If you think this argument is vaguely familiar, that’s because throughout the 1990s and early “Noughties” I was one of a handful of conservative writers who were “banging on” in National Review’s pages about the danger to mainstream conservative parties posed by the rising “fringe” parties to their right. Those parties were small in the 1990s, and their sting wasn’t very painful.
The major parties continued to prosper. But the fringe parties didn’t die. In all the countries listed above — and even in countries of stultifying conformity such as Holland — the outsider parties just kept rolling along, gradually winning a rising share of the vote and a much larger share of the headlines.
Thus, from 1992 to 2002 Pim Fortuyn went from being an obscure gay libertarian Dutch sociologist to become the leader of a fringe free-speech party that was on the verge of getting a fifth of the national vote when he was shot by a pro-Muslim animal-rights activist just days before a general election. Fortuyn was gone, but he had permanently changed politics in Holland where a successor “freedom” party now regularly runs third.
Less dramatic versions of that story occurred right across the advanced world. How did this happen? The short answer is that these fringe parties occupied the large empty spaces on the political Right that the mainstream conservative parties had abandoned. British Tories, French Gaullists, Swedish Moderates, and other parties elsewhere increasingly narrowed their appeal to that of superior economic management in a capitalist economy than their countries’ respective Leftist parties. They adopted what Marx called “economism.” They were embarrassed by the patriotism and traditional moral values that had been part of their original identity. They wanted the approval of the metropolitan liberal opinion-formers in which their leaders moved socially. They tailored their electoral messages accordingly.
That would have been fine if their voters had been treading the same ideological path. But the difficulty was that economic conservatives were (and are) a minority of potential conservative voters. We can estimate the size of that minority by looking at Germany where, since the early Fifties, the conservative vote has been split between the socially conservative Christian Democrats and the economically conservative Free Democrats. While the Christian Democrats repeatedly won around 40 percent of the popular vote whereas the Free Democrats struggled to keep above the 5 percent threshold needed to enter the Bundestag (at present they stuck outside Germany’s federal legislative body). Even so the tail succeeded in wagging the dog. What made matters worse is that insofar as mainstream conservatives did move into new ideological territory, their movement was towards such policies as adopting mass immigration — and an accompanying multi-culturalism — and surrendering sovereignty to supranational bodies over trade and economic policy. These approaches were even less appealing to many of their supporters than a cold financial “economism” which, after all, had long been only one thread in the larger conservative tapestry.
