But I think it would be a mistake to bet that the old pro-corporate conservatism will survive intact: Just as the upsurge in pro-market thinking on the right in the 1970s presaged the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, so the upsurge in national conservatism could presage a very different relationship between the right and business.
Start with hard realities. Corporations have abandoned their national moorings in favor of the global market (or what’s left of the global market after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) and are increasingly abandoning middle-of-the-road culture in favor of progressive social values (even Walmart Inc. is moving in this direction despite the roots of most of its customers in suburban and rural America). At the same time, the long-term decline of initial public offerings and the expansion of private financial markets have made it harder for regular people to invest in a future Google.
The past 30 years may have been good for the third or so of people who graduated from universities and work for global corporations. They have been much less good for the two-thirds who have seen their incomes stagnate and their jobs become more unforgiving. Both the Republicans and the Conservatives are reorienting themselves to voters who feel left behind by global capitalism, particularly toward older and less educated voters, because that is where they think future majorities lie.
Then look at history. Right-wing parties have a long history of skepticism about both business and markets, particularly if they clash with more fundamental conservative values such as national identity and social cohesion. Teddy Roosevelt devoted his career to disciplining corporate monsters and their masters, the “malefactors of great wealth.” Pat Buchanan’s 1996 campaign for the presidential nomination was powered by the idea that transnational corporations and crony capitalism were defiling America’s exceptional culture and identity.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Benjamin Disraeli chastised unfettered capitalism for tearing Britain apart into “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy.” Harold Macmillan believed in a “middle way” between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, which, as the son-in-law of a duke, he always found rather vulgar. Edward Heath, another conservative prime minister, denounced “the unacceptable face of capitalism.” On Brexit, the most significant economic issue of the post-Thatcher era, the Conservative Party chose to defy the global business establishment in favor of a leap in the dark, with Prime Minister Johnson memorably declaring “f*** business.”
So far this business-skeptical conservatism is an intellectual muddle. The new conservatives are right that 1980s conservatism has become zombified—always advocating the same solutions (tax cuts and deregulation) regardless of the problems. Nobody these days looks to the Club for Growth for intellectual enlightenment. The new conservatives are also right that conservatism at its best is about the pursuit of a civilized life rather than economic growth for its own sake. Conservatism arose as a critique of the excesses of the French Revolution and its zeal for liberty, equality and fraternity. Today its future lies as a critique of postmodern liberalism and its zeal for a strange combination of unfettered individualism and group rights.
But the new conservatives, particularly their Catholic wing, seem to lack a conservative sense of balance. Their dream of imposing a “common good” on a society that disagrees about fundamental things is a formula for intensified culture wars. They also ignore the strikes, discord and malaise that many of the policies they favor, particularly those giving more power to producer interests, led to in the 1970s. Disraeli owes his place in the conservative pantheon not to his youthful antagonism to the market but to his mature success in combining the best of economic liberalism with the best of conservatism.
Still, for all its intellectual flaws, the new business-skeptical conservatism confronts the corporate world with serious practical problems. It removes a hitherto reliable safety net. Corporate types can no longer rely on Republicans or Conservatives coming to rescue them when the going gets tough, as it surely will as the cost-of-living crisis deepens. It opens the possibility of some interesting cross-party collaboration. Right-leaning Republicans and left-leaning Democrats increasingly see eye-to-eye on issues such as tariffs on trade, tax credits for families, intervention to support communities that have been decimated by globalization and the breaking up of big tech companies. And it raises the serious possibility of something much bigger: the creation of a fully-fledged new conservatism that uses a plethora of interventions in the market such as tariffs and wage subsidies to shift the balance of power from business to labor.
The Reagan-Thatcher era of pro-business conservatism looks increasingly like an aberration rather than a natural state of affairs.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.