Buy a chainsaw or build a wall: the Right's political dilemmas

We risk facing a choice between a big authoritarian state run by the progressive left or a big authoritarian state run by the nationalist right.

Milei or Trump? Musk or Vance? Meloni or Salvini? Perhaps Badenoch or Farage?

The political right faces a dilemma, a path of liberty, openness to the world and small government or a path of big state, isolationism and social control. The debate is in its early days with some spectacularly confused positioning and policy. The confusion is best illustrated in the approach taken by Donald Trump to his new administration with, on one hand Robert J Kennedy Jr promising state-led controls over food and drugs while Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are given the task of reducing regulation and the size of the federal administration, presumably with Milei’s chainsaw in mind.

Is a government led by the right going to be a government that, in the tradition of conservatism, distrusts the overweening power of a central state or will it be one that believes big government is just fine so long as the good guys are in charge? I don’t know the answer to this question but the dominant strain in right-of-centre politics is a long way removed from Reagan’s belief that the government is not your friend. Sometimes this is wrapped up in old-fashioned paternalism but the post-liberal right dislikes the institutions of international capitalism believing that the failures of ‘the west’ stem from those institutions. Free trade, a rules-based international economic system and mobile financial investments are now the enemy rather than the route to wealth and prosperity.

Unless, of course, you are Javier Milei who believes that free trade, open markets and a small state represent the route to prosperity. And that the way to transform an economy is sound money, less regulation and free markets, the very thing that National Conservatives reject:

“But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.”

The central premise here is that a nation isn’t merely a place of shared identity, history and culture but an active entity - the active entity - in the operation of economic policy, a denial of individual initiative, creativity and agency. The National Conservative right rejects the ideas of the enlightenment - the liberal order - wishing to return to a god-fearing, hierarchical and state-managed society. All contained within a self-sufficient and protected nation.

The rejection of international markets, “tariffs are great” says Donald Trump, is excused by the idea that international capitalism is, definitionally, amoral and therefore corrupting. This is the world of David Cameron and George Osborne’s ‘global race’ where nations compete for prizes and where the idea of ‘security’ is given greater emphasis than the search for economic growth. We hear terms like ‘energy security’ and ‘food security’ where the meaning is essentially a self-sufficiency verging on autarky.

Yet, because Javier Milei cries ‘afuera’ as he tears down the institutions of modern, progressive government, he became a hero to the very people who don’t want to remove regulations just to rip out the bits of government they don’t like and replace them with stuff they do. Lots of excitable Reform UK supporters punch the air at Milei’s achievements (especially when attached to the symbology of that chainsaw) while calling for the nationalisation of water supply and steel production, the very antithesis of Milei’s programme. The Right is very confused but, I’ve a feeling it will end up being more like Trump or Marine Le Pen than Milei (or even the surprisingly moderate Giorgia Meloni), a combination of crude nationalism and opposition to the ideologies of the progressive centre and left. The fetish of nation is the National Conservative’s elemental truth, the thing that unites. And this nation is pure, perhaps not racially pure as with past nationalisms, but free from the corruption of liberalism with a state dedicated to protecting that purity from outsiders - from the globalist.

The left coined the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a catch-all description for the economic order created after WW2 with its associated collection of international agencies (most significantly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). The term, however, quickly became meaningless as ‘neoliberal’ came to describe anything and everything that left wing writers didn’t like about capitalism. The right, in developing a nationalist agenda, adopted the same concept (and many of the same critiques) of an international order ‘controlling’ the world’s economy but chose the term created by left-wing academics instead - ‘globalism’. And this slightly paranoiac ideology has public support, lots of people (despite happily buying foreign stuff) believe that there really is some sort of global race between nations and that the ‘globalist’ agenda stacks the odds against us:

“Western voters’ support for trade liberalization and multilateral cooperation has fallen by nearly half since the end of the Cold War, much of this coming before the 2008 global financial crisis. The pace and extent of this decline in public support for such liberal internationalist policies have varied across the West. Yet in one Western democracy after another, voters have turned increasingly to candidates and parties advocating fewer international ties.”

What we call populism exploits this disconnection largely by stressing the unfair, exclusionary nature of the international economy and the profits that large businesses extract from that system. In the old days this would have been a left wing position since labour unions typically oppose free trade and liberal employment laws but since the left’s de facto capture by public sector interests, some on the right have taken on the idea that migration, trade and the financial system act against the interests of workers. Supporters of Reform or Trump or Le Pen display a vague hankering for an imagined past when thousands of men walked to work in factories, whiled away their weekend evenings in trade clubs playing dominoes and were content with their lot.

At the heart of the right’s dilemma therefore is how to offer assurance and protection to people fearful of international competition while seeking to make the economy more competitive by reducing the size and power of the administrative state. The Farage, Trump position is quite cynical here believing that the public will vote for them if they talk ‘bigly’ about the condition of the working man. And, in doing so, present a platform of protectionism, tariffs and economic controls.

But should a right wing government act as Donald Trump says he will and defend the scale of the welfare state or will it see the end to the age of ‘free stuff’? If the right thinks like Milei then they will conclude that the biggest reason for the west’s sclerotic economic performance isn’t globalism but over-regulation, if you want to make the world better for workers then you have to start with economic growth not protectionism. But if the right thinks like Trump and le Pen then the reverse is true, protectionism and a new mercantilism become the political priorities along with state intervention (see Richard Tice’s desire to nationalism the UK’s steel industry) to prevent foreign ownership. And, for the UK with two-thirds of the economy linked to international trade, protectionism presents the risk of economic crisis on a scale not seen since the 1970s.

At the moment the right is held together (not everywhere as the UK shows) by either the failing of centrist and centre-left governments or else by a shared concern about the negative impacts of immigration and other ‘progressive’ social policies. In government, right wing politicians will have to make the choice between ideas taken from the traditional trade union left and support for more open trade, deregulation and reducing the scale of government. And they will be making those choices in the context, especially in Europe, of a stagnant economy. Many of the new mercantilist ideas are popular but if people like Milei are correct this popularity simply reflects people supporting the ‘free stuff’ culture that has resulted in the unaffordable state.

For the two leaders of the right in Britain, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, the policy confusion is manifest. Leaving aside that Badenoch clearly doesn’t like Farage, both Reform and the Conservatives are unstable. Reform because it is a coalition of the disaffected and the reasons for disaffection are not always easy bedfellows plus Farage wants to lead a mob not a government. The Conservatives, in contrast, still see themselves as the natural party of government temporarily outside that divinely-ordained role. Badenoch is trying to resist writing a whole programme for government at least four years before one is needed but, in doing this, finds herself speaking in vague terms about her values and the meaning of conservatism. This is not without foundation - the Conservative Party’s problems are as much about organisation as they are about policy - but more attention needs directing to the reasons for public disaffection. Plus maybe some ambition for Britain.

Nevertheless, the right’s division between what we might call ‘nativists’ and ‘globalists’ is real and is reflected everywhere across the democratic world. The basis for a successful right-of-centre government needs to recognise the importance of those international economic institutions, understand that places like China don’t play by the rules, and appreciate that the scale of international migration is disrupting societies everywhere. At the same time, the idea that ‘nation’ is everything must be resisted and the ideas of open trade, free markets and enterprise are just as important to the success and identity of the west as faith, family values and the rule of law. Conservatives should want to conserve, in some cases restore, these ideas and values. Isolationism and a preference for backing up trade with the gun boat might work short term for a rich and powerful USA but for Britain, France and Germany - nations made rich by international trade - it would be the worst policy. If the debate on the right is won by nativists like Marine le Pen and Richard Tice, or even (Conservatives beware) Miriam Cates, the result for our nations will be a choice between a big authoritarian state run by the progressive left or a big authoritarian state run by the nationalist right.