I sometimes get commenters telling me that Trump cannot be a far right politician because he favors big government. These people seem to forget that extreme rightists almost never favor small government.
There was a brief period where center-right parties did flirt with small government, but that period is certainly over:
The conservatives have undergone many transformations in their time: from the party of the landed squirearchy to that of the industrial bourgeoisie; from the post-war consensus to free-market radicalism. Now they are undergoing another. For 40 years, from the choice of Margaret Thatcher as its leader in 1975 to David Cameron stepping down as prime minister in 2016, Tories stood for small government. Today they are the party of big-government conservatism.
The budget provided a vivid illustration. By the mid-2020s public spending will be the highest, as a share of gdp, since the mid-1970s. By the same measure, taxation will be its highest since the early 1950s. But there is more to big-government conservatism than the size of the state. There is the philosophy of the state as well. And under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have set themselves aims they think can be achieved only by big-state activism.
Remember when people said Brexit would free Britain from Europe, allowing it to become another Singapore?
The modern left has little to offer the working class, so their votes are shifting to the right in almost all developed countries:
The Conservative Party captured huge swathes of northern England in 2019, and is pouring resources into these new territories. It is increasingly the party of the working class and the elderly, so picking a fight with young and middle-aged trendies makes sense.
So glad I live in America where none of this is occurring! Seriously, the Hispanic working class will be the next group to shift to the GOP. Meanwhile, upper middle class workers will continue shifting to the Dems.
Under a two party system where each party wins 1/2 of the presidential elections each century (in other words, in the USA) as one group shifts from one party to another, there must be a movement in the other direction of a roughly equal sized group.
PS. In a certain way I find all this to be kind of comical. Nativists like Steve Bannon became hysterical at the thought that lots of immigration from Latin America would change our politics. He was right, but not in the way he expected.
PPS. Biden is an old school Democrat, and doesn’t realize how his party is changing. I predict that Biden and Pelosi will cut my taxes, even though I’m pretty affluent. There won’t be any European style welfare state in America, not when the Dems need the votes of upper middle class professionals.
It’s no longer Biden’s party, which is both good and bad. It is increasingly Trump’s GOP, which is both bad and bad.