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Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives are neck and neck as election begins, and running on similar promises
Canada’s federal election is on. The polls show a polarized contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, one dominated by Donald Trump and the question of who’s best-suited to deal with his tariff and annexation threats. Canadian nationalism has surged. The Liberal Party, recently down 25 points in the polls to the Conservatives, have seen their fortunes turn around under new leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney — a manwho’s been all too keen to, ahem, adapt ideas from his top rival.
Liberal, Tory, same old story?
A Trump-centric campaign risks obscuring other important policy issues. But how much does it matter when the two front-runners are so close together? So far, both parties — one of which is running on the slogan “Canada Strong” and the other on “Canada First” – have adopted similar proposals for a range of issues.
Both Liberal and Conservative campaigns launched with promises to cut personal income taxes. The Liberals are offering a 1% cut to the lowest bracket, and the Conservatives are putting forward a 2.25% cut. Both parties are also promising to cut federal sales taxes on new homes for first-time buyers, with Liberals including new builds worth as much as CA$1 million and the Conservatives ramping it all the way up to … $1.3 million, but they’ll expand eligibility to non-first-time buyers, including investors.
On defense, Carney is promising to spend 2% of GDP on the military by 2030 and expand Arctic security. Poilievre has promised more or less the same, with details to come. Both say they’ll speed up the building of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, though Carney would keep a Trudeau-era emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, while Poilievre would not.
Affordability remains a major concern, even more so with tariffs threatening the economy. Poilievre even says he’d keep (though perhaps not expand) the Liberals’ public prescription drug, daycare, and dental care programs. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of Canadians can’t afford food. In 2024, the Liberals launched a food lunch program, which the Conservatives attacked as a headline grab but didn’t outright oppose. The parties haven’t released more on food security and affordability yet, but they almost certainly will.
Can the Liberals rewrite the past?
While the Liberals are now led by Carney, with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gone, they’re still the same party that has governed for nearly a decade and earned ire from voters for policy shortcomings. With a policy agenda that, so far, looks similar to that of the Conservatives, the Liberals must persuade voters they’re not just better on policy, but that their guy is better on character and competence, and that his team is fit for purpose.
It’s a tricky task, and it’s fair to ask how much the Liberal Party has changed. Many top candidates and current Cabinet ministers are the same faces from Trudeau’s years, including Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Bill Blair, and François-Philippe Champagne. The Liberal surge even persuaded a handful of candidates who’d served in the caucus to run again after saying they were out under Trudeau, including high-profile players Anita Anand, Sean Fraser, and Nate Erskine-Smith.
When Carney announced his Cabinet just before he triggered the election, Conservatives were quick to point out that the group contained 87% of the same faces from Trudeau’s table. Among the faces are those who supported, just weeks earlier, policies Carney is now reversing, including the Liberals’ signature consumer carbon price and its planned increase to the capital gains inclusion rate (reversals Conservatives were calling for).
Canada’s “presidentialized” election
A leader-focused campaign in the face of Trump’s threats will, perhaps ironically, be thoroughly American. Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice, notes that the tricky thing for the Liberals is this is a change campaign, with voters looking to reset after the Trudeau years. Carney will have to present himself as that change – which could mean an intense focus on him as leader.
Thompson calls it a “presidentialized” campaign, one that comes with a risk for the neophyte Liberal leader. “It opens the question of Carney’s political experience, or rather lack thereof – and the fact that he has never run an election campaign before, let alone a national general election campaign. It’s an open question whether his political inexperience comes out in a negative way.”
But a focus on character could also set Carney apart from Poilievre, even if the two don’t have much daylight between them on policy. Voters see Carney as the best person to be prime minister, and he enjoys high favorability ratings — over half the country likes him. The Conservative Party leader, on the other hand, isn’t particularly well-liked, with his unfavorables sitting at 59%.
Promise now, worry later?
For all the talk of character, Conservatives, including Poilievre himself, have accused the Liberals of stealing their ideas. That’s a fair criticism. As Thompson puts it, the Liberals have caught the Conservatives out and, indeed, have adopted their positions. But how far will that take the Liberals? And at what cost?
“These are all Conservative policies that were being wielded against Trudeau,” Thompson says, “which Carney has now adopted as his own. And it’s shrewd politicking.” But it’s also risky. “If the Liberals win, they need to deliver very quickly on showing that this is a new government and that they have new policies. The honeymoon period would be, I think, quite short.”
The Liberals will be happy to worry about all of this later. For now, they’re the beneficiaries of an election in which the very issues that were set to spell their doom have become temporarily incidental to Trump and to questions of character and competence – questions to which voters seem to think Carney is the answer.
The policy challenges that got Liberals into trouble in the first place are still lurking and waiting to reassert themselves in short order. But for the Liberals, those are problems for another day.
Canada's Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada September 25, 2024.
Conservative leader fights with broadcaster
While Trudeau was enjoying a New York broadcast, his opponent, Pierre Poilievre, was getting deeper into a fight with a Canadian broadcaster.
Poilievre’s Conservative Party announced Tuesday that it will no longer give interviews to reporters at CTV, the country’s top-rated private news channel. The Conservatives are furious about a Sunday report in which the network put together several clips of Poilievre speaking to present a misleading quote. The network apologized, but the apology did not go far enough for the Conservatives, since it presented it as an error, not an effort to deceive the public.
Poilievre’s disagreement with the broadcaster predates this incident. Last week, he celebrated the downgrading of the parent company’s credit rating. BCE, which owns CTV, is a landline and wireless phone company, and often the target of Canadians’ ire because of complaints about service.
Attacks like this on a big company, which employs 40,000, are unusual in Canadian politics and may be disquieting for BCE management, since Poilievre’s party may soon be in charge of its regulator. Poilievre often complains about Canadian media coverage of his party, alleging that outlets are tailoring their coverage because of subsidies from Trudeau’s government. He has often promised to defund public broadcaster CBC, but the new focus on Bell signals a wider and even more confrontational approach to media relations.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a Conservative general election campaign event, in London, on June 24, 2024.
Viewpoint: Expect more drubbings for incumbents in France and the UK
Upcoming elections in France and the UK appear likely to deliver historic defeats for both countries’ ruling parties in a challenging electoral cycle for incumbents around the world. The polling shows the centrist alliance led by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Rennaissance party trailing both the far-right National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 – pointing to an extremely difficult government formation process.
Meanwhile, the UK’s ruling Conservative party's dire polling ahead of the July 4 elections has prompted speculation of an “extinction event” that renders it virtually irrelevant in the next parliament. These votes follow others in countries including South Africa and India where the incumbents performed worse than expected.
What’s going on here? Eurasia Group expert Lindsay Newman says it’s a “long-COVID story” of the pandemic’s economic aftershocks fueling a political backlash. We asked her to explain.
This year is shaping up to be a bad one for incumbents. What are the lessons from elections so far?
In a series of surprise electoral outcomes, the ruling parties in South Africa and India both lost their parliamentary majorities, while the government-backed candidate lost Senegal’s presidential election to a little-known opposition figure. The driving narrative in all three is the long-COVID story – more specifically, historically high inflation levels.
Mexico, where ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum easily won the presidential election, is one country that bucked the trend. Sheinbaum benefited as the hand-picked successor of the popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has advanced an agenda focused on addressing economic headwinds through job creation and wage increases.
Can you explain the long Covid effect a little more?
Following the economic dislocations of the pandemic, inflation has been elevated and persistent around the world. We have higher-for-longer cost of living pressures and unemployment rates – factors that are shaping how voters think and particularly what they think about their governments. Pocketbook issues always tend to be salient during elections, and many peoples’ pocketbooks seem especially light in the aftermath of the pandemic.
So, do you think this trend will continue this year — for example, in the outcomes of the elections in France, the UK, and the US?
That’s what the polling is telling us. The electoral reckoning with post-pandemic conditions, including the inflation shock, is a global story. The outcomes thus far in 2024 suggest this will remain a difficult cycle for incumbents. We have to expect more of the same in these upcoming elections.
Interestingly, the political backlash seems to be coming even in relatively healthy economic environments, right?
There is nuance to what we are seeing. Voters are responding to how they feel about the economic environment they find themselves in, rather than the statistics or the nuts and bolts of the economic outlook. In the case of the US, for example, the country’s economic recovery has been one of the bright spots of the post-pandemic period, yet it’s not perceived that way domestically, and surveys show that inflation, the economy, and immigration are key concerns for voters going into the fall.
There was a similar dynamic at play in India, which has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet the felt experience of unemployment, rising prices, and inequities is likely behind the election results.
How worried are you about the potential for this backlash to destabilize political systems around the world? Where do we go from here?
Given the disruption and disorder we have seen over the last five to ten years, we have to expect more rather than less uncertainty ahead. This year’s voter backlash ties into another trendline I have been watching: a rising new radicalization of attitudes as well as actions. It has its roots in tectonic shifts in well-established public opinion, such as the 18.5-point average decline in support for Israel across dozens of countries registered by a January poll. Another driver is a broad political realignment away from the center and toward the poles.
The political consequences of these shifts are seen in the US in President Joe Biden’s outreach to younger and more progressive voting blocs and in Donald Trump’s appeals to his base. In Europe, nearly one-third of voters now opt for antiestablishment parties, either on the far right or far left, while in Latin America, antiestablishment candidates have secured a wave of victories in the post-pandemic period. We will get through the 2024 election cycle, but the risky times are likely to persist as these dynamics continue to ripple through the global system.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor at Eurasia Group.
Dem bias in Ottawa has Trudeau targeting Trump
The most intense debate in the Canadian House of Commons of late has been about a humdrum trade deal update between Canada and Ukraine. It is being disputed by the opposition Conservatives because it contains reference to a carbon tax.
Since Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has made “axing the tax” in Canada his number one priority, he has removed his party’s support from the deal, even though Ukraine has had a carbon tax since 2011.
But the governing Liberals say they detect an ulterior motive: the rise of right-wing, MAGA-style conservatism in Canada that has undermined the Conservative Party’s support for Ukraine.
Trudeau’s camp takes aim at MAGA bull's-eye
The Liberals ran an online ad on Monday, ahead of a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal vote in the House, that featured a photo of Justin Trudeau shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while claiming Poilievre’s party is “importing far-right, American-style politics and refusing to stand with our ally in their time of need.”
Conservatives say they support Ukraine and have just called on Ottawa to send surplus weapons – specifically 83,000 CRV7 rockets slated for disposal – to Kyiv. But the Liberals need to disrupt Poilievre’s momentum and seem convinced that comparing him to Donald Trump might do it.
After the former president won the New Hampshire primary in January, the Liberals made a direct comparison between the two men in an online ad, which said that Trump was one step closer to the White House and that Poilievre was ripping a page from his playbook. The ad noted that both men referenced “corrupt media,” their countries being “broken” and used the slogan “bring it home.”
Trump’s eye-for-an-eye approach
This is a dangerous game, given Trump is ahead in most polls and is an Old Testament-style politician, more inclined to take an eye for an eye than to turn the other cheek.
Why would Trudeau risk baiting the man who could be in the White House this time next year, where he would wield the power to enervate the Canadian economy?
The prime minister knows Trump takes note of every slight and pays everyone back with interest. After the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, Quebec, in 2018, Trudeau gave a closing press conference in which he said Canada would not be pushed around in trade negotiations by the US. According to Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, in his book “The Room Where It Happened,” the president raged against Trudeau, calling the prime minister a “behind your back guy” and ordering his aides to bad mouth Trudeau on the Sunday talk shows.
But Trudeau’s Liberals are trailing the Conservatives by up to 16 percentage points in every public opinion poll, and this tactic may work.
An Abacus data poll from Jan. 28 suggested there is some evidence to suggest that associating Poilievre and Trump correlates with voting intentions, with those who feel that the two men are different more likely to vote Conservative. Tying the two men together in a pejorative fashion is good for the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party, so the thinking seems to go.
That remains to be seen. Attacking a political rival is always a challenge when the target is held in more esteem than the source of the attack, which is the case here, according to another Abacus poll that found Poilievre much more liked than Trudeau.
Canada’s former man in Washington says to hold fire
The risk is amplified in that the Canadian public may well see through such a transparent tactic and decide that Trudeau is putting his party’s interests ahead of the country’s.
That was the warning issued at the weekend by David MacNaughton, whom Trudeau once appointed as Canada’s ambassador in Washington. He told the Toronto Star that Trudeau is taking a risk by taking indirect shots at Trump.
Doing so will make it harder to fight Trump’s promised 10% tariffs on US imports if he comes to power, he said.
“We used to be seen by the Americans as a trusted friend, ally, and partner, and right now, I don’t think that feeling is as strong as it used to be,” he said.
That MacNaughton has been forced to say this in public suggests he is being ignored in private.
Trudeau revives Team Canada
Trudeau has revived the Team Canada approach to relations with the US that served his government well during the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that yielded the U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal in 2018.
The new effort will be led by Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s current ambassador in Washington, Francois-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, and Mary Ng, the trade minister (notably not Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, or Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister who fell foul of Trump during the USMCA negotiations. “We don’t like their representative,” Trump said at the time).
Municipal mayors, provincial politicians, and business leaders will all be urged to reach out to their contacts to sell the message that the two economies are more integrated than ever. Trade statistics based on the first three years of the new USMCA show that total US trade with Canada and Mexico totaled $1.78 trillion in 2022, a 27% increase over 2019 levels.
When not criticizing “ideologically driven MAGA Conservatives” in Parliament, Trudeau has tried to sound civil.
But as professional diplomats who have worked with Republicans in the US point out, “no amount of Team Canada can overcome those ill-advised MAGA statements.”
Libs and GOP on different planets
Another problem is that the two are on different political planets.
The Liberal government is not keen on engaging with Republican politicians and officials, in part because of an aversion that dates back to the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the US Capitol.
The lack of readiness evokes memories of November 2016, when Trump was elected and the Canadian government was caught completely off-guard. The professional bureaucrats who are meant to advise governments had provided no contingency plan for a Trump administration and Trudeau had even invited the sitting Democratic vice president, Joe Biden, to Ottawa for a state dinner the following month. “They were so excited at the prospect of Hillary (Clinton), even better than Obama because she was a woman. They couldn’t wait for the transition,” said one person involved in the planning process. After Trump was elected, the Canadian government couldn’t even reach him to arrange a congratulatory call.
Louise Blais, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, was consul general in the southeast US at the time – MAGA land – and had built up an array of contacts among Republicans that proved invaluable. Among other things, she secured a phone number for the president-elect.
As she wrote in the Globe and Mail last weekend, even the most conservative Republicans are friendly towards Canada, realizing the relationship is a net positive for them. But they value a rapport built up over the years, not arranged in a panic, and they cherish mutual respect.
Blais recalled how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told her in 2016 that Republicans were hearing what Canada was saying about then-candidate Trump. “Be careful because you are picking sides,” he said.
Trade deal no protection against Trump’s tariffs
The long-standing Democratic bias at the official level is a luxury Canada can ill afford. Ottawa has a free-trade agreement with the US, but if the new president wants to impose a double-digit tariff on everything that crosses into America, Canada would be dragged into an expensive, retaliatory trade war.
Veteran Conservative MP Randy Hoback wrote on his Substack that the Canada-U.S. relationship is too critical to be jeopardized by domestic political concerns. “Trudeau’s actions are hazardous to our economy and national security,” he said.
Trudeau’s current emissaries don’t speak the same language as Trump’s party. A real Team Canada needs to include some people, like Hoback, who can speak Republican.
Canadian Liberals cry “Trump”… at their peril
Less than a year out from the US presidential election, concerns about Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House now include warnings of a possible slip into dictatorship. Last weekend, in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan wrote of a “clear path to dictatorship in the United States,” one that is “getting shorter every day.” Liz Cheney, a former Republican member of Congress and potential 2024 third-party presidential contender, echoed the concern, warning that the country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship.”
Meanwhile, north of the border, a desperate Liberal Party and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, way down in the polls, are doing their best to paint their main rival, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, as a MAGA North incarnation of Trump, with everything that implies. As Politico reports, Trump’s influence over Canadian politics is significant, a potential “wild card” for Trudeau and a force that will shape the country’s next election, which is due by the fall of 2025 – but could come sooner.
MAGA-fying Poilievre
The Liberals have been working to tie Poilievre to Trump for months. They tested online attack ads ahead of an anti-Poilievre campaign back in November, and Trudeau claimed Poilievre was following Trump’s lead in abandoning Ukraine.
The logic of a Trump-Poilievre connection is simple. Trump is viewed poorly in Canada. The Liberals are drawing on Poilievre’s conservatism and faux-populism to cast him as a norm-busting, phony anti-elite politician hellbent on waging culture wars, demeaning the press, and attacking the country’s core institutions, such as the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
So far, efforts to MAGA-fy Poilievre appear to be failing. The Conservatives are comfortably ahead in the polls by double digits, including two recent surveys – one by Abacus Data and one by Nanos Research – that found them ahead by nearly 20 points.
The Liberals are more than eight years into government and showing their age. And while they managed to come back from polling deficits ahead of the 2019 and 2021 elections – and retain government, despite winning fewer votes than the Conservatives – so far Poilievre has proven a stronger leader than either Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole, who led the Conservatives in the last two outings. Poilievre has better control over his caucus than his predecessors. His messaging and focus is on economic issues, particularly the housing crisis, and that resonates with Canadians.
Trump vs. Trudeau, Take Two
Americans worried about Trump 2.0 believe they are staring down a real threat to the republic. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote earlier this week, Trump’s “increasingly unapologetic anti-democratic rhetoric” seems likely to foreshadow a threat to the country’s constitution and its checks and balances. There are fears he will stack appointments with cronies and ignore limits on presidential powers while finding willing accomplices in Congress and state legislatures. Will the man who refused to accept the 2020 election outcome accept 2024’s results if he loses? And, if he wins, will he leave quietly in 2028?
If Trump wins, the US might not be the only country in trouble. Trudeau may face Trump’s wrath – especially after being used as a punching bag ahead of the Canadian election. In 2020, John Bolton detailed how much Trump dislikes Trudeau, an account that rings true in light of how rocky the relationship between the two leaders was. Those years included awkward bilateral meetings, summit showdowns, rebukes over policy decisions including Canadian military spending, and an acrimonious renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is little chance the relationship will improve if Trump wins in 2024, and voters are taking note.
An October poll by Abacus Data found that Canadians believe Poilievre would better manage Trump than Trudeau – 37% to 28%. The polling firm’s CEO David Colletto explained to the Toronto Star that a Trump win would not necessarily boost Trudeau’s reelection chances, as Liberals seem to believe. He noted that respondents see Poilievre and Trump as sharing certain conservative affinities and perspectives. In this way, at least, Poilievre’s alleged proximity to Trump for them is seen as a potential asset.
What’s next?
Americans must consider what a Trump 2024 win would mean. Graeme Thompson, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, warns that observers may be discounting the possibility of it hurting US democracy.
“I think people are underestimating – as they did in 2016 – the odds that Trump wins the next election and the potentially dire consequences for the US republic that could entail,” he says. “The campaign itself is going to be brutal, and there’s a good chance that the losing side rejects the outcome, regardless of who wins.”
Canada must also prepare for a Trump win, and the Liberals will be doing so while trying to use the former president and the MAGA crowd as an anti-Poilievre cudgel – a strategy that may not even work. While Thompson reminds us that Canada is great at managing its relationship with its southern neighbor, “it will need that skill more than ever if it faces a second Trump presidency.” Moreover, the governing party might wish to rethink its strategy.
“If the Liberals are still in power,” he says “they would be smart to de-personalize the relationship as much as possible – that’s to say, make it transactional and interest-based, especially given the bad vibes between Trump and Trudeau.”
Unless something changes, given the current polling data, the Liberals, despite their best efforts, might not be around long enough to take that advice.
Canada's Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre speaks in the House of Commons.
Poilievre is polling well despite crying "terror"
The political exchange was sparked when a 56-year-old New York man set out to attend a Kiss concert, but instead ended up driving his Bentley at high speed into a barrier at the border crossing, going airborne and exploding on impact, killing him and his wife.
Fox News was quick to report that it was believed to be a terrorist attack, and Republicans were quick to link it to Biden’s border policies. On Twitter, Ted Cruz called it a terrorist attack, as did GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called for a wall along the northern border.
In Canada’s House of Commons, before the facts were established, Poilievre asked about reports that the incident was linked to terrorism. After it became clear it had nothing to do with terrorists, the Liberals accused him of jumping to conclusions. When he was asked about it, Poilievre berated the reporter who posed the question, which commentators, including this writer, thought went too far. He also came under harsh criticism for voting against a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal and delivering a misleading explanation for the vote.
Both incidents gave Liberals the opportunity to attack him as dishonest, mean, and a Trumpy northerner, perhaps hoping for make a comeback in the polls. So far, that has not happened. The most recent poll from Nanos shows the Liberals so far behind that they are tied with the NDP, which could put pressure on the smaller party to force an early election. Seat projections show that the NDP would pick up seats if there was an election today, but that’s no guarantee since their voters might not like to see the NDP bring down Trudeau, opening a path to a Poilievre government.A proud conservative holds a sticker in Irvine, California.
Viewpoint: The era of limited government is over for conservatives
For decades, the coalition that made up American conservatism included the strong influence of limited-government libertarians who identified themselves as the “leave us alone coalition.” But amid the social and cultural clashes playing out in America in recent years, a new, more activist strain of conservatism is rethinking the political value of leaving key institutions alone: National Conservatism.
NatCons see an existential threat from the secular left, and they want to use the power of the state to put conservative values back in the center of public life.
These ideas were on full display during the National Conservative Conference in Miami, Florida, this week. For three days, hundreds of conservative activists, intellectuals, and aspiring politicos debated the future of America’s conservative movement at the third annual gathering of the National Conservative Conference.
So, who are NatCons and what do they want? The US conservative movement traces its roots back to British intellectuals like Edmund Burke who opposed the liberal theories of universal rights advanced by people like John Locke. It continues through to the conservatives who founded the National Review in the 1950s and who today love discussing these and other long-dead thinkers at institutions such as Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute. In recent years, this intellectual lineage was at risk of being rendered irrelevant by the unexpected political success of former President Donald Trump, who tore the conservative movement apart … but also gave it its most significant policy achievements in a generation.
Like the crews that show up after hurricanes, national conservatives see their job as rebuilding and revitalizing the intellectual foundations of conservatism to keep the movement alive for a new generation. Think MAGA, but with a Ph.D.
Chief among their tasks is helping conservatives challenge what they see as the biggest threat since communism: the woke left. The conservatives gathered in Florida believe leftists dominate US institutions, from academia to big business, and have long tried to dismantle the old American order grounded in faith and family values – and to replace it with an egalitarian world order. This, conservatives fear, would destroy what makes America unique, and great. While Trump’s message of making America great again resonates with this audience, there was open skepticism this week about the former president’s return to public life. Jewish yarmulkes were a more common sight than red MAGA hats, reflecting a very different wing of the Republican Party than those flocking to Trump rallies.
What’s the difference between national conservatism and regular old conservatism? Old conservatism, from the Barry Goldwater political realignment of the 1970s through the second Bush administration, was a mix of anti-communist national security hawks, evangelical voters in the 1980s and 90s, and economic free marketers who pushed for deregulation, low taxes, and open borders to unlock innovation. They agreed on the need for a robust military and a limited government focused solely on helping liberty flourish.
NatCons reject this. For them, conservative libertarianism failed to give working-class voters a reason to support the right. Combined with the electoral success of Trump’s populist economics and the fact that many believe the American left is a greater threat than anything happening abroad (with the possible exception of China), NatCons reject the free-market ideology of your father’s conservativism and see a role for a more robust and muscular leader who uses power to correct America’s course. The movement is anti-China, anti-big tech, anti-bureaucrat, and pro-God.
This means a deep disdain for the US civil service, a constant source of derision. They want leaders to fight the deep state, confront the liberal media, go after leftist academics they say are destroying education, and punch back when big businesses reflexively adopt liberal causes while ignoring the priorities of tens of millions of America’s religious and cultural conservatives.
Republican politicians in Miami clearly sensed a moment of opportunity. “Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told attendees. West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, meanwhile, shared his journey from welder to combatant against monied capitalists on behalf of his coal-mining constituents.
Nobody embodies the movement more than Florida’s young Gov. Ron DeSantis, who got a standing ovation after an hour-long, policy-heavy speech touting his accomplishments in confronting the media and big tech and his unique approach to COVID – a not-so-subtle dig at Trump, who elevated the person who, for conservatives, became the face of a rotten administrative state: Anthony Fauci. DeSantis’s speech directly referenced the quote from Trump advisor Steve Bannon that a country is more than an economy. This idea has turned into a nationalist creed that the government must offer more to its people than cheap Chinese imports, low-wage retail jobs, and a debased national culture.
National conservatism is an admission from the right that limited government did not work. It did not prevent jobs from moving to Mexico or stop China from stealing US intellectual property. It did not protect the nuclear family or create more two-parent households. It has not improved public schools, they say, or stopped enormous sums from being wasted in futile wars.
This movement sees itself explicitly representing a faction in a factionalized society that needs to fight to keep what it has the way the left has been fighting to take it. This is not a new movement, but it is a different form of conservatism that shares only a religious identity with your father’s conservatism. NatCons believe they are the future of the American right, and they are preparing to push the GOP in their direction through a declaration of policy principles that span from the bland to the radical.
The most radical – and one that’s causing division – is over the role of religion in public life. Some want to target Supreme Court decisions from the 1940s that expanded what had been a much more limited concept of the separation of church and state than Americans broadly accept today. A nationalist America is one with a strong conservative identity, one that until recently was largely religious in character.
Something not addressed at NatCon, however, was the rising diversity of America since the 1950s. At the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, America was 90% white and 90% Christian. Today, whites make up a shrinking segment of the population, and Christians are rapidly becoming a religious minority – still dominating Jews, Muslims, or Hindus in number but nowhere near as dominant as they were even 40 years ago as church attendance has plummeted. The collapse of the national religious identity has given way to secular leftism. NatCons, in turn, want to roll back the clock on social change by allowing states to bring religion back into public schools.
So can national conservatism tolerate dissent? Can it live with secular, childless, elite-educated America? Or is this yet another faction in a rapidly factionalizing American that cannot tolerate living in the same country as its cultural and ideological foes? The movement to protect the dying cultural vestiges of pre-2000s America is about more than simply making space for the religious right; it’s about reversing the dominance of the secular left. It’s unclear whether there’s room to tolerate those they see as sneering elites in academia and woke corporations, and who, in a healthy democracy, occasionally win elections.
Conservatives have factionalized themselves for years between “neoconservatives,” “populist conservatives,” and “free market conservatives,” and the religious among them grew up quite comfortable in their own strong identities – be they Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish.
While these groups mixed comfortably in an air-conditioned ballroom in Miami, it is unclear how being positioned to fight an ideological war for the soul of a nation against the enemies within is compatible with America as a pluralistic liberal society that has thrived on mitigating differences through politics. If the US is to successfully transition from its roots as a male-dominant, white Christian nation to a multiethnic pluralistic society, the factions need to find a common language.
But a language of accommodation is lacking. Public opinion polling frequently finds that Americans on both the right and left see the country’s biggest problems differently. Apart from education and church attendance, geography is increasingly the most important marker of political affiliation as Americans are clustering in places that are more culturally homogenous.
Many fear that America will be lucky if politics remains the only place where these cultural differences are fought. Too many countries have already shown us what happens when ethnic and religious groups find themselves uncomfortable with their neighbors. Today’s fiery political rhetoric could become tomorrow’s firebombs unless ideologues on the left and right make space for one another.
Nothing in Miami suggested we are close to that point.
Jon Lieber is the lead US political analyst at Eurasia Group.
NatCon 2022: Conservatives rethink foundations of the American right
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC reports from the 2022 National Conservative Conference in Miami, Florida.
What is national conservatism?
I'm down here in Miami, Florida, attending the third annual National Conservative Conference where we're hearing from a large group of conservatives who want to rethink the foundations that have held together the American Right for the last 50 years. Part of this is in response to Donald Trump's surprising election in 2016 and his dismantling of the conservative coalition that had supported the Republican Party to that point. Another big theme that we're hearing about is a reaction to what folks here call the woke Left who, in their mind, have dominated educational, business, and cultural institutions for a very long time and have pushed out the traditional Christian conservative values that built this country.
Coming out of that, some of the conference organizers want to explicitly allow states to bring back religious education into schools in order to make the United States once again a more explicitly Christian nation. Other folks here put an emphasis on de-emphasizing the role of free market economics, in what used to be known as the conservative three-legged stool between cultural conservatives, national conservative hawks, and free market economics. They want to take economics out of this altogether and capitalize on the political gains that were made by President Donald Trump, pushing a much more economically populist type of political philosophy.
And then I think one of the final big themes that we're hearing about today is that the era of limited government is over in the US. For the folks that are gathered here today, they see a much more robust role for taking power in the US and then using that power to advance conservative causes. For example, by reforming the civil service —— one speaker talked about putting term limits in place, not only for elected officials, but also for federal bureaucrats —— so that you didn't have these group of empowered Americans who had these jobs for decades and decades and could push policies that the national conservative movement does not like.
The conference has gathered together a range of folks from political philosophers, religious leaders, several leading Republican politicians including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Senator Rick Scott, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, along with a number of conservative intellectuals who are engaging in this robust debate around the future of what conservatism is in the US politics.
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