This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive. Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with postliberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orbán, the leading European postliberal, has just lost power.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several postliberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, and nationalizing British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness — the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Up ahead looms a new postliberal political landscape, one in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

The neoliberal or hyperliberal era of metropolitan openness, starting in the Eighties, is best summed up in the saying that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights. There were some differences between center-left and center-right on the size of the state and levels of redistribution and immigration, but also a broad consensus on how to prosper.

Globalism in economics, and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But the new consensus brought many benefits. Most people became richer, and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower-income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more permeable elite than in the post-war period. (The 1957 Cabinet was entirely male and public school-educated, and more than half Etonian). The decline of the industrial working class meant many dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from this consensus, especially outside the greater Southeast, and their number grew after the crash of 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialization, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

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For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated in these decades. One of them is the further loss of religion. Strong traces of Christian belief still animate public and private life, but mass secularization has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews points out, the female domination of institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their provider role and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement rate.

There is a third big shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults, the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain, the post-1997 liberalization of immigration means that, today, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born. The white British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to white British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The 2016 Brexit vote, and the Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganized slap in the face to establishment. They were protests, not only by those who felt they had suffered the economic effects of hyperliberalism, but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from the big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked: imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote, a section of the political class tried to reverse the result. When the impasse was broken by Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Brexit was indeed done, but the two further promises, to reduce immigration and to start “leveling up” Britain — a direct response to the Brexit vote — were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026, we have shifted towards a new small-c conservative consensus, much of which even a Labour government is forced to adapt to. The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness, the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and this coalition’s new set of priorities: wanting national interest, and national citizen preference, more vigorously pursued; deep anxiety about free-riding, hence the need for tighter control of both immigration and spiraling public welfare; desire for more orderly neighborhoods; rejection of progressive excess; skepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the social base of the metropolitan era consensus, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC), but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealizable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces so many professional jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the Seventies, when what the academic Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation, but we have overshot and ended up with the bat tunnel-fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think harder about the gridlock that results from liberalism’s reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgment that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labor market (only four-in-10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialization, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defense, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarization, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the skepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights, constraints on power and value neutrality. Postliberal critics argue that it stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, is more militant and religious. Writers like Patrick Deneen regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves. The religious postliberals believe that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demand a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This is more pre-liberal than postliberal.

More mainstream postliberals prioritize the “common good”, but that begs the question of who defines it. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the chief UK variant of postliberalism, is more a vibe — Left on economics, Right on culture — than a political philosophy or policy program. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on it in societies with such diverse interests and values.

In today’s Britain, there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of US postliberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hardcore socialist economics and the quaint idea that the working class longs to return to the factories.

Another dead end is nostalgia for an overwhelmingly white Britain. This nostalgia is now found on the ethnonationalist fringe of the postliberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of remigration.

Of course, English ethnicity should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries, then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

The re-emergence of English ethnicity as a normal identity, after centuries of being submerged in a broader British or Imperial identity, is to be welcomed, not feared. And postliberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies, a critical mass of people sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in spirit, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the Forties and Fifties and the equalities revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for the appeal of postliberal ideas is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the related reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise — it is tempting to label it a spiritual one — that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels, but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” — or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism; they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the problem — rather than the recent marriage of economic neoliberalism and progressivism — opens the door to reactionary postliberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution: we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other moderate postliberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar point in his book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a reinvention of liberalism, but it’s one that overlaps with the kind of postliberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral deregulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about postliberalism as a course correction is seeing it as an attempt to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Liberalism, say postliberals, is parasitic on other forces to thrive: freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefited from factors that are now either absent or weakened: a growing population; rapidly rising incomes; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single, national media-led, public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the last war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, aging societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualized media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in politics badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from postliberal priorities, even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream debate.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorize as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism — a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism — has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans, but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the Left.
• Restoring authority to elected politicians.
• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.
• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.
• Recognition that money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction; family structure and upbringing matter too.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimizing the motherhood penalty, but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less exposure to the market in some key public utilities but more exposure in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to current Net Zero plans; ensure the lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritize national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivization of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich.
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small businesses.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralization in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting public investment and growth companies in left-behind areas, plus investing in local institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• Reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.
• Create more outlets for public-spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with a more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto, but it cuts across still-powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses only on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; the reluctance to rethink rights legislation even when it thwarts democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left, but the Right bloc would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as an electoral accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Farage tacks to the center, with Restore Britain nibbling at his Right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that can combine some of the productive, deregulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its history. The course correction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

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Today’s course correction requires nothing more from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for an effective democracy. As even the raffishly liberal Financial Times writer, Janan Ganesh, has recognized, liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

Historic liberalism is a sensibility as much as an idea or institution. It is built on reasonableness, open-mindedness, good-faith argument, and a willingness not to see opponents as enemies.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted, and some variants of postliberalism have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of social media algorithms, but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about size of the state and levels of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept this new, more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of “decent populist” parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethnonationalism. Rather than demonizing opponents as bigots or elitists, we need a new generation of politicians, on both the liberal and populist sides, who can speak across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century, huge challenges are now piling up. And the ability of politicians to manage them is made more difficult by an increasingly divided and demanding electorate. This explains Britain’s high turnover of prime ministers. If some strands of postliberalism are part of the problem, then the movement’s broader intuitions are a necessary part of the solution.

***

A longer version of this essay can be found at David Goodhart’s Substack, A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

This should not be a surprise. Human babies take a long time to reach independence, which confers significant obligations on their parents. Before the existence of the welfare state, or reliable contraception, societies attempted to hold both men and women to these obligations by stigmatising sex outside marriage, and as far as possible forcing marriage on any couple whose illicit fun resulted in an unplanned pregnancy.

The alternatives to a ‘shotgun wedding’ were terrifying: in the 19^th century, unmarried pregnancy could leave a woman indigent, imprisoned in near-slavery in places like the Magdalene laundries, as or at grave physical risk in the hands of a backstreet abortionist. Without easy access to divorce, too, a shotgun wedding could leave a mother dependent for life on an abusive spouse.

It is no wonder, then, that the 20th century women’s liberation movement sought economic independence and control over fertility for women. Feminists founded organisations such as Women’s Aid to challenge domestic abuse and violence, agitated for equal pay and, more fundamentally still, demanded greater control for women over their own fertility.

In 1961, the contraceptive pill was first made available. In 1968, the Abortion Act made it legal to terminate a pregnancy. And in 1974, health authorities were given permission to prescribe the contraceptive pill to unmarried women. The marriage rate promptly began to fall, and continued to do so steadily from its 1970 peak of nearly 60% before stabilising at around 20% at the turn of the century.

It seems that when marriage and raising babies becomes optional rather than inevitable, many women will choose to prioritise other things (I know – imagine!). Today, those couples who still marry do so an average of more than a decade later than they did in 1970. The average age of having a first baby has climbed from 23.7 in 1970 to 28.8 in 2016, and the same statistics show that more than half of first-time UK births are now to parents aged over 30.

And as well as (or in my case because of) starting later, we are also having fewer children: nearly half of households never have more than one. Only one in seven families has three or more.

In 1974, the year the birth control pill became available to unmarried women, the British birth rate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, where it has remained ever since. Nor is this phenomenon confined to Britain, where in 2018, the rate was 1.7 live births per woman. In 2017, the overall fertility rate across the EU was 1.59 babies per woman.

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So did feminism kill the birth rate? Actually, no. Though antifeminists are often keen to blame dwindling fertility on the selfishness of modern women, it is more accurate to say that liberal individualism killed the birth rate.

The liberal individualism at the heart of modern civilisation, as elaborated perhaps most influentially by John Locke, views us as free, rational and equal to all other individuals. The liberal individual is autonomous, in command of his body, and in possession of natural rights including liberty. And for a long time, it was a boys’ club from which women were excluded, because we were instead expected to represent all the spare bits of human nature left out of the Lockean vision of the ideal person.

For as well as having the capacity for logical thought, humans are deeply irrational. We are not disembodied rational consciousnesses but evolved animals, with instincts developed over millions of years. And we are not atomised individuals but inherently social.

But these other aspects of human nature get palmed-off on women. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, men have historically defined women as ‘Other’ — that is, as whatever men did not wish to be. So as liberal individualism gained in dominance, those men who embraced it did so in large part by celebrating their own superior rationality, autonomy and command of their mortal flesh against a stereotype of women as irrational, childlike in their dependence and hopelessly addled by emotionality and the concerns of the body.

It is no coincidence that the modern democratic political project, which is premised on the capacity of each individual for reason and judgement, excluded women. Women’s allotted role was to serve as cultural dumping-ground for all the spare bits of human nature, such as animal instinct and strength of feeling, whose persistence compromised the arguments for enfranchisement. So it must have seemed only natural that the rights due to a rational Enlightenment subject should be denied to women.

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Then, the Women’s Liberation movement turned liberal individualism from an instrument of women’s oppression into a central plank of our liberation. If the Lockean individual is autonomous, rational and possesses natural rights, why should women not also claim that rationality, enjoy that autonomy and exercise those rights?

Well, quite. But this is where we get to the birth rate. If, as feminists, we accept as a core premise the liberal-individualist conception of personhood, it follows that ‘liberation’ must mean liberation from dependence on others, and from our emotional and animal nature.

As I have argued elsewhere, having a baby cuts radically across the liberal conception of personhood. Motherhood tends to makes us more emotional and in need of social connection, even as we find ourselves suddenly inhabiting a ballooning, leaky body over which we only have the most marginal control. It is astonishing how much of feminism has a conflicted relationship to motherhood. But perhaps it should not be surprising, given that it is very difficult to be entirely free and also have dependent children.

In policy terms, it is clear that feminist liberation is understood as in tension with motherhood. In the 2019 election, every major political party competed to show they were thinking of women’s interests — mostly via subsidised childcare. While this may be of practical benefit to many, it is telling that family policy understands ‘choice’ to mean subsidising childcare, and offers little support for parents who choose to look after their own offspring.

As well as marginalising motherhood, conflating feminism with liberal individualism is increasingly producing mixed messages. As ever more of the great battles for equality are won, the feminist remit is getting wider and less coherent —including everything from environmentalism to Palestinian rights. The definition of ‘woman’ is receiving the same treatment. We are now expected to include males in the definition, if they say they are women, or be labelled reactionary bigots.

And none of this is doing anything to make space for the spare bits of human nature left out of the liberal ideal. Now that we are all rational, autonomous individuals, who carries the can for our embodied, social and emotional aspects? Today, the messy stuff either still gets dumped on women as a ‘second shift’ or outsourced to — you guessed it — poorer women. Small wonder we are putting off becoming that messy, leaky, animalistic and shamefully dependent Other.

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Does it matter? There is much talk today of what we can and should do to ensure the survival of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the political expression of liberal individualism. But liberalism seems to be liberating women from willingness to give birth to new liberals, at least in sufficient numbers to keep liberal populations static across generations. Does it not follow from this that either liberalism must adapt, or else liberals — and their democracies — must, in the end, die out?

This should worry anyone who recognises (as we should) that women’s sex-specific interests still need advocacy. It may not have been feminism that killed the birth rate so much as the conflation of feminism with liberal individualism, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will be women who get the blame. The reaction of misogynists to the waning of fertility in Western liberal cultures is less likely to be a critique of the liberal conception of personhood, than a concerted effort to stuff women back into our pre-feminist role as hysterical, flesh-bound, dependent and fecund Other to the rational male subject.

How are we to resolve this? If we are not to watch our worldview expire or else invite the grandfather of all antifeminist backlashes, we need to address the heart of the problem: our impoverished understanding of ideal personhood. To put it another way, we need to make more space for emotion, social bonds and our evolved nature as embodied creatures. This goes not just for women, but for everyone. We need to allow love and the body back into the way we see human nature.

If we managed this, what then would women’s political interests look like? Or men’s, for that matter? Would we still see rationality and freedom as the only important values? How might we rethink our social, economic or ecological priorities? These are questions worth asking.

Generally, they have succeeded in implementing many aspects of their agenda, pushing the political conversation toward their direction. They also start to become ‘normal’ political parties, subject to the same types of activities and bargaining found in more traditional parties. Their stances are clearly not to everyone’s liking, but their impact and durability can no longer be denied.

Blue-collar populists have had the most success in their signature issue, restricting migration. Norway[2. Norway tightens asylum policy to cut numbers.], Denmark[3. Danish parliament passes contentious ‘ghetto’ plan.], Switzerland[4. Switzerland’s new immigration statute sets high hurdle for citizenship.], and Austria[5. The long honeymoon of Austria’s right-wing alliance.] have all tightened their policies on refugees since populist parties entered into government, and Italy’s government[6. Thousands march for refugee rights in Italy.] is in the process of following suit. America’s populist president, Donald Trump, is yet again embroiled in a dispute with Congress over immigration policy as he attempts to reduce the number of illegal migrants who enter and reside within America. Poland[7. Poland only accepts returning Poles under migration policy.] and Hungary’s[8. Orban digs in against European Commission on migration policy.] populist governments have also rejected pressure from the European Union to accept Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees as part of the EU’s common policy.

Just the threat that blue-collar populist parties could take power has often been enough to push governments to propose migration restrictions. The Dutch Prime Minister fought off a challenge from conservative populist Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in 2017 when he took a more demanding tone towards migrants, telling them in an open letter “act normal or get out”, and he has played a strong role in reducing African migration into the EU[9. Rutte says EU deal to reduce migration is a big step forward.]. Sweden’s major parties both tacked to the right on immigration in this year’s general election to fend off the Sweden Democrats, as did Norway’s Labour and Centre parties in that country’s 2017 election. Angela Merkel’s government followed suit this year in a bid to help her CDU/CSU alliance win two recent state elections. Even French President Emmanuel Macron recently mentioned immigration as a concern to be dealt within his speech addressing the gilets jaunes protestors.

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Denmark’s blue-collar populist Danish People’s Party’s (DF) two-decade growth in strength has even forced the long dominant Social Democrats to abandon allies on the left in the run up to next year’s campaign. Breaking a twenty-five-year agreement with the Social Liberal Party, Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen has led her party to vote with the bourgeois-populist government on a number of immigration restriction measures in the current parliament, including a ban on wearing burkas in public[10. Danish parliament passes ban on burqa and niqab.] and a controversial effort to combat “ghettos” where many Muslim immigrants live.[11. Danish parliament passes contentious ghetto plan] The populists have been so successful that there is now a new party to its right, the New Right, which argues that the DF is not tough enough on migration. Polls currently show it is likely to surpass the 2% threshold to enter the Folketing.

Even Hillary Clinton has got in on the act, recently saying that Europe needs to “get a handle on immigration” to stop the rise of blue-collar populism. Restricting immigration and reducing the number of Muslim refugees may remain very unwelcome policies among Western elites, but virtually everywhere else it’s a winning issue, forcing any leader who seeks to form a government to shift with the prevailing winds and endorse policies that would have been unacceptable five years ago.

Conservative populists have had an impact in other policy areas too. Norway’s Progress Party started as an anti-tax protest movement and to this day the party insists it’s more of a classical liberal party than a populist one. In government, its leader, Siv Jensen, took the Finance Ministry and has worked with Conservative (Hoyre) Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg to cut income taxes and eliminate the inheritance tax. The centre-Right coalition has also implemented a long-time Progress Party proposal to finance these cuts by taking money directly from Norway’s large sovereign wealth fund to pay for current spending.

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In contrast, the Danish People’s Party consciously places itself between the traditional Left and Right on economic matters. In practice, this means the party approves of tax cuts for lower-income workers but not for higher-income earners. Their opposition to this forced a smaller member of the governing centre-Right coalition, the libertarian Liberal Alliance, to abandon its plans to reduce the top income tax rate in the 2018 budget.

Italy’s conservative populists, the Lega Party, has also used its newfound power to push for radical changes in fiscal policy. It had campaigned for a 15% flat tax to replace the current progressive regime that includes rates up to 43%. It had also called for reductions in the retirement age. Its government partners, the more centrist populist Five Star Movement, had campaigned on a 780 Euro a month universal basic income. While a recent budget agreement with the EU forced both parties to scale back their programme, the new Italian budget will include increased spending and dramatically lower taxation, precisely the opposite of what the prior, more establishment-friendly budget had envisioned.

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Populist economics has also found a home in the United States. President Trump signed a massive corporate tax cut in late 2017 while also approving dramatic hikes in both domestic and military discretionary spending. The deficit has ballooned as a result, rising to nearly $800 billion (3.9% of GDP) in fiscal year 2018. The deficit is expected to further widen to nearly $1 trillion, or over 4.5% of GDP, in the coming fiscal year. Populist economic policy is spreading and is likely to have as much impact over the long term as its migration programme already has.

For the most part, fears about populism being inimical to democracy have proved ill-founded. Concerns that President Trump would become an autocratic strongman have faded as he acted in accord with his constitutional powers and accepted policy reversals when checked by other branches of government. No populist party in coalition has even tried to move against the press or attempted to criminalise political opposition. While some of these parties did grow out of movements with roots in authoritarianism or fascism, as the parties have grown, those elements have usually been dismissed or checked.

In Eastern Europe, though, the picture is a little less reassuring. Hungary’s Fidesz government has acted in ways reminiscent of authoritarian governments, especially in its use of state resources to mount openly political campaigns. Opposition political activity is not formally restricted, but the difficulty in attracting private advertisement for newspapers critical of the government has drastically reduced the number of openly critical press sources. Polarised between the Fidesz-supporting rural areas and opposition to him in Budapest and with the opposition split, politics is freer than it is in Putin’s Russia, but not as open and fair as elsewhere in the EU. Moreover, the invoking of ethnic nationalist themes in election campaigns is unlikely to be echoed by mainstream Western politicians.

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The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Poland is another worrying case. The governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) attracted worldwide opprobrium when it overturned a law that had allowed the outgoing Civic Platform party (PO) to appoint a significant number of judges to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. Since then, PiS has continued to pass laws that give its government greater control over the judiciary and public prosecutors. It has also placed the state media directly under government control, leading to what some opponents say is blatantly biased press coverage. The EU has threatened to suspend Poland’s voting rights as a result of these actions.

We must always be prepared to protect democracy, but we also must avoid the temptation to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of votes that don’t go the way we want, and even to change the rules as a result of them. Those opposed to conservative populism have claimed that both the Brexit referendum victory and the election of Donald Trump might have been fraudulently obtained by Russian state propaganda on social media. Law enforcers will duly reach their own conclusions on those issues. But American opponents of Trump have called for Democrats to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and appoint their favoured judges should they obtain control of Congress, exactly the type of allegedly anti-democratic action PiS has engaged in. Democracy is a fragile flower, and its flourishing ultimately rests on the willingness of the losers to accept results they disagree with.

Western countries have now had some form of democratic elections for over a century. In that time, we have grown used to a Left-Right political landscape, one that developed only over time and only in countries where the primary political dispute was over how to handle the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Communism. If one goes back to the mid-19^thCentury, many European countries were divided between Liberals who sought to expand democracy and free markets and combat the power of crowns and clerical gowns and Conservatives who opposed them. The current landscape emerged only when those battles faded in significance and new alliances were drawn to meet new challenges.

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There were always outliers to this landscape. Irish politics was divided for nearly 80 years along the lines of which side you supported in the Irish Civil War, and Israeli politics was originally divided on the question of how a party related to Zionism. Scandinavian politics has long had room for agrarian parties that did not fit neatly into the Left-Right continuum, as did many Eastern European countries in the interlude between the World Wars. The basic insight is that democratic politics organises around the questions that divide a people at a particular moment in time; parties are not, and should not be, frozen in amber.

Conservative populism represents a growing number of people who want different questions asked and answered. So long as this continues, we should expect these parties and figures to remain strong and active players in their nations’ politics. The evidence so far shows that as unconventional as their policies may seem, they can successfully compete in a free and vibrant democratic playing field and can operate as responsible actors when they obtain government. So long as the problems they address remain unsolved, we should expect to see the issues they champion and many of the solutions they advocate to remain on the Western agenda, and perhaps influence the course of history as decisively as did the rise of social democratic parties in the last century.

The End of History and the Last Man is an extraordinary work of political and philosophical scholarship. Its scope, depth and detail would have made it an exceptional work in any era. But like the book with which it is often paired (Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations), its virtues have been lost in the quarter of a century since it came out. Like Huntington, Fukuyama’s title suggested a misleadingly simple thesis. And like Huntington it did not in fact advocate what it was accused of advocating.

To this day, people who have never read beyond the title of either book will argue with what they imagine to be Fukuyama or Huntington’s thesis. Both authors continue to be cited in innumerable radio programmes and op-eds, with people seizing either man’s thesis to set up a fallacious-point that they can then bravely refute.

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By Douglas Murray

There have, of course, been more enlightening criticisms of Fukuyama’s work. The most persuasive being that the book contains a slight misreading of Hegel which Fukuyama had picked up from the brilliant but troubling Alexandre Kojeve. And after a quarter century being misread, it does seem possible that Fukuyama has come to realise that there is room for misinterpretation in his first book; he has spent recent years concentrating on rewriting elements of that thesis in two considerable books The Origins of Political Order [2011] and Political Order and Political Decay: from the industrial revolution to the present day [2014].

Between such deep and substantial works, Fukuyama has a tendency to turn out shorter, slighter works. Hence The Economist is – as it is so often – slightly wrong in its summary of Fukuyama as quoted on the dustjacket of this latest book. It is not the case, as the organ claimed, that Fukuyama is the “glorious exception” to the basic rule that in intellectual life, “celebrity destroys quality”. During the 2000s, in particular, Fukuyama’s oft-citedness most certainly damaged the quality of his work. State Building [2004] was a slight and hastily-produced. It seemed almost to be a symptom of the problem it was aspiring to address.  America at the Crossroads (published in the UK as After the Neocons) [2006] was little more than an act of distancing: possibly politic; personally useful; but far from glorious.

His new book, Identity: contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition, is another of these slighter works, but one which is still more significant than most churned out these days. In it, Fukuyama attempts to address some of the questions which many people have spent the last two years trying to consider: namely ‘why do people keep voting the wrong way?’

Fukuyama would not put it so crudely or crassly of course. Still, his work is an attempt to grapple with the rise of political instincts that are not his own. Much of this can write itself, and has done so elsewhere many times. Donald Trump appears in the book’s first sentence. Vikor Orban pops up on the third page, and Brexit arrives, inevitably, just a few paragraphs later. For Fukuyama the Trump and Brexit votes were a particular disappointment, suggesting to him as they did that the two countries which led what he calls the “neoliberal revolution” under Reagan and Thatcher were now “turning away toward a more narrow nationalism”. To his credit, Fukuyama tries to understand why something he abhors should have happened. And he has typically Fukuyaman explanations.

Further reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

He sees these movements as part of the battle between what the Greeks termed ‘thymos’ (the part of the soul that craves recognition of its own dignity); ‘isothymia’ (the desire for recognition for being ‘on an equal basis’ with other people); and ‘megalothymia’ (the desire to be reckoned superior to others). This is good, and is itself superior stuff. Perhaps among the host of Trump and Brexit books Fukuyama would be justified in feeling a degree of megalothymia of his own. But within the space of just another page (this is still only the preface) Fukuyama has already moved on to equating the US President with “Caesar or Hitler or Peron”.  Which is a point not deserving of a great amount of recognition or dignity. The fact that this preface concludes with the sign-off “Palo Alto and Carmel-by-the-Sea, California” should surprise no one who knows the area.

He has other material from recent years to work with, of course, not least the events of the Arab Spring. But Fukuyama isn’t able to add very much to the established and recognised facts about these events: complex, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states like Syria can fall apart very brutally; information technology makes uprisings today easier than they were in the recent past. It all leads him to some pat conclusions that fit his existing perceptions. For instance, we are told that “nationalism and Islamism – that is, political Islam – can be seen as two sides of the same coin”. To which one might say, “well very possibly. But almost anything can be said to be the other side of the coin if you nominate yourself the inscriber at the global mint.”

There are other games at play here which are all-too recognisable from an awful lot of books hurriedly published in the last 24 months. Though they profess to be attempting to understand public votes of recent years, the authors’ aims in fact appear to be to ‘correct’ the recent public votes. Fukuyama is subtler in his efforts to do this than many, and to be fair he probably does believe that the votes he deplores are going to have the negative consequences he thinks they will. But this is a still a strange rut to be persistently tilling two years after the facts.

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Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

Along the way, Fukuyama plays certain intellectual games: exercises in treading water while fountaining more from his mouth. Such as when he chooses to perform a multipage recap of the tedious dispute between two French scholars of Islam that even made it into the New York Times two years ago. The dispute between Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel is as perfect fodder for Fukuyama as it was for the NYT. It is a seemingly meaningful dispute (Roy diagnoses the ‘Islamicization of radicalism’, Kepel the ‘radicalisation of Islam’) which in a distinctly French way ducks all the most meaningful and troubling aspects of the debate it purports to engage itself in. Such disputes are to intellectual inquiry what World Wrestling Entertainment is to sport.

In other parts of the book – such as the chapter entitled ‘The democratization of dignity’ Fukuyama summons his perception of the present and his armoury of historical knowledge to more rewarding effect. From Rousseau to Christopher Lasch he grapples with the democratic consequences of the therapeutic society in which ‘self-esteem’ steps into the vacuum left by religion and therapy triumphs over all.

Towards the book’s end he is enlightening on the four characteristics of peoplehood identified by John Jay (“shared religion, shared ethnicity, shared language, and shared commitment to common principles of government”). It is not only Fukuyama who is concerned about which of these ends up shouldering the burden when they others fall away, and in which order that may be happening at present.

But in the end it is unclear what Fukuyama – or anyone else who he marshals to his cause – proposes to do about any of this.  Vote Clinton, I suppose, view the last couple of years as some terrible aberration, and then just hope that the public finally takes notice of all these negative reviews and comes back to voting in ways that are more acceptable. Fukuyama is as good a lecturer as can be found. But it remains the greatest opportunity cost of recent years that so many smart heads have spent their time theorising and talking while retaining so little interest – even now – in simply listening.

This is the man who set the template for Donald Trump, albeit without the tantrums on social media. Steve Bannon, the United States President’s repellent former strategist, even called him “Trump before Trump“. Since winning untramelled power in Budapest eight years ago, Orban has created the model for a new nationalism sweeping through  Rome, Warsaw and Washington, with its admiration of autocrats, scapegoating of refugees, hostility to Muslims, attacks on globalisation and creeping erosion of checks on power.

Having just won another election, campaigning with a barrage of assaults on the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros that carried the sickening stench of antisemitism, Orban now seeks nothing less than the transformation of Europe in his image. We cannot say we have not been warned – since he is open about his intentions despite governing only two per cent of the continent’s population. The latest version of the speech he gives annually to young Hungarians at a summer camp in Transylvania sets out his vision of ‘illiberal democracy’.

This speech echoes Trump’s tropes with hostility to China, sympathy for Russia and savage attacks on elites (obviously ignoring the ones at home growing rich through closeness to his own Fidesz party). Orban poses as champion of traditional Christian identity and values, demanding rejection of ‘the ideology of multiculuralism’, an end to ‘open society Europe’ and curbing of ‘the Muslim influx’. He even parrots those tedious claims about censorship and political correctness thwarting debate of immigration, ignoring how this issue dominates headlines.

Further reading

Why Hungary rewarded Orban's rough democracy

By Henry Olsen

Orban scorns the elites in Brussels. But unlike his populist pals in Britain, he does not seek exit from the club, nor its demise. This would be even crazier than Brexit, since Hungary receives more European Union cash per capita than any other member, accounting for much of its public investment. This flow of funds provides the bedrock of his economic success and often ends up in the hands of friends. So, instead, he wants control. He is calling for his allies to “concentrate with all our strength” on next year’s European elections – not least by continuing to weaponise migration, despite the big drop in new arrivals this year.

Orban uses refugees and religion to accuse his opponents of undermining Hungary’s cultural identity. He has passed a barrage of hostile measures including criminalising those who help undocumented migrants win asylum and shackling NGOs, while his party even appoints theatre directors to guard against any subversion.

Now he wants to dominate the European stage, claiming next year’s elections are critical. “We must demonstrate there is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy,” he told the crowd of young Hungarians. “We must show the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite… Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal.”

This is a declaration of war on human rights, minorities and tolerance. Orban and his fellow travellers admire autocracies in China, Russia and Turkey. They want border fences and conformity, not civil rights and refugees. They believe majorities can trample over minorities, whether on moral issues such as protecting people fleeing conflict or social issues such as non-traditional lifestyles. The results can be toxic; just look at the hideous treatment of Roma communities in Hungary and now Italy. Or indeed, those migrant families ripped apart at US borders.

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By Beatrice Faleri

This is all part of the current struggles over identity and race, wrapped up as ever in complex issues such as economic dislocation, social exclusion and technological advance. Just as those areas of Britain most alarmed by immigration are often ones with fewest migrants, this challenge to core values comes from Europe’s most ethnically homogenous area. Foreign citizens make up less than two per cent of the Hungarian population – which is, ironically, less than numbers emigrating over the past decade from a rapidly ageing society with low birthrates.

This assault from the east, stoking fears of minorities and outsiders to mask cronyism and domestic decline, comes as Western societies bicker over diversity and integration. Orban is joined in battle by Bannon with a new foundation aiming to forge a far-right alliance to cause maximum disruption in Brussels and Europe. “He’s a hero…the most significant guy on the scene,’ said Trump’s former strategist while touring Europe recently. Bannon is a man, remember, who also told far-right French activists that accusations of racism should be seen as ‘a badge of honour.’

Having presided over a slide towards authoritarianism at home, Orban wants to “wave goodbye to liberal democracy” in Europe next year. So how will progressive forces respond to his paranoid politics, especially since this comes at a time when leading nations such as Britain and Germany are obsessed with internal issues and riven with their own divisions along lines of age, class and region?  So far, the omens are not good; Orban’s party is still allowed to sit with the main conservative group in Brussels, for instance, while he was permitted to wreck efforts to solve the migration crisis by rejecting a plan to assist frontline states by sharing refugees.

We are witnessing a fight over Europe’s identity as a bastion of decency, birthplace of democracy and home of human rights. Orban rules a small land with a fractured history, but he presents serious challenge to our values with his crass illiberalism, majoritian popularism and an ugly brand of nationalism. Liberals of all colours need to rediscover confidence and remake their creeds for the modern era. Yet what tragic irony if ideals forged in wake of terrible war, then exported eastwards after the defeat of communism, should rebound by corroding our own democracies.