The Conservatives are in crisis because “popular capitalism” is no longer possible
It was not meant to be this way. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and her allies championed what they called “popular capitalism”. According to this theory, voters would be given a permanent stake in the market through the sale of council housing and shares in privatised utilities.
And, for a period, it worked. The sale of more than a million council homes helped transform Labour voters into Tory loyalists. In 1984, shares in the privatised BT were 10 times oversubscribed, gifted a windfall to the government and voters. The sale of British Gas (exemplified by the populist “Tell Sid” campaign), British Airways and the water companies followed. By the end of the 1980s, share ownership among the public had risen from seven per cent to a quarter.
The revenue from privatised assets, and the North Sea oil boom, underwrote Thatcherism as unemployment spiked, and funded costly income tax cuts. But these unique circumstances cannot be repeated. As left-wingers have taken to remarking, the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people’s assets.
Ok, this is a common narrative in both Britain and in the US about Republicans, and it is definitely true, there is an intellectual exhaustion and a lack of anything positive to sell from conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. The public is more skeptical of unfettered capitalism and increasingly feels like the marketplace doesn’t work for them. The low hanging policy fruit for conservatives has been picked. This narrative has been true for at least ten years now.
But what I’m confused by is this: you’d think the left would have decisively taken power in a durable way given this. And yet, in both the US and UK, the right has managed to hang onto power, and the left parties are merely competitive at best. In the UK, Labor still lags slightly behind conservatives albeit somewhat less so than one might expect. In the US, Democrats look like they’ll make gains, but the polling leads haven’t been large enough or durable enough to guaranteed that they’ll win any real power back in either 2018 or 2020, at least from our present vantage point. This despite our current president being someone that a consistent majority of people disapprove of.
Why isn’t the left more successful? Why aren’t we at the start of a generation of left party dominance as was seen in the mid-20th century?
Abstract meta-level answer: there is never going to be a long-lasting stable period of one-party electoral dominance in a first-past-the-post system unless something extremely abnormal is going on. The second party will reconfigure itself however it has to in order to be an attractive alternative to ~50% of the voters – you’re not just going to get a rump minority throwing away its votes indefinitely. And, indeed, both major parties have substantially reconfigured themselves several times in living memory.
Concrete object-level answer: the right’s been trying to stoke a culture war since the mid-’90s, in the mid-’00s the left finally forgot the lessons of the late ‘60s and took the bait, and until that winds down it doesn’t really matter what policy positions get taken or what scandals come into view. So long as polarized politics invade the entirety of public memespace, so long as everyone knows that the Enemy Tribe is basically Satan, neither party is going to be able to grab a large enough share of the electorate for even a mayfly mandate.