![]() ![]() But does the populist right know how to address them? Not exactly. Only the populist right talks consistently about all three problems thus its current political advantage. Third, the preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash - even in a progressive bastion like Sweden. Second, wealth, secularization and economic stagnation drove down European birthrates, threatening depopulation and decline. ![]() First, globalization and European integration enriched the core more than the periphery, the metropole more than the hinterland. It can win power because the old establishment, the supposedly sensible center, helped create and failed to solve three interconnected problems. This is European conservatism’s predicament at the moment. The defaults of the past may be wrong, but at least they feel attractively familiar. Is there anything to say in defense of the stumbling prime minister? Only this: When politicians return, with seeming irrationality, to ideas that seem zombielike and ill-suited to the present moment, it’s often a sign that the problems of the present moment just don’t have clear solutions. ![]() It’s also the politics that the Republican Party is perpetually groping toward without quite getting there.īut Truss has gone in the opposite direction, not just with her tax-cut push, but with a push for expanded immigration - a double-down on a 1980s growth prescription, a Reagan-Thatcher nostalgia trip, that’s carried the Tories away from their own constituents and earned her party absolutely apocalyptic poll numbers. This is the style of politics that just elevated Giorgia Meloni’s populist movement in Italy and that’s brought right-wing populism into the mainstream of Swedish politics. At the moment the electoral sweet spot for right-of-center governments in the Western world is a mixture of cultural (not religious) conservatism and relative economic moderation - an anti-libertarian right-wing politics, favorable to the welfare state and skeptical of immigration, that appeals to constituencies buffeted by globalization and anxious about national identity. As politics, the mini-budget looks even dafter. Her big gambit upon succeeding Boris Johnson, a mini-budget crowded with tax cuts, looks like a policy debacle, recklessly inflationary and fiscally destabilizing. Liz Truss, the new prime minister of Britain who may not be the prime minister for long, is by general agreement out of touch with reality. ![]()
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