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Notes -
Your Victories are Temporary, Theirs are Permanent
The most important thing lesson reified by recent political events is that while conservatives can win by democratic means, they cannot rule by them.
This is the single absolute lesson of the last fifteen years of democratic populist conservatism, from Meloni to Orban, from Bolsonaro to Trump. Progressive victories are eternal and irreversible, conservative victories are limited and ephemeral.
Understanding why requires only a cursory glance at the underlying constitutional mechanics of every major Western or Western-adjacent democracy (the same also applies in large part to many non-Western democracies, like India, although they have their own local differences).
The 20th century saw the construction of a number of constitutionally protected edifices that make conservative governance effectively impossible. These include, but are not limited to, the ECHR and European Union and the integration of the first or both into the constitutional structures of pretty much all European countries, the CRA in the United States, the emergence of supremely powerful progressive Supreme Courts in Canada, Italy and elsewhere, forms of devolution that strip precisely the powers from national governments required to implement conservative policies, and the emergence of a vast legal sector - particularly in the Anglo countries - designed to stymie policy implementation by using much of the above.
For example, adding a new citizen requires only that a single administration (which probably didn’t win the support of an absolute majority of voters even once, depending on where we’re talking about) admit and naturalize - via work or family visa, refugee status, legalizing illegal migrants, whatever - a single individual. Stripping someone of citizenship almost always requires constitutional change, in some cases unambiguously (eg second gen birthright citizenship in the US) but in many other cases (many EU countries) practically, because appeals to the ECHR, constitutionally enshrined, will almost always be won by appealing parties except in - and sometimes even in - the most egregious cases. This is occasionally possible for actual terrorists but certainly not for large migrant groups. This inherent imbalance - progressives can easily add a million citizens, conservatives can never remove a million citizens - cannot be addressed by democratic means, because national-level extreme supermajorities are very unusual in democracies. It is coup-complete not because reactionaries can never get into power, but because they cannot exercise the power that their democratic majority should rightfully give them.
Even where legislation was passed by the regular process rather than constitutional amendment, the entire construct above allowed for the insertion (as in the CRA) of vast amounts of new and powerful law into the existing constitutional framework in a way that became impossible to reverse. Additionally, longstanding small-c conservative norms like the US senate filibuster, an unwillingness to repeal previous passed laws, the existence of ‘economic conservatives’ who don’t care about culture, crime or safety and so on, prevented the reversal in any case of radical laws passed during times of bizarre, panicked or propagandized national sentiment. Squeamish quasi-conservative politicians winnowed majorities into minorities on any possibly radical piece of legislation that even sought to temporarily or partially reverse anything.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
Sometimes, in countries with systems in which the left has alienated a huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons (Turkey and India) an ambitious leader can somewhat accomplish some things democratically, or quasi-democratically by preserving an absolute legislative majority for 10+ years, which is enough to finally hack away at the aforementioned. But the Anglo countries are not Turkey or India (yet anyway), populations are too fickle, they have longer democratic traditions, and the center and left are more powerful.
Future conservative movements must therefore consider very carefully what they can and must do, after winning power legitimately by democratic means, to ensure the neutering of non-compliant institutions and the ability to rapidly consolidate extraconstitutional power to effect significant change, by whatever means.
You could write the same thing from a left-wing perspective. It used to be that many democratic countries - even western ones - had substantially socialist economies, with the state an active agent in the economy, public ownership or stewardship of many sectors and major companies, and public-sector unions and employees being the dominant representatives of a powerful and organized labour movement.
Now, thanks to international organizations and agreements, it is impossible to actually have a left-wing government. Want to nationalize a strategically important firm? Want the government to manage a crucial economic sector? Think a natural monopoly should be serviced by a state-owned company rather than private equity?
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
Now there is actually a thesis that ties everything here together: countries across the world have seen their legislatures abandon exercising their power, and ceded instead. To the executive, to the courts, to unelected institutions, to foreign organizations, etc. There's nothing stopping them from retaking that power, except that they don't particularly want to do their job, and the vagaries of culture and ideology in a globalized world have stopped them from working together effectively.
The state has relinquished most of the direct meddling it used to do in earlier times, that much is true, but in return it has started to appropriate a massively larger share of the outputs the newly freed economy produces via taxes, and it has constricted the regulatory environment much more tightly as well. Most of that was championed by, or at least tangentially aligned with, left-leaning ideology. Budgets in Europe are not collapsing because we spend so much on making the best AI data centers, space programs, powerful militaries, automated factories or whatever other Promethean thing one could dream of, but because something like 20% to 30% of all economic activity must be fed into the retiree-healthcare-migrant-welfare-NGO complex.
To be clear, conservatives and rightists across the globe have a terrible track record of stopping this process, and in many cases they were and are active participants in it. The German populist right AfD has plans for our national retirement scheme that, in terms of the spending involved, would make any leftist proud. But overall, there is IMO simply no way that someone on the left can come away from an honest comparison of what the welfare state is and how it behaves between now and the supposed heyday of muscular social democratic parties with the opinion that somehow their cause got shafted. It'd be akin to a white nationalist finding e.g. the current UK's demographics preferable to the ones from 1950.
Gibmedats for the old are bipartisan almost everywhere - there have been centre-right parties which don't support them, but they get vote out quickly. One of the game-changers in 2016 was that Trump said he wouldn't cut Social Security and that he visibly relished the hatred of the SS-cutting wing of his own party.
The big expansions in working-age welfare since 1980 were not left-wing either. I am most familiar with the UK, where the first means-tested benefit for people (primarily but not exclusively single mothers) in low-paid work was introduced by Heath and made permanent by Thatcher. And the drift towards expanded eligibility for disability benefits also begins under Thatcher (conventional wisdom is that it was deliberate in order to massage headline unemployment numbers down) and continues under governments of both parties.
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This isn’t actually true, though. Even in cases where, say, the EU and ECHR protect some private property rights (and therefore expropriation without compensation) it’s easy for there to be ways around it. For example, you simply issue a new currency and print money to pay property holders at a laughable official exchange rate, giving them cents on the dollar, then briefly switch to using euros or dollars, then issue a new currency. This would require crashing out of the Euro and possibly EU but this, again, is perfectly legal - Syriza strongly considered it, but decided against it because it meant a lot of economic hardship. You can even do it more easily than this by passing entirely legal laws that make some sectors non-viable commercially, destroying enterprise value, buying them from investors for nothing, then restoring their pricing power - for example - again fully legal under the ECHR as long as you have some kind of environmental or other reasoning. The same goes for defaulting on government debt, which any treasury can do by just…not paying the coupon for a relatively short period after which the markets consider it in default - this doesn’t require any special authority. Now, again, progressive governments might choose not to do it, because a lot of socialist economic policy is actually very very stupid and bad, but they could.
By contrast, stripping say 5 million people of citizenship at once and mass deporting them isn’t possible with a simple majority in most of Europe.
It isn't. As long as you are in the eurozone you are legally required to follow the stability pact and the eurozone is like hotel california. You might say "it's just fines" but mass deportation would also result in fines, at least in theory.
It is completely legal for a Eurozone country to trigger article 50 and leave the European Union and therein the Euro. This can be triggered by any national government, just as it was in the UK, although obviously that didn’t involve the Euro in that specific case (nevertheless, the legal mechanism would not be different).
Nope. That's for the european union, not for the eurozone. There is no procedure to leave the eurozone. Once you are in the eurozone you're there and in the EU forever.
It was legally clear that Greece could crash out of the Eurozone in 2011. They chose not to. The legal analysis from the Troika more broadly, the ECB specifically and the European Commission all said they could - what rule prevented them from doing so?
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How many divisions has the eurozone? If some country wants to leave it, it could be done -- I doubt that the will exists anywhere at the moment, but things do fall apart eventually.
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This is as true for the right as it is for the left. But just being legal does not make it practical. Leaving the EU would consume an entire country's attention for 5-10 years. It's not for nothing that in France, both the RN and LFI plan to ignore/wreck the EU from the inside, and have abandoned any plan of leaving it.
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It's a load-bearing plank of old-school euroleftism that the bond market is some kind of capricious pagan god, dedicated to keeping mankind from happiness, as opposed to a simple consensus of the smart people with skin in the game about the state of a country's economic governance and their ability to repay their debts.
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Yeah the EU might try their best to force Austerity on you like in the case of Greece for irresponsible social spending but ultimately doesn't really have too many good tools since they refuse to let people actually starve or otherwise face the consequences of their actions. Meanwhile mass-deportation would be something that'd be actively stopped
The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing socialist policies is that international investors (governments, private asset managers, whatever) might voluntarily choose not to lend to you anymore. The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing right wing policies is that they just…block you from doing them with no recourse by ruling them illegal.
As you note, they are not the same.
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But you can say the same for the various national and supra-national organisations that you proposed had a binding effect on power. While the EU or supreme courts might protect some progressive causes, in actual fact nations can leave the EU, or pack the supreme court, and then get away with all kinds of right-wing policies.
I suppose you could argue that there would still be some blowback risk as has happened with the likes of Duterte and Bolsanaro, but if you were dealing with a genuine socialist/communist leader the blowback would probably be them getting assassinated mid rule so it evens out
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I'm reminded of when we had the PVV-led government in the Netherlands. They couldn't even raise the speed limit. The civil servants just blocked it, despite a parliamentary majority. They would've had to start replacing the civil servants, at which point there'd be court cases, at which point they would've had to start to try to pack the courts, for which there isn't even a legal mechanism AFAIK. It would've essentially required a self-coup. To raise the speed limit. Let alone try to do anything of actual importance. I can't help but conclude that the Dutch government is basically more or less fake in much the same way that Iran's elected government is fake. The elections are real but the elected people have no real say in anything if the institutions disagree.
You're right that this doesn't just apply to "the right", but to anything that opposes the globalist institutional consensus, and that old-timey socialists would run into the same problems if any were elected. That doesn't make it any better.
Why did the civil servants block it?
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