"It could buy me a boat": how elite conservatives lost touch with their voters

if you treat your voters as irredeemably naff, you deserve to lose

“But it could buy me a boat,” sings Chris Janson, “It could buy me a truck to pull it.

It could buy me a Yeti 110 iced down with some silver bullets”

It’s a game we play sometimes. Thinking about what we’d buy if we had a million dollars. Chris Janson dreams of going fishing on a good boat with a cooler filled with beer. Now that might not be your idea of what to buy with a million dollar windfall but it is part of a story, “they call me redneck, white trash and blue collar”, of what an ordinary American would choose to get with their Powerball winnings.

We, and by we I mean people on the thinking right, have an idea about what is important. But do we really understand what the ordinary working class American or Brit or Frenchman really wants? Too often we allow our preferences to shade what should be built, what should be sold and what is good. People sneer at Deano with his four-bed Barretts house, his leased Audi and his plastic lawn with grey garden furniture. But when Deano gets more cash he isn’t going to move to a Cotswold village to buy a cottage, he’s going to buy a bigger detached house with a double garage to store his bigger Audi and his wife’s Range Rover Evoque.

Aaron Renn, the American urbanist and social observer, has remarked a few times that conservative-inclined people like him tend to live in places filled with people who aren’t remotely conservative-inclined:

“Ask yourself: Who is more likely to be buying traditionally produced artisanal products? Who is more likely to prioritize “buying local” over patronizing the big box chain? Who is more likely to preserve or rehab historic buildings? Who wants to landscape with “native plantings”? Who actually lives in those cute New England towns? To ask these questions is to answer them.

Think about small town America. One would think that conservatives would be flocking to these places, rehabbing old Victorian homes, or opening a coffee shop or bookstore on the town’s Main Street. This does sometimes happen. But whenever we come across a high quality, intact, thriving small town, very often we discover that it’s a liberal enclave.”

For all that conservative writers and thinkers talk about what we have lost and fantasise about “...Norman Rockwell paintings, pictures of cute New England towns, preppy clothing, 1950s family scenes, Beach Boys-era Southern California…” The reality is that the preservation of these things is mostly a preserve of wealthy liberals not conservatives. There are plenty of social media accounts posting pictures of winding lanes, thatched cottages and sun reflecting off the golden stone of churches but the reality is that this sort of right-wing world is the preserve of a few (city-dwelling) young fogeys and doesn’t remotely reflect the actual demographic of right-leaning voters. Here’s Renn again on those Republican voters:

“Visit rural America and see plenty of people driving $80,000 super duties, or owning a $25,000 side by side or a high-end fishing boat. Or spend some time talking to them and learn that their family has season passes to Walt Disney World even though they live hundreds of miles from Florida.”

These folk made the money and pretty much did what Chris Janson says he’ll do when he gets that pile - buy a truck and a boat then go fishing. Rednecks made good don’t want to return (even “RETVRN”) to some mythical better past that never existed. Here’s Dave Burge, ‘iowahawk’ on Twitter, laying down the hard truth for those fogeys:

“See kids, there were two 1950s. There was the 1946-54 Fifties, and the 1955-65 Fifties. The Sixties were actually 1966-72, and the Seventies were 1973-82. Compared to today, all of them sucked balls.”

And Dave is right. And the thing is that Bubba off fishing in his new Ford truck and Deano in the garden of his new build outside Doncaster understand this a whole lot better than the people sharing Roger Scruton quotations and pictures of the Notre Dame on social media.

“It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.”

Here, in Scruton’s words, is the reactionary worldview defined. Scruton doesn’t need to define ‘beauty’ because he has said it against a dismissal of ‘kitsch’. And we know what that means, it means the naff. It is Michael McIntrye, it is Jack Vettriano, it is a Ford F350 Super Duty, and it is Chris Janson singing country music. Above all it dismisses much of what Deano and Bubba, their wives and children find beautiful because that is a degenerated beauty. In truth, for all that cathedrals, Bach’s B Minor Mass and Giotto’s crosses are indeed beautiful, the dismissal of Deano’s preference amounts to little more than snobbery. And why on earth should he support your political mission if it involves sneering at what he chooses to spend his money on?

Conservatives are often asked what they would conserve, usually as a sort of catch question that can be used to show how the right just want to slow down the advance of progress. But the answer is fairly simple: the things that provide us with joy, that frame our communities and which contribute to making our lives better. And this means more than either a faint nostalgia for an imagined past or a belief that my beauty and your beauty are the same. Indeed there are those who’d suggest that Renn’s talk of artisan bakeries and refurbished old houses merely reflect the fact that these places (the world of ‘libdemmery’ for the British) are homes to lots of wealthy people. And that the preservation is achieved as much by the use of ‘heritage’ to stop development as it is by crafters or nostalgia.

The lack of connection between the conservative-inclined voter and the elite conservatives who dominate thinking about policy is, I think, a much bigger problem for the British Conservative Party than it is for America’s Republicans. In part this reflects Britain's London-centred policy world. Just as we’d get very different attitudes to transport investment if all the transport planners were made to live in Aspatria, we’d understand the cultural and economic aspirations of Britain’s lower middle class if they weren’t treated as essentially a different species by people living in tiny London flats who have the task of crafting social and cultural policies for a conservative future. We’d hear a lot less about gentle density, tramways and bicycle lanes and rather more about car parking, family housing and airports.

There was a time when conservatives took the view that we could preserve the glories of our history and give Deano and his wife the chance to have a decent, even a big, house, a nice car each and the wherewithal to jet off to a hot country now and then for some well earned sun and sangria. If the ‘RETVRN’ meme has anything to say it is that we’d like it so Deano - or his wife - could afford to buy that family house on one wage, that the house will be big enough for the kids to have their own room, for there to be two reception rooms and space to park three of four cars. But to do this we need to face down the (increasingly lib dem voting and definitely wealthy) residents of those little towns with their artisan bakers, historic high street and ‘buy local’ schemes. More than anyone these are the people standing in the way of future Deanos and Sarahs having the lives their brains, efforts and luck deserve. First though, the people writing policies for British conservatives need to stop thinking those wealthy, lib dem voting, people are right about Deano with his boxy house and plastic grass.