The Conservatives are in crisis because “popular capitalism” is no longer possible

caustictickingoftheclock:

marcusseldon:

collapsedsquid:

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?

very off-the-cuff answer, but it could be because instead of offering to give people things, the tories are now offering to stop some nebulous other from taking away people’s things. see things like anti-immigration policies or anti-fiscalism.

admittedly these have always been strategies of the right. but working conditions have been steadily deteriorating for the past few years (thanks in no small measure to the right’s policies), and the right has played on people’s fears about their future quite effectively. and the more they get re-elected the worse they make working conditions and the more they get to stoke people’s fears, hence creating a cycle.

Also most of the people who dislike capitalism on the left are younger and more politically disengaged so it doesn’t translate as easily into political gains.

The Conservatives are in crisis because “popular capitalism” is no longer possible