On the Crossroads at the Edge of Empire

The fate of the conservative movement in the most loyal imperial satrapy

All my life…watching America

-Razorlight

You may recall the ‘throne room’ scene towards the beginning of the 1980 Flash Gordon film. In it, Ming the Merciless holds court over a throng of envoys from across the galaxy. These poor and desperate vassals caper and genuflect before him, hoping to win some small favour or, at least, spare themselves from his wrath.

This is something akin to the international scene in the developed world. At the centre, on his vast throne - a little rusty now, admittedly; a little tarnished, but still impressive - sits the Emperor himself, the United States of America. Gathered around are the leaders and elites of the Empire’s various satrapies, near and far - the Canadians, the Japanese, the New Zealanders, the Italians - all jostling for attention and hoping perhaps to obtain some small morsel from his hand. They bring gifts and entertainments; they bray with laughter at his jokes; they hang on his every word. When he isn’t looking they whisper to each other about how coarse and oafish he is, of course - but they also secretly admire his bravado and forthrightness. They yearn to bask in received glory by being identified as his favourites.

What passes for Britain’s intellectual elite are the most callow and debased of all those gathered about the metaphorical American throne. It would be charitable to say that they were in the grip of an inferiority complex - but there is nothing complex about the underlying psychology. These people still cling to the idea that they ought somehow to be considered influential players on the world stage. But they also know themselves to have been utterly eclipsed by their big, upstart younger brother. So, like a second-rate bully who chums around with the biggest kid on the playground, they dedicate themselves entirely to echoing his every sentiment and obeying his every whim.

Hence the absurd, ‘monkey see, monkey do’ way with which these people mimic the trends which they perceive in the American media they consume - like a younger sibling prancing about and copying an older brother or sister in half-awareness of what is really going on. And hence the thinness and emptiness of our current politics, which increasingly resembles a sort of playground pantomime - a gaggle of children playing at something they dimply perceive to have import, but which they do not truly understand.

This has hitherto largely been a problem on the left. We have for a long time been forced to witness the sad, strange spectacle of Britain’s ‘thought leaders’ unthinkingly parroting the slogans and received opinions of their progressive American betters in badly pronounced toddler-language - blah blah police brutality, blah blah systemic racism, blah blah fascism, blah blah reproductive rights - never once stopping to consider whether the British context may be the teensiest bit different to how it is for their American counterparts. In their false sophistication these people have spent the last eight years working hard to ‘out Blue’ Blue America on the issues of the day, in the belief that this is what grownups do, and the result has been that, in the aftermath of Trump’s latest victory, they have been made to appear like the vapid intellectual juveniles they really are.

It would be a tragedy if this were also to become the fate of the British right - a sort of half-baked, pound-shop, playground imitation of MAGA Republicanism. There is no doubt that success will always breed imitators and that it is helpful to have international allies and advisors, not to mention donors, and Nigel Farage’s recent meeting with Elon Musk (often reportedly being the prelude to a $100 million donation) must of course be seen in that light. But, more broadly, there is a failure on the British right - just as there is a corresponding failure on the British left - to think deeply and rigorously about what a genuinely rejuvenated British form of their brand of politics ought to look like, as opposed to mere mimicry. And there is a danger that British conservatives are, in the coming years, going to produce merely a brittle simulacrum of what they think approximates the attitudes and policies of their American equivalents, rather than a genuinely lasting and important political movement.

In some ways, this failure on the part of British conservatives to grapple with the matter of their own distinctiveness is to be expected. Empires are always imbued with ideas, because that is how they are held together across time despite their internal frictions and differences. Patchworks of cultures, languages, ethnicities and civilisations have to be stitched together by a set of shared concepts (often religious or quasi-religious, of course) which are imposed. And this is even more true of the American Empire, which does not have the formal political cohesion which the Romans, Mughals or Ottoman Turks enjoyed. America’s Empire is chiefly conceptual (although it has its military and commercial components) - held together by an utterly dominant overarching set of cultural beliefs, supported by dominant ownership of the means of cultural production - and it is, in light of this, natural that in the imperial vassals competing value systems would struggle to emerge.

And yet one cannot help but feel that the British right would, like the British left has done with its equivalents over the Atlantic, be undergoing a failure of imagination to directly ape the substance of MAGA Republicanism without reflecting on how it is that such a movement came together. To put things simply, the British right is heading towards a position of imitating content, when the proper lesson to learn about the success of Trump in 2024 really concerns form. After the failures of 2020, American conservatives - anybody who has followed the movement from this side of the Atlantic will be aware of this - underwent a strenuous, rigorous period of reflection in which they thought very hard, and carefully, about how success could be achieved and what it would look like. They devoted serious intellectual resources to understanding where their movement was coming from, the underlying philosophy on which it rested, and the ideas which animated it. The story of this intellectual project is yet to be written - a subscription to the Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind might be good places to begin to get a flavour of it - but the fruits are now becoming self-evident as the new administration takes shape and it makes clear that it has serious plans for what it will do in office.

That intellectual project of course rested on a pre-existing structure of think-tanks, colleges and independent scholars which in international terms is comparatively vast in scale. But the point remains: the American right understands that politics is a matter of ideas, and that careful thought about ideas is absolutely necessary in establishing a political movement that will endure and be of constitutional, rather than fleeting, importance. This appears to be what has been constructed in the run-up to the 2024 election. And it has clearly become a movement which will transcend and long outlive its chief protagonist, Donald Trump.

The British right does not currently really understand this, caught up as it is in unsophisticated gesture politics, which is why we should be concerned that it will be reduced to simply trying to copy and paste the end-product of MAGA Republicanism into its agenda rather than engaging with the question (which their American cousins have squarely confronted) of what an authentic domestic form of conservatism really looks like. There is still time to remedy this problem - barring calamity (which, to be clear, with the current government is by no means to be entirely ruled out) - the next general election is almost five years way. That’s long enough to think properly and carefully about how a proper intellectual agenda can be constructed and then sold to the public. But the work has to start soon, and be serious and structural rather than just a matter of throne-room genuflection and pantomime.