(Bloomberg Opinion) -- One of the most striking frescoes of the Renaissance is to be found in the council chamber in Siena. It has an unusual subject. Painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1339, just a decade before the city was ravaged by the Black Death, “The Allegory of Good and Bad Government” portrays two worlds. On the good-government side, the shops are open, builders are at work, people are dancing and Justice is a beautiful woman, guided by God. “Turn your eyes to behold her,” implores the inscription below. “Look how many goods derive from her and how sweet and peaceful is that life of the city where is preserved this virtue who outshines any other.” On the bad-government side, Justice lies bound at the feet of the Tyrant, with the characters of Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division and War looking on.
Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic should dwell on Lorenzetti’s fresco. Samuel Lubell, a Polish-born political scientist, argued that, in any era, there are always two parties: a “party of the sun,” which creates the light and heat, and a “party of the moon,” which “shines in the reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.” Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the right has been the “party of the sun” in the United States and Britain. Now it is in danger of becoming the party of the moon unless it radically overhauls both its personnel and its ideas. Certainly, it has ended up on the bad-government side of Lorenzetti’s fresco.
Since 1979, the left has managed to install only four people in the White House or Downing Street — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on one side of the Atlantic, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on the other (and the latter never won an election). The right has established a clear advantage in two things — practical competence and intellectual dynamism.
The first is a traditional advantage of conservatism. Both Republicans and the Tories have based their electoral appeal on the idea that they will do a better job of looking after your money and protecting your country than the other guys. Vote for the left if you want to build castles in the air. But if you’re more interested in preserving the value of your house and keeping criminals off the streets, then vote for the right.
However, the right has also been more dynamic, generating the intellectual light that the moon can do no more than reflect. Since 1979, modern conservatism has produced nearly all the important ideas that have changed the political universe, from privatization to welfare reform to “broken windows” crime policy. These ideas may sound obvious today, but they were widely regarded as “crazy” when they were first floated in the work of maverick intellectuals, such as Milton Friedman in economics and James Q. Wilson in social policy. Indeed, those ideas became so mainstream that they changed the left, too. Clinton and Blair, the two most successful left-leaning politicians of the past 40 years, were often accused of being conservatives. Clinton balanced the budget and reformed welfare. Blair gave his party a new name, New Labour, and abandoned the dream, laid out in Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution, of nationalizing the means of production.
Of course, there were ups and downs in this era of conservative dominance — George W. Bush’s Iraq war and John Major’s wrestle with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism being just two downs — but the right has generally managed to stay on the “good government” side of Lorenzetti’s fresco while at the same time revolutionizing the idea of what “good government” has meant.
So you might imagine that in 2020, a year when the West is being menaced by a deadly disease and challenged by a new rival in the East, conservatives would have redoubled their advantage. This is a year when voters crave security and competence. Yet the conservative sun is fading.
In the United States, the polls indicate that Donald Trump is likely to lose the presidency to a 78-year old Joe Biden, while the Senate may change hands as well. In Britain, where the Tories have just finished their (virtual) annual conference, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s popularity has plummeted. Ten months after he won an astonishing 80-seat majority, he is being consistently outshone by Sir Keir Starmer, the new competent-looking Labour leader. In the Conservative Party the air is thick with talk of “life after Boris,” with backbenchers rallying behind Rishi Sunak, the bright, telegenic young chancellor, as the most likely replacement.
Driving all this is Covid — and the right’s inability to handle it. In both Britain and America, the supposedly competent side of the political spectrum has failed in its basic task of protecting its citizens from the virus.
In the United States, the number of deaths per million inhabitants is close to 600; in Britain it is pushing 650. By comparison, Canada is around 250 and Germany is just above 100. The best performers — Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and so on — are all below 50 deaths per million. Of course different countries count in slightly different ways, but the margins of difference are so enormous that the right cannot shrug them off. On Oct. 1, more new cases were announced in the Trump White House than in Taiwan, Vietnam and New Zealand combined. The economies of the best performers are all recovering strongly too.
Trump’s behavior has been bizarre, especially so since he caught Covid himself. Johnson was guilty of laziness, failing to attend early government meetings on the virus. More traditional conservatives — a Dwight Eisenhower, say, or a Winston Churchill — would have been shocked by the fact that, despite the peril to the nation, Trump and Johnson have surrounded themselves with mediocrities, chosen for their slavish loyalty rather than their competence.
Conservatives would have been horrified, too, by the way that this incompetence has extended to the management of the Western alliance. In every great crisis since the Second World War, the United States has taken the lead, usually followed by Britain. This time around, the Anglo-Saxon duo went the opposite direction, with Trump withdrawing from the World Health Organization and Britain embroiled in a prolonged fight with the European Union. If there is a leader of the free world now, it is, very reluctantly, Angela Merkel, who is retiring in all senses of that word.
Worst of all, the Anglo-Saxon right has been badly bested by the country that it regards as its main geopolitical competitor. Even if you allow for China’s murky role in the virus’s origin and apply a measure of skepticism to its official Covid figures, the regime in Beijing has done a far better job than Britain or America of keeping its people safe at home and projecting its soft power abroad.
Ending up on the bad-government side of the fresco could cost Republicans the White House and the Senate; it could also cost Johnson his job. In the great sweep of history, that might not matter much: Great parties can shrug off such personal setbacks. What’s worrying from the right’s perspective is the ideological hole that Covid has exposed in its philosophy of government. Or perhaps we should say philosophies.
Over the past 40 years, conservatives have embraced two philosophies of government. The first philosophy was outlined in Reagan’s famous remark, in his inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This made sense at the time: The U.S. government had become too big, too sprawling and too intrusive.
But gradually this hostility has frozen into dogma. Thus, tax cuts should be championed, regardless of the size of the deficit; public sector pay should be squeezed, regardless of talent; government shutdowns should be treated as a badge of honor. (“By the time we finish this poker game,” Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said during one standoff, “there may not be a federal government left, which would suit me fine.”) What’s more, this rhetoric has become hypocritical: America’s tax code is stuffed with exemptions and perks for special interests, not least those that favor Republicans.
The second of these philosophies has come to the fore under Trump. “Philosophy” might seem like the wrong phrase for this most anti-intellectual of presidents. Indeed, in some ways, Trump is barely a conservative at all, more a populist opportunist driven by emotion than by a core set of beliefs. But at the heart of “Make America Great Again” there is a Hamiltonian view of the state. The “energy in the executive” is to be celebrated so long as it is used to advance America’s power. Forget the free market; embrace “America First.” Peter Navarro, one of the president’s trade advisers, declared that “never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world” for essential goods.
In Britain, Johnson is a more natural conservative than Trump. Through a mixture of indolence and opportunism, though, he is heading down the Trumpian slalom. He won last year’s election by promising to spend more money on just about everything — just slightly less than Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s right-hand man, maintains some of the old Thatcherite fervor: He wants to turn Britain into a “meritocratic technopolis,” to “level up” the left-behind regions of the country and to reform the civil service. But there is a worrying gap between the vision of a lean, efficient Singapore-on-Thames and the chaotic reality of incompetent ministers and turmoil in Whitehall.
Both of these conservative philosophies have floundered in the Covid crisis. The “drown-government-in-a-bathtub” faction has been forcefully reminded that you need a decent state to provide essential public goods and rescue the economy when it goes into a nosedive. The “national greatness” faction has seen things look decidedly ungreat with Covid — and with perhaps worse to come. Trump and Johnson’s doctrine of self-sufficiency could mean high prices for consumers: Ninety percent of America’s generic drugs are made either in China or India, while a hard Brexit could savage Britain’s already damaged economy.
Not surprisingly, the right is now badly divided in both countries. The only thing that unites American conservatives is the need to appoint a conservative Supreme Court justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On everything else — taxes, free trade, foreign policy — the conservative family is more divided than at any point since Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential run in 1964. In Britain, the only thing Thatcher’s descendants can agree on is the need to get Brexit done: Once that is finished, the glue will disappear.
Will a new conservatism emerge? Perhaps, but only once it comes to terms with the two great themes of our age. The first, equality and fairness, is often tough territory for the right. The left’s call to punish the rich is a powerful one, particularly in an age of monopolistic tech tycoons and tax-dodging hedge funders. But conservatives can argue that the best way to include those who had been left behind is to grow the economy, and that the best way to advance non-discrimination is through meritocracy and equality of opportunity rather than affirmative action and equality of results.
This points to the second great wave: The need to reform and revitalize government. This should be natural territory for the right, which is mercifully free from the ties to public-sector unions that stymie the left’s thinking. (Search for “government reform” in this year’s Democratic platform. You won’t find it.) What the right needs is a new conservatism that goes beyond the withered husk of faux-Reaganism and the heady drugs of Trumpery and Brexit.
Tomorrow’s conservatives should instead draw on two things: the rich tradition of conservative and classical liberal political thought, and a pragmatic assessment of what works in government around the world. “Smart-government conservatism” should begin with the idea that if you believe in a small state, then you need a focused, efficient, competent one. That credo goes back to John Stuart Mill and the Victorian radicals who reduced the size of the British state from 80 million pounds in tax receipts in 1816 to under 60 million pounds in 1846 even as they increased its services — simply by stripping out all the aristocratic perks and sinecures. Its modern incarnation is on display in tiny Singapore, which boasts the world’s best schools and public health system by doing what Silicon Valley does: It hires selectively, pays well (its civil servants can make $1 million a year) and weeds out poor performers (including — please note, Joe Biden — bad teachers).
Next, smart-government conservatism should concentrate its spending on the poor. Why dole out money to hedge-fund managers, while leaving public hospitals so bereft of equipment that doctors have to bring in ski goggles to operate? A new generation of “blue-collar conservatives” who want to expand the state to help the poor are halfway there. The Republicans should get rid of all $1.6 trillion of exemptions (which go to the well-off) and introduce lower tax rates for all. Why do nine in 10 Americans need accountants to fill out their tax forms?
Conservatism has reinvented itself many times before: That is the secret of its endurance. The best way to think about its current malaise is to borrow from another Italian — this time, a Marxist. Observing the Great Depression, Antonio Gramsci, in his “Prison Notebooks,” offered this observation: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Look around the conservative Anglosphere and morbid symptoms abound — from the heretical (embracing protectionism) to the silly (criticizing mask wearers). But those should be a prompt to forget the old and find the new. Conservatives need to remind themselves that they have repeatedly reinvented their philosophy in the past — in the light of the rise of democracy, the spread of industrialization and the emergence of the welfare state. British and American conservatives have always avoided the continental European error of looking for last ditches to die in. But in order to repeat this trick yet again, they need to rethink their philosophy of government for an age of recurring pandemics and a new rising superpower in the East. Government is too important to be left to the left.
John Micklethwait is the editor in chief of Bloomberg; Adrian Wooldridge is the political editor of the Economist. They are the co-authors of “The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It,” published by Harper Via and Short Books.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.
Adrian Wooldridge is the political editor of the Economist and author of its Bagehot column.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.