It’s incoherent but it’s where the right is
Eugene Robinson makes a good point here:
Truss never had a popular mandate in the first place — fewer than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party backed her in the vote to succeed the buffoonish but cunning Boris Johnson — and made grievous political errors as well. On Wednesday, she and her aides so mishandled a routine vote in the Commons that there was pushing, shoving and pretty much a total meltdown in the Tory ranks.
In a larger sense, however, even if you leave aside her political ineptitude and her embrace of voodoo economics, Truss was in an impossible position. So was Johnson before her, and so will be her successor. The Conservative Party is in power because it embraced populism, which turns out to be a good way to win elections but an impossible way to govern.
In British politics these days, all roads lead back to Brexit. Like many in the Conservative Party, Truss originally opposed the idea of Britain leaving the European Union. But after voters narrowly voted for Brexit in 2016, she did what Johnson and many other Tories did and became a fervent Brexit supporter, bashing the E.U. and demanding that then-Prime Minister Theresa May move more quickly to finalize the divorce.
Today, none of the promised benefits of Brexit have materialized. In fact, Britain is having a harder time than E.U. countries in dealing with the economic shocks of the covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war. There are long lines at ports of entry that even stoic Britons find hard to endure. The country faces labor shortages, especially in areas such as agriculture and home health care — relatively low-paying jobs that used to be filled by workers from Poland, Romania and other E.U. countries.
Likewise, the Conservative Party decided to encourage populist anger about immigration. In April, Johnson’s government announced a deal to send refugees who seek asylum in Britain to faraway Rwanda instead. Truss appointed a home secretary, Suella Braverman, who not only supported the Rwanda plan but wanted to go much further and see legal immigration from all sources dramatically reduced. However, Braverman resigned Wednesday. She was ostensibly fired over a documents-handling controversy, but she might as well have leapt from a sinking ship. It’s unclear what the next administration’s immigration policy might be.
When you hear Republicans in this country say “secure the border” or “crack down on crime” or “America first,” keep in mind how easy it is to write a bumper sticker and how hard it is to actually govern in a complex, interconnected world. GOP leaders, pay attention: Britain’s Conservatives have pandered their way into ruin.
Unfortunately for us, we don’t have a parliamentary system that can quickly purge our leaders so when it becomes obvious here the country will just completely implode.
Also, I have to emphasize that Liz Truss’s program was pretty much right out of the 1980s Republican handbook and that ain’t populism. The GOP will very likely do exactly the same thing if they get their power back, even under Trump. After all, he’s one of the rich guys who will benefit. They will assume the markets won’t react the way they reacted in Britain because, well… just because. They believe in these fallacious economic principles because they have no alternative. And unlike the UK we don’t have any way out for at least two years. It will be a disaster.