Is the whole world becoming more conservative?

By some accounts, the whole world is becoming more conservative. It that so?

The answer is an unqualified yes and no.

As with the second coming of Donald Trump, there are global indicators more people are leaning more conservative, which does not bode well for democracies around the world. But that’s not the full story.

In 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament at Westminster with a ringing endorsement of democracy. “Around the world today, the democratic revolution is gathering new strength,” he declared.

The Great Communicator picked the perfect metaphor to describe the mood: “Democracy is not a fragile flower.”

Today, democracies, like cut flowers, are wilting, shrinking and dying. Between 1982 and 2016, something happened to democracy, freedom and progressive thought.

“Today, democracies, like cut flowers, are wilting, shrinking and dying.”

Freedom House explained in its Freedom in the World 2021 report: “Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in U.S. freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration.”

In addition, more countries had performed worse on various measures of freedom than had improved compared to any other point since 2005. In less than 40 years, the optimistic outlook for democracy Reagan chronicled at Westminster had turned pessimistic. Democracy itself, Freedom House observed, had been rendered vulnerable.

“The expansion of authoritarian rule, combined with fading and inconsistent presence of major democracies on the international stage, has had tangible effects on human life and security,” the reports concluded.

In this sense, a recent survey by Statista indicating a rightward turn around the world, should serve as an alarm not only about democracy’s precarity but also about the threat to human life as a result of democracy’s decline.

What happened in the United States between Reagan and Trump? Even though he took a page out of Reagan’s playbook, Trump dismantled Reagan’s conservative vision. After the appearance of Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, the Republican Party fragmented.

Dan Milbank marks the turn of the Republican Party away from good faith participation in democracy as beginning on Sept. 27, 1994, when the “rising bomb thrower,” Gingrich, set a course toward the precarious politics of today. Robert Ivie, rhetorical scholar, notes the Republican Party “became authoritarian and deconstructionist over the course of the last 25 years, destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own party and U.S. democracy.”

The rise of populist authoritarians

The movement degenerated into name calling and masculine posturing as Trump betrayed Reagan’s “compassionate conservatism and unleashed a flood of fear and anger aroused by terrorist attacks and illegal immigration. He deployed the populist paranoid style of Alexander Hamilton, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan. And people followed his lead.

After his 2024 election, Trump has cast in stone an American politics “Gorilla-glued” to disruption, violence, ugliness, vengeance and anger. The slippery slide turned out not to be liberal forsaking of morality, but Republicans destroying values, surrendering to MAGA resentments and following Trump down the rabbit hole of an incomprehensible age of political turmoil.

According to Statista, more democracies are making a turn to the right. Hungary, since the rise of Viktor Orban, has become a dictatorship disguised as a social democracy. Germany saw a rise of 21% of its citizens becoming more conservative. In Japan, 34% of residents say they have become more conservative. The only country showing a movement toward the left was Great Britain.

In Precarious Rhetorics, Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona and Christa Teston suggest one cause of the growing sense of precarity felt around the world is the growth of rightwing nationalist populism in nations of the North Atlantic. The rise of “hard-right populism,” they note, “is cultivated through the sowing of fear and suspicion.”

Politicians in the West have exploited feelings of disaffection among those who believe globalization has left them behind — white, American blue-collar workers, for example. Whether it be immigrants that allegedly “take our jobs”; corporations that are perceived to enjoy unfair competitive advantages because the countries in which they operate extend financial, legal or other subsidies; or those whose cultural practices seem otherworldly when compared to received wisdom relative to, say, gender, this scapegoating of the cultural and foreign other evokes feelings some have associated with tribalism.

“The appearance of populist authoritarian leaders around the world has created pockets of conservative growth.”

The appearance of populist authoritarian leaders around the world has created pockets of conservative growth. Along with the rise of Valdimir Putin and Erdogan of Turkey, other such leaders include Silvio Berlusconi, Viktor Orban, Jarosław Kaczyński, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolas Maduro and Narendra Modi to name a few.

In “Right-wing Populism as Gendered Performance: Janus-faced Masculinity in the Leadership of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdogan,” Betul Eksil and Elizabeth A. Wood offer a helpful analysis of how populist authoritarians are winning the support of so many voters: “We have found that their machismo combines a deeper bullying, masculine set of performances with a paternalistic dominance that claims to protect their ‘own’ people.”

An epidemic of mistrust

The shift to the right has been fueled in the U.S. by MAGA evangelicals, and the movement shows no real sign of abating. Trump’s demagoguery unleashed an unquenched thirst for total power over all others. More people distrust the basic institutions of government.

Conservative British philosopher Onora O’Neill argued in some broadcast lectures that our society is suffering from a crisis of trust. With an out-of-control social media as a promiscuous breeding ground for mistrust, this crisis has exploded into a full-blown epidemic.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes the malady is deeper: “It’s also, more disturbingly, that we don’t feel the great institutions of our society are working for us. This means we are unhappy and mistrustful about our educational system; our health care services and police — let alone our representatives in government.”

Any casual review of social media reveals how many people live with toxic levels of suspicion and approach people in public life with unusual levels of suspicion. They are convinced the great institutions of our society have failed them. They are unhappy and mistrustful about schools, health care, police and government.

People feel caught up in international economic and political processes they can’t control. For example, “globalization” has become a devil term among conservatives along with “diversity” and the “common good.” People feel power is being taken away from them by an unseen system they can’t control.

A hard-hitting progressive pedagogy

Perhaps progressives need to examine our pedagogy. On a variety of fronts, progressives pushed and pushed hard for the rights of minorities, women, gays, lesbians, transgender people, immigrants and for an array of liberal social values. Across the board, progressives have accumulated an impressive record.

No one has paid much attention to how progressive pedagogy has shamed conservatives. They have been deeply, seriously shamed, and progressives tend to believe they deserve all of it. But with the arrival of Trump, the conservatives are pushing back hard. Perhaps they suffer from “shame exhaustion.” And rather than do the hard work of education, repentance and change, many Americans have rejected the entire progressive platform.

Evidence of conservative resurgence

Evidence of a more conservative America shows up every day at school board meetings with outraged parents demanding the banning of books, MAGA evangelical politicians insisting on putting Bibles in classrooms and having Bible classes in the curriculum.

Science faces a daily battle from anti-evolutionary forces, anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers. Trump is a climate denier. And conservatives are pushing for more drilling, fewer regulations, a less protected environment and full reliance on the god of the market.

“The attempt to destroy the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt has resurrected some discredited ideas.”

The economic aspect of the conservative turn has been aided by attempts to write revisionist histories of the Great Depression. The attempt to destroy the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt has resurrected some discredited ideas.

One of the apostles of the Market God is Amity Shlaes. American historian Robert S. McElvaine says her “faith in the market is so unquestioning that she opposes regulation not only of the stock market, but of anything. She would let the market sort out for us even tainted foods and deadly drugs. In her market-worldview, the Food and Drug Administration is ‘an outrageous theft of a function normally provided by the private sector — quality control.’ She seems to believe that when a sufficient number of people die from a dangerous product, the market will self-correct and cause the manufacturer to lose sales to safer products. That is apparently the way they do it in China.”

What now?

Here in the United States, the slippery slope of MAGA conservatism is a betrayal of Reagan’s conservative vision, a demolition of democratic values and is pushing us into the abyss.

Even more concerning, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, is attempting to have the whole world in his hands and push all nations to the right. He has interfered in the politics of Germany, Great Britain and Canada even before Trump is inaugurated. He has held secret meetings with leaders of China and Russia.

Among the possible reasons for the magnetic attraction of these conservatives leaders: Our love of wealth, the amount of anger, alienation and mistrust brewing in the minds of ordinary citizens, the hyperbolic emotional claims of populist leaders, and a deep sense of having lost something that can’t be retrieved without submitting to the authority of rightwing populist leaders.

In these senses, the world and the U.S., in particular, is becoming more conservative. But behind the political dysfunctionalism, there are positive signs that progressive ideas are firmly planted and continue to prosper. Large majorities of Americans favor abortion rights, same-sex marriage, citizenship for immigrants and an expanded social safety net.

I have a sense the conservative growth follows the pattern of evangelical churches growing in the 1990s, not from evangelistic efforts, but from poaching “conservative” members from more progressive churches. That effort has basically concluded, and now evangelical churches face the same pressures of surviving in a secular culture. Sure, they are louder, more militant and they tend to gather in large numbers to reassure one another they are right, but this is not enough evidence to suggest a hard right turn in America.

If and when President Trump plays his “authoritarian” ace, his “I want to be your leader for life” card, I believe even the Republican Congress will rebel. It’s a bridge too far for the people of the United States of America.

The conservative movement is too angry, too riddled with animosity, too power-hungry, too arrogant and pushy to last for long. Their outsized reliance on vitriol will ultimately wear thin on the publics of this great nation. People will tire of the constant attempts to distort truth with lies, shut down democratic deliberation and the culture of fear and hatred.

 

Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.

 

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