OPINION
Former Australian PM Tony Abbott has a new book coming out, and it’s certain to send the chattering classes into a screaming fit of triggernometry. With a working title of Peak Insanity, Abbott promises to tackle “The climate cult, the gender fluidity push, magic pudding economics, the cultural self-loathing that appears to afflict the best countries in the world… Crazy things are happening everywhere.”
If Abbott’s previous book Battlelines is anything to go by, it should be great book. Battlelines was, after all, the book that completely transformed my own views on Tony Abbott.
It’s not just the lunar left in Abbott’s sights, though. The craven right are also copping a serve. Now is hardly the time, Abbott says, to sit back and moon over a vanished ’80s Golden Age of Centre Right. Not while the forces of barbarism are hammering at the gates of the West and the centre right is paralysed by blue-green, dripping-wet wokeness.
Nostalgia for a golden age and lamenting the decline from it is characteristic of conservatives, and that’s not all bad provided it spurs us to lift our game rather than fold our tents […]
So yes, not only is it a more dispiriting world but too often conservative parties also have let people down, their strongest adherents most of all.
Disappointment, though, is part of the human condition and our duty is not to find perfection but to seek improvement. Politics is rarely a contest of good versus great or even of good versus bad; often it’s bad versus worse.
Right now, things are very much going from bad to worse, and the biggest problem is that the centre right is hardly an improvement on the rabid left.
The problem with the centre-right parties of the Anglosphere is not so much defective beliefs as insufficient self-belief. This problem has been less a failure of belief than a failure to put beliefs into practice. Not so much because we’d lost faith in the liberal-conservative creed but more because we’d lost faith in our capacity to bring the electorate with us.
A centre-right government acting like a centre-left one can only ever be half-hearted and unconvincing and unlikely to impress voters, who can always tell a fake.
Conservatives win elections when voters think we will make life better for them. We just have to be a clear alternative to the other side in opposition and a competent administration that gets things done in government. Not Labor-lite and not Red Tories.
The left are selling out their voters, too – look at the demographics of the Greens and Labor vote, for instance, and, apart from some rusted-on heartland seats, it’s a sea of well-off, university-educated, smugly bourgeois faces – but they’re getting away with it.
Mostly because the centre right hasn’t the conviction to stand by its principles.
After all, what’s not to like about lower taxes, greater freedom and smaller government; about support for the family, small business and institutions that have stood the test of time? Parties of the centre right should have a natural competitive advantage against those of the centre left provided they’re true to their instincts. The freedom party, the tradition party and above all the patriot party, for that’s what we are, should be the natural party of government.
And if richer people are voting more left while poorer people are voting more right, what’s the problem with that – except for political snobs? It’s the left that sees those who vote against it as “deplorables”.
By contrast, the current centre-right parties derided the people who vote for them as “deplorables”. So they expend all their political capital on chasing after the left, shouting “Us, too!” in a vain hope of being invited to the quinoa-and-almond-milk dinner parties of the fashionable left-elites.
And all the while, a sea of middle-ground voters seethes in quiet fury.
Increasingly, now the central divide in public life is between those who think Western civilisation is a blessing or a curse. Certainly those who regard climate change as the greatest challenge of our time, safety as more important than freedom, biology as irrelevant to sex, government spending as unconstrained by government revenue and our countries as deeply tainted by their history are welcome to their views, but none of them belongs on the conservative side of politics […]
So let’s have no more climate catastrophism. Let’s have freer domestic markets and freer trade with like-minded countries. Let’s make immigration working class rather than welfare class, and let’s control it and limit it so there’s less downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and massive pressure on infrastructure. Let’s stop pandering to leftist propaganda that the world’s best societies, the ones people want to migrate to rather than flee from, are somehow the worst.
Let’s restore school standards and value getting a trade rather than an expensive university degree. Let’s have government working with families, not against them. And, finally, let’s wake up to the fact not all countries and movements have the same respect for human life.
The Australian
The mainstream conservative parties know what’s right: they’re just too scared to say it, afraid of being called ‘Nazis’ and ‘racists’. But the left will call them that, no matter what.
So, why not man up and actually stand for something?