Richard Wolffe: Britain allowed its populist right to rise. America should heed the warning [View all]

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Britain allowed its populist right to rise. America should heed the warning
Richard Wolffe

Instead of marginalizing fringe conservatives, the mainstream parties have embraced them. Now they’re shocked that the inmates are running the asylum


Friday 24 June 2016 10.36 EDT
Last modified on Friday 24 June 2016 12.01 EDT

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In Washington, congressional Republicans thought the Tea Party’s anti-establishment and anti-corporate spirit was fine to ignore as long they helped undermine President Obama.

Instead of ejecting them to join a third party, they embraced them, including their conspiracy theories about the president’s birth and religion. Now, after alternately ignoring and ridiculing Trump, they are shocked that the leader of the birther conspiracy is their nominee. The GOP’s short-term appeasement has imperiled its own future.

This weakness was summed up with more graphic eloquence by Sir Nicholas Soames, a senior Conservative MP and the grandson of Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about appeasement.

“If you have an Alsatian sitting in front of you, and it growls at you and bares its teeth, there are two ways of dealing with it,” he told the ConservativeHome website. “You can pat it on the head, in which case it’ll bite you. Or you can kick it really hard in the balls, in which case it’ll run away.”

Conservative leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have lacked the courage to kick anyone in the balls. Except, perhaps, themselves.

The second lesson is about the siren call of nationalism. In an age of fractured media and financial crisis, it is refreshingly simple to attract a hard core of passionate voters with a nationalist message.

Nationalism is a unifying force that exploits the resentment of economic and demographic upheaval. It is much easier to blame shadowy foreign powers and immigrants than it is to help older workers adapt to new skills in new industries.

But the forces of nationalism, once unleashed, are not easily contained. David Cameron’s response to a Scottish independence vote was to stoke his own nationalism with a policy of “English votes for English laws”. Less than a year later, English nationalism destroyed his hold on power.

The anti-immigrant nativism among the conservative base of the Republican party is no less mortal a threat to the GOP. After pandering to the wall-builders and anti-amnesty crowd for years, Republican leaders are now rightly fretting they will lose an entire generation of Latino voters. Like Cameron, they only have themselves to blame.

The third lesson is a generational one. British voters under 34 were overwhelmingly supportive of staying inside the EU, but they were also the least likely to vote. That poor turnout meant the economic fate of millennials was decided by their parents and grandparents.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/britain-right-wing-brexit-america-trump?CMP=share_btn_fb