Congrats Boris, R.I.P Fiscal Conservatism

Although Boris Johnson may have defused a ten-megaton bomb of neo-Marxism in Britain and assured the final passage of Brexit, his Conservative victory is hardly a victory for conservatism. On the far side of the Atlantic, as over here, fiscal responsibility has taken a lethal beating.

Reviewing a failed campaign manifesto by Starbucks titan Howard Schultz a million years ago last spring, Andrew Ferguson wrote, with his typical combination of wit and sagacity, “Schultz hopes to define himself as the political equivalent of a jackalope: the ‘fiscally conservative social liberal’ that folklorists and mythologists have been describing for decades, though no one has ever seen one in the flesh.” Ferguson pointed out that the voters of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who gave us the Donald Trump presidency “are, alas, best described as ‘fiscally liberal social conservatives.’”

Fiscally liberal social conservatism is a force whose potential electoral power has been greatly underestimated. It’s like a huge basin of light sweet crude that sat patiently about three feet beneath the surface of politics, just waiting for some ragged crew of Beverly Hillbillies to stumble upon it and reap gigantic rewards. Donald Trump achieved the presidency by sheer instinct, not by crunching data and judiciously weighing competing voter interests. He sensed that enormous success could be had by melding a pugnacious brand of cultural conservatism — opposing political correctness and loudly denouncing illegal immigrants — with a defense of the liberal welfare state and its entitlements.