The EconomistOctober 5th 2019 Britain 51T
he manwho this week fulfilled his lifelong dream of address-
ing the Conservative Party’s annual conference as prime min-
ister is routinely compared to Donald Trump. They both have crazy
hair. They were both born in New York. They both have the ability
to send their supporters into paroxysms of delight. But a more in-
triguing comparison is with the original architect of the Republi-
can Party’s populist turn, Richard Nixon.
This might sound far-fetched. In terms of personality, the two
men could hardly be more different. Nixon was a pessimist who
liked to brood alone with a bottle of whisky, whereas Mr Johnson is
a gregarious optimist. Yet when it comes to their wider political
personalities and strategies, the similarities are striking.
Nixon is remembered today as a hardline conservative. He
made his reputation as a communist-baiting member of the House
un-American Activities Committee and destroyed his reputation
as president with the Watergate burglaries and the White House
tapes of his ranting against the elites. Yet for much of the time he
governed as a liberal. He pioneered a wide range of liberal policies:
affirmative action, with the Philadelphia Plan; environmentalism,
with the Clean Air Act; and workplace regulation, with the Occupa-
tional Safety and Health Administration. He chose as his chief ad-
viser on domestic policy Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lion of liber-
alism. Perhaps most importantly of all, he opened diplomatic
relations with China.
Nixon’s great aim was to fuse conservative and liberal themes,
to produce a new governing philosophy. Combine the Democrats’
commitment to big government with the Republicans’ belief in
traditional values—and throw in a bit of demagoguery—and he
would be invincible. A seminal moment in his intellectual evolu-
tion came when Moynihan encouraged him to read Robert Blake’s
biography of Disraeli and he came to the conclusion that “Tory
men with liberal policies” held the key to progress.
Mr Johnson represents the same confusion of reactionary and
liberal impulses. His journalism is full of dogwhistles about Mus-
lims’ “letterbox” burqas and the like. A Downing Street spokesman
has accused prominent Remainers of “colluding” with the Euro-
pean Union. Yet Mr Johnson was also a popular mayor of Britain’s
most liberal city, who supported gay rights and amnesty for illegal
immigrants.Hecontinues to regard himself as a liberal globalist
who opposes the eubecause it is a protectionist trading bloc.
Mr Johnson tries to reconcile these tensions by supporting a
combination of big government and old-fashioned patriotism. His
mantra is that Britain needs to “get Brexit done” so that it can turn
to the real work of lavishing money on hospitals, schools and the
police. In private he justifies his bulldog stance as the only thing
that can save Britain from a nativist backlash if Brexit does not
happen, or a far-left Labour government if austerity is maintained.
When it came to putting his philosophy into practice, Nixon
was dragged relentlessly to the right. He pursued a “Southern strat-
egy” of recruiting into the Republican fold Southern whites who
had voted Democrat since the civil war but were alienated by Lyn-
don Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. This was part of a wider national
strategy of recruiting members of the “great silent majority”, alien-
ated by those “limousine liberals” who were soft on crime and
friendly with foreign powers. He surrounded himself with hard-
men who understood that making omelettes meant breaking eggs.
He foamed with contempt for establishment types such as busi-
nessmen (“those farts”) and university professors (“those ass-
holes”), and unleashed his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, to de-
nounce the “nattering nabobs of negativism”. He lived in fear that
he would be outmanoeuvred on the right by George Wallace, who
preached a purer version of his anti-establishment backlash.
The same is happening with Mr Johnson. He intends to pursue
a northern strategy in the next election, targeting pro-Brexit seats
in the historically Labour-voting Midlands and north, to make up
for the loss of pro-Remain seats in Scotland and the south-east.
This is part of a wider national strategy of appealing to voters who
are tired of being condescended to by metropolitan elites. He has
deployed inflammatory rhetoric about Parliament’s “Surrender
Act” to stop a no-deal Brexit. He has surrounded himself with
hardmen such as his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who
seems willing to do whatever it takes to make Brexit happen, and
Sir Lynton Crosby, a master of the political dark arts. His establish-
ment-bashing has extended to normally pro-Tory groups such as
company bosses (“fuck business”) and even to the institution of
Parliament itself. Completing the Nixon analogy, Mr Johnson has
his own George Wallace to worry about in the shape of Nigel Farage
and his Brexit Party.Defeated, but not finished
Nixon’s strategy destroyed the man himself but revolutionised his
party. By the early 2000s the Republicans were a big-government
party with a Southern president, George W. Bush, and a Southern
House majority leader, Tom DeLay. In 2016 Mr Trump won the pres-
idency with votes from the Republican South and from blue-collar
workers in swing states. The fate of Mr Johnson and his Nixon-like
strategy is still to be written. He may be the shortest-serving prime
minister in history. There is even talk of prosecuting him. The
northern strategy will be harder to pull off than the Southern strat-
egy: Mr Johnson is an Eton-educated Tory trying to appeal to work-
ing-class voters, whereas Nixon was a self-made Californian; the
north is scarred by its industrial past whereas the sunbelt was ris-
ing. But if he can pull off a remarkable election victory by offering
certainty—or the illusion of certainty—while his opponents offer
dither and delay, the result would be a long-term change in the na-
ture of the Conservative Party, just as far-reaching as the one that
Nixon began in the Republicans. Then Britain really would be in
with a chance of producing its own Donald Trump. 7Bagehot Richard Milhous Johnson
The prime minister has a striking amount in common with America’s 37th president