It is a commonplace that today’s Conservative party has become an ungovernable rabble – a group of factional sects unfit to govern, with too many in the party and among its media supporters careless of effective government as a matter of principle. What else can be said of a party that has delivered three prime ministers and home secretaries, four chancellors and health secretaries and five education secretaries in one calendar year? What is less explored is the deeper ideological source of this phenomenon.
An important clue came last week with the spectacle of newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives taking 15 votes over five days to elect candidate Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, the second most important role in the US constitution after the president. No speaker and the House cannot function – no swearing in of members, committee chairs or passing of laws. Business was frozen as McCarthy made an incredible series of concessions on House procedures and his power as speaker to the “Freedom Caucus” of ultra rightwingers to win their votes. He is now their cipher: US government is in the pocket of a minority faction who do not believe in the very principle of government.
These are not just the political shenanigans that are now customary in Washington; instead, they reveal the ideological madness that has also descended on the right in the UK. Thus, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s radical libertarianism, which informed the disastrous tax-cutting mini-budget was borrowed directly from the US libertarian right and now reinforces the Truss camp’s crazed belief they have a legacy to protect. Same story for climate change denial, fighting culture wars as a proxy battle against the liberal left and stretching anti-immigrant legislation beyond the limits of legality. The actions of the Freedom Caucus, or “the Taliban 20”, have the same roots, ideological and organisational, as those of the Brexit “spartan” MPs who forced the hardest of hard EU exits on Britain by brooking no deal except on their scorched earth terms.
“Losers’ consent”, the doctrine under which, if you lose a free election, you accept the verdict of the voters, is rightly said to be a precondition for democracy. So is a broader willingness to accept other basic principles; democracy is not a process to give an ideological minority a clean sweep of everything through sheer bullying. There has to be compromise and acceptance that democratic politics is a constant argument; opponents are citizens, too, with valid interests and arguments. They have to be out-argued rather than treated as disposable scum.
The American Republican Taliban don’t care. Members of the Freedom Caucus may talk and look like other politicians, but the self-belief that they are absolutely correct – helped by the US’s industrial-scale rightwing media – has made them deranged. Government is a “swamp”; welfare undermines self-reliance, however acute individual need; tax is an infringement of personal liberty; might is right in interpersonal as in international affairs (so be suspicious of Zelenskiy and lean into Putin); global warming is a socialist conspiracy; abortion and gay marriage offend the Bible.
One part of the caucus comprises hyper-fiscal hawks who want a speaker who will join them in freezing the US government’s activities when it breaches federal debt limits, so holding the Biden administration to ransom, as is now certain to happen during the next two years. Another group comprises hyper-libertarians whose utopian vision is of a society of rugged, gun-carrying Americans free to do what they like when they like. This is the route to a moral society and through giving individuals total licence they will create the wealth that trickles down to others.
Read the books and speeches by the intellectuals and politicians who have fuelled this craziness over the years – Ayn Rand, William Buckley Jr, Leo Strauss, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Novak, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump himself – and terms such as justice, fairness, obligation, do-as-you-would-be-done-by, partnership, compassion and human rights are absent. Their lexicon is freedom, choice, “Make America Great Again”, “America First”, tax cut magic inducing wealth creation with nothing else contributing: their enemies are the deep state, immigration, anything “woke” and the state as swamp. The Republican Taliban do not want to govern; theirs is a performative politics to stop any one else from governing. Electing a puppet speaker, hostage to their ambition, is the precondition for their sabotage. You don’t need a mob to invade the Capitol to achieve your ends (none in the Freedom Caucus has condemned the events of 6 January) – your speaker will now do the job.
The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, suffers being hostage to the hyper-ideological, over-reaching right in the same way. He knows he needs a compromise deal on the Northern Ireland protocol in which necessarily the EU will have some backstop relationship; only thus can UK-EU relations unfreeze. Be sure his European Research Group Taliban will match the Freedom Caucus in their mulish opposition. Nor can he give up on the attempt to scrap and replace 4,000 laws by the end of 2023 that might contain an element of EU law, however useful. This ambition is logistically impossible and risks crippling government, but for the ERG, like the Freedom Caucus, that is grist to their mill. What about finding the resources for our failing social care system? A rational conversation about tax or Brexit? Negotiation with striking public service workers? Who on the right cares?
Anything sane is off limits, with Boris Johnson, having made a possible £10m or more in speaker fees by next summer, obviously readying himself to launch an attempted comeback – another copycatting of the American rightwing playbook where media exposure, political prominence and sky-high celebrity earnings feed off each other – politics as TV entertainment for personal gain. The riven Republican party is obviously in the beginnings of a death spiral. British Tories are not far away from one too.
● Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
