The ongoing disaster in Afghanistan is only the latest fiasco to provoke fury at the unseriousness of Boris Johnsons government. In fact, for the past 20 years British and American conservatism has seemed ever more unrealistic: its policies ever more like fantasies, its relationship with the truth ever looser, its leaders ever less focused and competent.
This persistent unrealism has had terrible costs. And yet, without seeming to have mastered the basics of governing, conservatives still win plenty of elections, and dominate how politics is talked and thought about. To many voters and commentators, conservative government, however much it fails in practice, is still the realistic option.
This puzzle increasingly frustrates and baffles the rights enemies, particularly pragmatic centrists, who believe governments must above all be competent, orderly and practical, with defined and achievable goals. In parliament Keir Starmer is always telling Johnson sternly that he must get a grip. The line is meant to highlight the governments chaos and laziness, and to suggest that Labour would do better.
Both parts of this message are quite plausible. Yet as Tory support has held steady throughout the prime ministers leadership, Starmers favourite line has started to sound incredulous as well. How can a government so removed from reality, he seems to be asking, remain so politically strong?
But perhaps we should ask a different question. Are Starmer and his advisers, like other supposedly rational critics of conservatism from remainers to never-Trump Republicans thinking too narrowly about what is realistic in politics?
For some political theorists, descendants of Machiavelli, realism is not about practical policies and competent governance. To them, politics is fundamentally about power and action, not ideals. So political realism can take many different forms. It can be presentational choosing a party leader who looks prime ministerial; ideological ensuring that your partys worldview is energising or relevant; strategic building a winning coalition; or even a bit fictional telling voters a story they want to hear. The sign of an effective politician, writes the Cambridge philosopher Raymond Geuss in his 2008 book Philosophy and Real Politics, is the ability to choose skilfully which models of reality to use in a certain context.
Johnsons endless, shameless promises have made him the leading British practitioner of this kind of political magic realism which works, like populism in general, for as long as a decisive number of voters believe in it. Meanwhile, the realism that Starmer offers is much more sober. It treats being politically realistic primarily as a form of self-denial.
In the late 20th century, centre-left politicians such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton greatly feared being seen as impractical dreamers. Their most formative years had been during the long ascendancies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, when the transatlantic right successfully sold itself to voters as a corrective to as conservatives put it the failed idealism and utopianism of the 1960s and 1970s. Thatcher and Reagan offered what you could call conservative realism. There is no alternative, Thatcher famously said, to free-market capitalism and a less egalitarian state and society.
New Labour and Clintons New Democrats largely accepted this. Blair was scornful towards those on the left who wanted to discuss the matter. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer, he told the 2005 Labour conference.
Since his government, Labour has slowly shed its faith in free-market capitalism. Yet except during Jeremy Corbyns leadership, the party has continued to believe that its politics must above all be realistic and that what is realistic is still basically set by the Tories, by rightwing newspapers and by relatively conservative swing voters. It is Labours job, the argument goes, to win power and improve peoples lives within those boundaries. Hence Starmers emphasis on patriotism, security and the family. Hence also his spin doctors portrayal of the Corbyn leadership essentially one long revolt against rightwing orthodoxies as a cautionary tale.
Under Starmer, Labour has gone back to being a party that looks at Britain and its politics with a wary eye. Yet in the meantime Johnsons Tories have abandoned Thatchers conservative realism for a much more speculative mixture of populism, nationalism, authoritarianism and economic interventionism. Its unclear how much the government has actually thought about this political recipe theres often a sense of the ingredients being thrown together in a panic but for many voters the product has been very palatable, even addictive, like junk food. By comparison, Starmers offer to govern Britain more sensibly and competently, in ways he has mostly yet to specify, can seem a bit worthy and bland.
And for all the Johnson governments short-term fixes and fantastical plans, his party has not stopped thinking about political realities. As their relentlessly partisan distribution of government contracts and positions in the cultural establishment is making clear, the Conservatives can still be conscientious when their own interests, rather than the public interest, are at stake. If you want to think about politics, writes Geuss, think first about power Who does what to whom for whose benefit?
Arguably Blair and Clinton and their successors, despite all their calls for the centre-left to be more realistic, have not practised enough of this kind of clear-sighted, ruthless politics at least, not outside their own parties. New Labour and the New Democrats left the power structures of their countries, which favour the right, largely intact. Since then, Donald Trumps frighteningly uninhibited presidency has made the Democrats more assertive. But in Britain, Johnsons sometimes demagogic premiership has not had a similar effect on Labour. Unlike Joe Biden, Starmers idea of a realistic centre-left politics remains almost ostentatiously modest.
This autumn, its possible that difficult decisions about state spending and taxes after the pandemic or amid another resurgence will force the Johnson government to behave in a way that is seen as more realistic. Some commentators and many opposition politicians are looking forward to the great procrastinator finally having to make choices.
But enemies of Conservatism shouldnt assume that these dilemmas will necessarily trouble the Tories for long. If switching back to a strict diet of Thatcher-style conservative realism proves too much for Johnson, the party has a suitable replacement, the much leaner chancellor, Rishi Sunak, an enthusiast for free markets and a sceptic about government. Such a U-turn would almost certainly be accepted and defended by its MPs and the rightwing press, like countless Tory U-turns in the past.
As long as most of the British media, most of the business world and even many leftwing voters see Tory rule as the default, there may be no such thing as an unrealistic Conservative government. A truly realist Labour party would want to do something about that.
- Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
