The transformation of Ronald Reagan’s so-called movement conservatism to Newt Gingrich’s nastier version, and then to the Tea Party and finally to Trump, is hardly novel. Bismarck’s Germany was deeply conservative at its founding, but after Bismarck’s dismissal by the Kaiser and the strong reception of polemics by radical cultural pessimists like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the term “Third Reich”), Germany became more and more reactionary, culminating in the anti-democratic extremism of right-wing parties after World War I. From there it was only a short distance to Nazi dictatorship.
Moving from the tragic to the ridiculous, one could say that Britain’s Tories (aka the Conservative Party) have followed a similar trajectory. It has been a sea change from Ted Heath, the moderate’s moderate who brought the U.K. into the European Union, to Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson and eventually the absurd Liz Truss, the former leader of an important country and nuclear power who now pilgrimages to CPAC conventions like a teenage groupie and apes MAGA rhetoric.
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If the abiding characteristic (and besetting sin) of the liberal is caution, complacency and a preference for the status quo (which often lead to hippie-punching, blind obedience to donors and inertia), with conservatives, it is competition against one another as to “who is the most conservative.” This may have its amusingly juvenile aspects in Capitol Hill bars after work, but it is the visible manifestation of a cumulative and self-reinforcing radicalization.
This radicalization has functioned as a mechanistic, almost Marxian dialectic. At every point of crisis in the GOP — after Watergate, after the elder George Bush’s loss in 1992 and after Barack Obama’s apparently sweeping victory in 2008 — pundits, political scientists and even a few Republican graybeards urged caution and moderation. Yet in each case, the party lurched further to the right.
