We ARE doomed! In your face!

The Tories were always on borrowed time

It’s funny how you get more right-wing as you get older, as Fr Ted once said, but in voting terms you have to wait some time now. The crossover age at which one is more likely to become a Conservative is now 71. 

The Tories trail in fifth among my cohort, those aged 25-49 (a category which, being somewhat towards the older end of that range, I feel we should use more).

Perhaps they deserve it. The government has performed very poorly both in actually governing and in running an election campaign, but it also faced some extreme demographic headwinds and the clock was ticking as soon as they won in 2019. This was perhaps something they should have thought more about before they embarked on the genius anti-triangulation strategy of ‘rule left, talk right’.

I recently wrote about the Tory party’s imminent destruction, and while some on the Right take great glee in this, I just feel sad. In meme terms July 5 will be for me either ‘Yugoslav war criminal swallowing poison’ or ‘Yes honey’, which seems a long way from the mean-spirited glee I felt after the last election.

That victory was good news for my tribe, and in the playground of our north London primary school I had to suppress a smirk like I’d bought tickets in the away end while the parents around me lamented five more years. But it was bad news personally, as it came just three months before my book, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, which predicted Conservative electoral and cultural annihilation. (On top of this, the book also came out in the week of lockdown. I suspect that the Chinese Communist Party was so concerned about what I had to say that they had to do everything to stop it, and so the orders were given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.)

Many people were – understandably – a bit bemused that I could think this while the Tories secured yet another election victory, and yet 2019 was a false dawn; Boris Johnson, blessed by Fortune in that mysterious way of his, led a pro-Brexit side which was united while the opposition were painfully divided. His opponents also had a uniquely extreme and incompetent leader, who was something of a black swan event (all part of the nightmarish Eric Joyce punch-up timeline in which we’ve found ourselves). But the underlying social and cultural trends were against the Conservatives.

The polling data by age was a key issue. People lazily assumed that young people would grow into voting Tory but the age divide in politics was actually a recent thing, and the young went for Thatcher in large numbers. Neither were the middle aged very well disposed towards them; it was people in their 30s and 40s who heavily voted against the Conservatives in 2017, which made me think that this wasn’t the natural rebelliousness of adolescence but a more permanent shift of social mores

My basic premise is that the 1960s was a second reformation, a cultural shift as seismic as the 1520s, and the Tories represent the old religion. Like with the Christianisation of Rome, the other obvious historical parallel, this meant that British conservatism was a creed as much in demographic decline as the Christianity from which it once emerged, and the degree to which it had become disliked by anyone born after around 1975 was intense and perhaps irreversible. 

This began to occur to me when I noticed that friends were not becoming more Right-wing as they hit their 30s, even those who had become parents; indeed in many cases the opposite was true, and they were growing more sensitive to breaking taboos, and far more progressive on issues to do with identity. Much of this was social desirability, but then social desirability drives norms in every society; even if people fake it, their children will believe it.

This was accelerated by Brexit, which saw a large number of people turn to a sort of James O’Brien view of the world in which Right-wing extremists had captured the Conservatives - even if, by almost any measure, the Tory party has become way more liberal. Indeed, to the point that it accepts pretty much every progressive assumption and even makes arguments starting from their opponent’s premises.

Despite long-held Conservative assumptions that people will continue growing into it, surveys showed that those born between 1965 and 1980 were actually moving to the Left as they got older, and in the US the proportion identifying as liberal had increased from 29 per cent in the mid-1990s to almost half today. The same thing was happening with the cohort after us, who were not showing any signs of becoming more Right-wing as they aged. The daunting realisation was that this cultural shift was permanent. Faiths abandoned by grandparents and forgotten by parents will not be retained by the children. 

There are today very few important areas of British or American society in which progressives do not have complete dominance, and it goes beyond traditional areas like the arts or universities.

We notice the trend in academia because it is the most pronounced; here the Left:Right ratio of 3 to 1 in the 1960s has accelerated to 10 or 20 or even 100 to 1 (and far more imbalanced among younger faculty), yet whole fields have gone from being politically mixed a generation ago to overwhelmingly Left-liberal today, to the extent that dissenting thinkers increasingly keep their opinions to themselves. Among doctors, scientists, civil servants and even the leadership of mainstream churches, small-c conservatism had become marginalised. Most British institutions now proclaim the values of the Left because they appreciate that this is what Caesar demands, and this is only going to accelerate with a Labour government.

This cultural trend is reflected in the shifting axis of the two-party system. In the US the Democrats have become the party of graduates, a trend which Britain has followed. The Conservatives, once the party of the more educated middle classes, have long been haemorrhaging support amongst all professionals – seen as a ‘rejection of the party’s values’ – while making advances in once improbable ex-industrial towns in the midlands and north (which they’ve subsequently lost).

What I’m describing chiefly concerns the middle/upper-middle-class, but societies always come to imitate the belief systems of such people. If left-liberalism has become dominant among the elite, then like many historical faiths its popularity among a high-status minority will lead to universal adoption. Look how right-wing politicians. continue to mock ‘latte-drinking elites’, when in fact chain coffee shops selling the stuff are found in the most unpromising high streets across the country. The same goes for values.

One crucial barometer is the extent to which younger women have become far more Left-wing than men, with a pro-conservative bias among females born before 1955 turning into a heavily Left-liberal one among younger cohorts. In 1974 the Conservatives had an 11-point advantage among women, in an election they lost, something which would be unthinkable even during a successful campaign today.

Historically, religions that attract large numbers of women tend to predominate, the most obvious being Christianity, where females heavily outnumbered males in the early centuries, in some areas by six to one. This was also true of Methodism in 18th century England and Evangelical Christianity in Latin America, and in each case the role of men as ‘secondary converts’ was a key driver of growth (the first Christian kings of Anglo-Saxon England and post-Roman France both converted at the behest of their wives). So the fact that young women backed Labour over the Tories by 73 points to 18 at the 2017 election should have been a cause for alarm. 

People’s political identity tends to be heavily influenced and shaped by the individuals in their social circles, so the disappearance of conservatives in the professional middle class has a domino effect; people grow older in an ideologically homogenous environment, and so continue to identify as liberal even as their tastes change. Indeed, one of the most popular political insults of the 2010s, ‘centrist dad’, applies to a demographic of men whose lifestyle is recognisably conservative – marriage with children, weekend visits to the Cotswolds in their hatchbacks and musical tastes frozen in the 1990s. Those people would have been overwhelmingly Tory once upon a time, yet they reject their values.

Most importantly, though, the Left has developed a moral monopoly - just as with all victorious religions - so that those outside of the faith are under an unspoken obligation to prove their moral worth before their views can be considered, lest they be considered guilty of one of the sins they are suspected of.

Because of this, one of the de facto expectations for conservatives in public life is that they must denounce those to the right of them, and so the boundary of what is acceptable shifts leftward, and ideas that would have been mundane and mainstream one decade become shocking the next (or ‘controversial’, as the media use as shorthand for ‘beyond the pale’). 

People still talk of conservatives as ‘the establishment’, and as much as I’d like that to be true, progressive views are the norm among the future leaders of tomorrow, even at Britain’s elite schools. Indeed the most expensive schools and colleges, both in Britain and the US, are now leading the way in liberal causes, whether it’s gender-neutral uniforms or no-platforming conservatives, and in America there is a clear correlation between how much a college charges its elite students and how intolerant it is of Right-wing speakers, a phenomenon nicknamed ‘radical privilege’ by one blogger. 

Conservatism has increasingly become associated with the non-university educated and old, concentrated in more provincial areas, led by a small reactionary urban elite who still support the old faith. This has happened before, when England’s declining Catholic population hung on for over a century after the Reformation before dwindling almost altogether, a mixture of the rural, traditional-minded in the more remote west and north, and a conservative sub-section of the aristocracy. At that time Anglicanism was the prestige faith; today Left-liberalism is the creed of the new ruling class. That is why there is no contradiction in public schoolboy lefties or Labour signs outside £2m London houses, any more than there was in 16^thcentury aristocrats being radical Protestants. 

We live in a two-party system, which means that there will always be a left and right wing bloc, and for most of the past 100 years the latter has been in power. Based on historical trends you would be unwise to bet against the Conservative Party bouncing back, but in truth we don’t know. After its coming annihilation it faces a choice: on the one hand, of effectively abandoning the old gods altogether, to stop fighting culture wars and accept that the second reformation is done.

Or the Right will become something else, perhaps post-Christian altogether, and focussed - as in continental Europe - on identity. It might not be led by the Conservative Party at all, a movement which – though this is under-appreciated – is intimately tied to the fate and health of the Church of England, also in freefall and wholly captured.

Where it goes from here depends on the next generation and how they feel about the world their parents have left them, but that is a story for another day. Suffice to say that, like Homer Simpson, I have the satisfaction of saying ‘we are doomed!’ as we head towards the rapids.