launch their effort.

Hilton emigrated to the US in 2012 and his book is addressed to his new countrymen, advising Americans how to take their country back and reclaim power. While the book is sprinkled with specifically American references, to the Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Liberty, for example, its powerful analysis is rooted in something that transcends national identity. Hilton’s populism is about understanding people in all their facets, as workers and as consumers, but most importantly as parents, neighbours, and friends.

Further reading

Why I helped Trump kill the old Republican Party

By Frank Buckley

Populism is gaining strength across the Western world precisely because the elites who rule us no longer view us in those roles, or in that way. Hilton’s book decries Western elites for viewing people as things to be moved about for their benefit. That is what underlies their commitment to free markets, free trade, and free movement of peoples. Modern elites know what ancient patricians and medieval aristocrats knew: if the people can be denied political power, those who have domination of financial and intellectual power can rule without restraint for their own selfish benefit. That is why the elites prefer rule by international institutions which are not directly elected by the people, such as the EU or the UN. And that, according to Hilton, is why the Davos set must be dethroned.

Hilton’s populism is profoundly egalitarian. It rests on the idea that all of us deserve a shot at living decent lives in decent communities. That’s why he contends that economic security should trump aggregate economic growth as a political value and, if providing for the former reduces the latter, then so be it.

It’s also why he dedicates nearly a third of the book to reinvigorating local communities, not normally something attributed to populist demands. Hilton understands what many in the elites don’t, that populism is at heart a demand for self-determination and human dignity. That requires economic and political reforms so that real power rests with the many, not with the few.

This emphasis allows populism to strike back at the heart of the argument that it is inherently anti-democratic. In the ancient world, the many would often strike back at the few by centralising power in a monarch with sufficient power and military strength to destroy the power of the landed few.

Further reading

Adventures in Trumpland

By Ian Birrell

Elites echo this ancient concern by alleging that populists will entrench themselves in power by controlling the media and suppressing political disagreement. That’s the essence of their claims about Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s PiS party, and is also regularly part of the vitriol levied against President Trump.

Hilton considers this to be a canard.  He makes the case for restrictions on migration and trade, especially trade with China. He rightly sees China as the true anti-democratic force in the modern world, and his most radical proposal is for the US to place an economic embargo on China, eliminating all trade with and investment in the Middle Kingdom.

But his strong commitment to decentralising government power, by giving states and cities more exclusive power to govern and by giving individuals more market power to shop for government-funded services, shows that defeating the few does not go hand in hand with enslaving the many. In fact, true populism requires exactly the opposite.

Hilton buttresses his argument with personal examples. He is the child of Hungarian refugees who fled Communism during the Cold War. He has seen close hand what tyrants can do – they have killed his family’s friends who sought freedom and stripped his grandmother of her job to punish her for her daughter’s flight. Giving any government such power is anathema to him, and the fact that such a government might be nominally ‘populist’ does not change the underlying evil it would represent.

Further reading

What the Right gets wrong when the Left goes nuts

By Peter Franklin

As a native-born American, I found some of Hilton’s recommendations and beliefs politically naïve. The American Right is defined by an interpretation of the American Revolution that resists the exercise of all government power, not simply an elite-dominated centralised power. The American Left, meanwhile, remains wedded to the view that private power is suspect, and that only government provision of services can ensure that all people are treated equally.

Against these twin legacies, it is extremely difficult to see how contemporary American politics can embrace his agenda, especially his call for universal, government-funded health care delivered entirely by private actors. Such a move would slaughter both parties’ sacred cows, and those cows are precious enough that neither party will willingly sacrifice them in a bi-partisan compromise.

But it’s entirely possible Hilton sees that. His television show is not called The Next Revolution for nothing. It may very well be that electing a populist president is not enough. Americans may have to revolt against both established parties and create a new one to really take back control of their lives. If so, count me in – and Hilton’s book would be a great foundation for that new party’s platform.

From the same author

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

In this interview for UnHerd, Hilton explains how these threads come together in his philosophy of ‘positive populism’. This is the belief that the benefits of modern capitalism have to made available to everyone not just the fortunate elite. Though sceptical of the ability of the current crop of populists to find workable solutions to the problems they identify, Hilton predicts that their failure won’t result in a return to establishment values, but new forms of populism. It’s not for nothing that his new show for Fox News is called The Next Revolution.