In America, at least, Trump’s version of populism has crushed the modern-day Left and its progressivism. Woke is dead. The Democratic Party might eventually make itself relevant again by relearning to love their homeland. In the meantime, I suggest, principled conservatives owe it to posterity – and Western civilisation – to provide something of a critique of populism, be it American, German, Italian, Hungarian or even British. Philosophical conservatives need to sort out not only what they dislike about conservatism but what they have in common. Whither conservatism?
In the first instance, at least, let us rule out the British Conservative Party in its current state as being conservative in any useful sense. Let the Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak era (2010-24) speak for itself. To borrow from Hayek’s ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative’ (1960), the best that might be said about these Tories is that they did not quicken the pace towards despotism. The worst is that they did. The title of Niall Gooch’s article in UnHerd magazine tells us a lot about the spinelessness of the Conservative Party: ‘Jailing Brits for Facebook posts isn’t justice.’ Yes, Sunak’s Tories were already out of power for a month when 53-year-old Julie Sweeney, the primary carer for her invalid husband, who lived ‘a quiet sheltered life in Cheshire’ and was ‘kind and compassionate’, found herself sentenced to 15 months in jail. Her crime? A silly one-off comment in Facebook about blowing up a mosque, a quip she quickly regretted and deleted. But the tyranny of Keir’s administration, along with all those woke judges and policemen involved in that case and so many others, would not have happened without fourteen years of Tory cravenness.
The British Conservative Party had fourteen years in government to save the United Kingdom from the curse of multiculturalism and indiscriminate and illegal immigration. As Sir Roger Scruton opined, a multiethnic UK might be a fine thing but multiculturalism, too often a euphemism for multi-civilisationism, is a recipe for disaster. Multiculturalism, argued Scruton, constitutes a dangerous fraud because it universalises religions and customs that resist universalism. Jonathon Portes, journalist for the Guardian, claimed at the time of Roger’s death in 2020, that ‘Scruton’s brand of conservatism gave a licence to bigotry’. This comment says more about Portes than it does about Scruton, who abhorred bigotry and was a student of Islamic culture. Moreover, it conflates nativism (love of the local) with xenophobia (fear of the foreign).
It is true that a common feature of populism, sweeping much of the West, is that the everyday citizens of a Western nation-state, be it America, Germany, Italy, Hungary or the UK, love their respective homeland – Scruton called it ‘oikophilia’ – in much the same way they love their family. There is, as Portes would remind us, a prejudice in this, but it is the prejudice of saving your child before rescuing the children of strangers in a burning building. Think about it. How terrible, from the perspective of your offspring, if you failed to think their survival was your priority – even if you could have saved more lives prioritising the children of strangers. How against ‘the natural order of things’, as one of writer Stephen Adly Guirgis’s characters opines: ‘No parent should have to bury a child … On the day of my son’s birth, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding.’
Enlightened patriotism – the interchangeable love for your homeland and the love of home and family – is to the populist a matter of sacredness. The ultimate loyalty of MAGA is always going to be about home and the homeland. Nevertheless, Americans are extraordinarily welcoming to (legal) newcomers; the one demand made of the newbie is to put America first, a sentiment Donald Trump has employed for his political ascent. Mass immigration into the United States traditionally came under the auspices of ‘the Great American Melting Pot’ – join us here in the Land of Opportunity but first leave behind your ancient grudges. Roman Catholic? Fine. Sectarianism? Not so much. Muslim – yes. Sharia Law – no thanks. William Tyler Page’s famous American Creed (1917) is less about assimilation than integration. The same applies, in one way or another, to every nation-state in the West: we all have our own specifics, our own history and heritage, and yet we share a comparable conservative-versus-libertarian dynamic because of our Christian and democratic inheritance.
The heart of the West is a respect for all things local (the physical) balanced by the universalism of democracy with its respect for the conscience of the individual (the spirit). Accordingly, as Scruton notes in The Uses of Pessimism (2010), life in a Western society offers the prospect of a post-tribalism that ‘confers security and freedom in exchange for consent – an order not of submission but of settlement.’ It is about the peaceable cohabitation of strangers. The admission price to this Western-style modernity – ‘societies of rational beings, bound to each other by accountability, friendship and respect’ – is a renunciation of fanaticism, be it religious, ethno-nationalist, ideological or otherwise. Neo-racist progressives, trapped inside the bubble of latter-day tribalism, projected onto Donald Trump a racism he does not possess. Consider these words from Trump’s first Inauguration Address: ‘It’s time to remember the old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.’ Leftists have a propensity for demonising populist leaders as racists. In the case of America, at any rate, Trump’s appeal to Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Arabs and black males on November 5, 2025, put to rest that lie once and for all.
If Trump could be said to have a tribe, it is the nation-state of America – only America is a constitutional republic that prioritises the rights of the individual as per the First Amendment. Before he died in 2020, the urbane Roger Scruton was no die-hard apologist for the rumbunctious Donald Trump. He did, however, expound in Conservatism (2017) on certain traditional conservative precepts that overlapped with Trumpism – ‘the defence of the homeland, the maintenance of national borders, and the unity and integrity of the nation.’ Scruton, in short, tacitly supported Trump 1.0’s America First agenda on the grounds that ‘governments are elected by a specific people in a specific place.’ I cannot but help think that Trump 2.0’s war on radical transgenderism, the 1619 Project, radical Islamic terrorism and wokism would, as a whole, have also met his approval.
And yet there is, unquestionably, a xenophobic strain within all the Western populist movements. Marine Le Pen’s has valiantly attempted to purge her National Rally of past associations with racism, to ‘de-demonise’ her movement. And yet the party’s National Front origins linger. As Farage once remarked: ‘I have never said anything negative about Marine Le Pen; I have never said anything positive about the National Rally.’ MAGA, with its libertarian-conservative roots, is less prone to xenophobia and racism than some of its European counterparts, and yet a leading light in the movement, Steve Bannon, has spoken of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as one of his great influences. No doubt Heidegger’s discursiveness on ‘organic-ness’ and ‘rootedness in the earth’ caught Bannon’s attention, seeming to speak, albeit in a pretentious and often incomprehensible way, about the merits of nationalism. Still, Heidegger, as we all know, failed to connect his ‘organic-ness’ or localism with the universalism of democracy. Though Heidegger rejected Hitler’s enthusiasm for technology – re-industrialisation, the autobahn, the V1 and V2 rockets, and so forth – he did not protest Germany’s transition from democracy to dictatorship. Heidegger, bluntly put, remained a tribalist to the end.
Contrariwise, Nigel Farage continues to promote enlightened – that is, democratic – patriotism. On the one hand, he has been forthright in his criticism of the cover-up that accompanied the Rotherham ‘grooming’ scandal, despite Labour disparaging him as an Islamophobe. On the other, he continues to fiercely oppose ‘bigots’ and ‘extremists’ joining his party. Consequently, Reform UK is today not only outdoing the Tories in the latest polling but even Labour. One option, still rejected by Kemi Badenoch, is that her well-heeled if hapless party amalgamates with blue-collar Reform – as happened in Canada – to unseat Keir’s disastrous government at the next general election. That would, if nothing else, force well-to-do Conservatives to sort out what they have in common with modern-day populists. Maybe it is more than they imagine.
Daryl McCann is an Australian Journalist.
