How to Survive in Politically Volatile Times

” class=”css-owy2rv ey68jwv2″>David French

In this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist David French and Rory Stewart explore how small-c conservatives can keep hope alive in the midst of a populist onslaught.

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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

David French: I’m David French, a columnist for The New York Times. A lot of us are feeling politically homeless right now. The Democrats are flailing while trying to figure out how to stand up against Donald Trump, and there are people like me. I left the Republican Party in 2016 after Trump’s rise. Looking at the political landscape, I wonder: Where do we fit in?

Our friends in the United Kingdom are going through their own destabilizing political moment. I wanted to see how they’re realigning to see what we can learn from them and how they’re keeping up the fight. That’s why I wanted to talk to Rory Stewart. He’s a co-host of a podcast called “The Rest Is Politics” and the author of the book “How Not to Be a Politician.”

For a long time, he was deeply embedded within the Tory Party, a traditional British conservative. He was a member of the British government, a minister. Rory campaigned against Brexit, and Boris Johnson eventually expelled him from the party.

I wanted to talk to Rory about how those of us who care about democracy keep hope alive in the midst of a populist onslaught. It’s a conversation that’s political, certainly, but it also gets personal about how each of us can engage and persevere when engagement carries a cost.

Rory, thank you so much for joining me.

Rory Stewart: Thank you so much for having me.

French: Well, let’s just start with the basics. I want to go back and talk about the arc of conservatism in the U.K. When did you realize your party was changing and that it was becoming something unrecognizable to you?

Stewart: Well it actually happened surprisingly suddenly. Of course, the changes will have been happening under the surface, and we can now see the ways in which what happened in the 2000s was part of the story — the financial crisis, the rise of social media, the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. And very rapidly we found ourselves in 2016 with a Brexit referendum where people voted for Brexit, for Britain to leave the European Union after more than 40 years.

That suddenly revealed these cleavages in British society, which were extreme. Suddenly we had opinion polls suggesting that a majority of people would not consider one of their children marrying somebody who’d voted in the other direction.

So we were suddenly beginning to feel a little bit more like the United States — this sense of extreme polarization, almost civil war, which in the U.S. context had been around longer.

French: Is there a moment when you look back and you realize, “Oh, this was a leading indicator”? I’ll give you an example from my experience to help illustrate the question.

I was at a conservative gathering in 2015 when Donald Trump mocked John McCain’s military service and said he preferred people who hadn’t been captured. When I heard that, I felt an instinctive anger: How dare you? But then as I heard it, the audience burst into laughter and applause. That was my first sign.

Is there a moment like that or moments like that when you look back and realize the signs were building and you weren’t able to really see them? Or was it really as sudden as the vote outcome on Brexit?

Stewart: Well, it felt sudden, but looking back, I think there were moments. One of them was when, dealing with fellow members of Parliament, I began to realize that they were voting to leave the European Union without understanding any of the detailed implications. We had moved well beyond a rational calculation into a world in which they were sensing increasingly that their voters wanted out and it was no longer relevant for them to try to understand the detailed technocratic implications — “Voters want out. I’m voting out. I’m not even going to waste my time listening to Rory about the technicalities of what the disadvantages might be.”

Final example, which was probably the most devastating of all, was when I ran to be prime minister against Boris Johnson. I imagined that whatever else the British would do, they would not vote for Boris Johnson, this kind of extraordinary buffoonish character who was essentially a television celebrity and a joke. My whole view of Britain as a conservative was: In the end, the British people are pretty sensible. They’re pretty thoughtful, pretty moderate. They might put up with this guy becoming mayor of London as a joke, but they’re definitely not going to vote for him to be prime minister. He’s not suitable. He’s not a serious person.

Then I suddenly saw the whole swing of public opinion in his direction, and of course, that was devastating for me. It was devastating for me, obviously, personally because he beat me to become prime minister. But second, it was devastating for me as a party member because I thought, “How on earth can this party possibly go by this person?” Most important of all, devastating for me as a citizen of Britain and as a democrat to think, “How on earth did my nation, my voting system end up with somebody who’s so manifestly unsuitable?”

French: You used the word “devastating,” which is a word that tracks with me in a number of ways, including in all of the arenas that you just mentioned. But there’s one that I also think is in play in the United States, and I want to ask you if it’s in play in Britain as well. The movement of the Republican Party from a Reagan, more libertarian-inflected ideology toward this very angry populism is devastating for me in a personal way. In this sense that it wasn’t as if the Republican Party just switched out its voters. The vast bulk of the people who were for Reagan conservatism then ended up being for Donald Trump populism and then enforced that with rigorous social sanction against dissent. Vigorous social sanctions, where if you had disagreements, you were a traitor. You began to see people pulling into populism just to preserve their social connections, their community, for lack of a better term.

Was that a phenomenon in Britain as well?

Stewart: Absolutely. It continues to be a phenomenon. I am perceived as a traitor. That’s been a very central part, particularly of the social media discourse. But it’s more than that. You end up with a range of right-wing media, ranging from podcasts to television stations, that characterize me as representing everything that is wrong with the global elite. That there are two boxes that people operate in. There are the voters for Donald Trump or the voters for Boris Johnson, and they represent “real” people. And then there’s another category, which is the global elite, the establishment.

And as soon as I moved across, I became all those things: I became a traitor. I became an elitist. I became completely out of touch. I’m unable to read the room, I support illegal immigrants raping British girls. I endorse whatever dystopian features of our society exist. I’m responsible for destroying national identity.

And then, of course, because politics has become a sort of new type of sport, new things emerge. So I am corrupt. I’m degenerate. I am physically weak. There’s a lot of stuff about how many press-ups can I do? So for Vance, the attack was, “Rory is stupid.” But for a lot of his followers, they then say, “I bet JD Vance can do more press-ups than you can.” And: You’re a girl. You’re not a proper man. All of this then follows from, as you say, moving across from being on the side of conservatives to now being apparently no longer recognized as a conservative.

French: As you were talking, I was kind of chuckling to myself not because anything that you said was funny at all — it was all dreadful — but it was also identical to my own experience, up to and including the absolute denigration of you as a man. I mean, you served in the British Army, a member of the Black Watch Battalion, correct?

Stewart: That’s right, yeah.

French: Black Watch Battalion, one of the most storied military units in Western military history. And yet they’re questioning your fundamental identity as a man. This is something that’s happening across the pond in an identical manner.

So there are a number of people who’ve been pushed outside the communities we once belonged to, and you got right back in the fray. You got right back in the argument. Talk about your personal response for a minute. What did you do to say: My role — if I’m going to defend the center — this is how I’m going to take a stand?

Stewart: Well, I saw it as existential, which is, I guess, a pompous way of saying that I thought Boris Johnson posed a kind of catastrophic impact on the British economy. But also standards in public life, our constitution but, sort of more generally, that he was going to destroy everything that I cared about, everything that made me proud. Therefore, I had no alternative other than to make this my cause, talk about this, debate this, point out what was wrong with it, try to make an argument for something that seemed to me natural, which was the old order.

And how did I do it? I did it in different ways. I wrote a book. I have the biggest podcast in the U.K., called “The Rest Is Politics.” But, of course, that carries with it the fact that I am now an enormous hate figure and I now get attacked by Elon Musk. I get attacked by Donald J. Trump Jr. I get attacked by JD Vance, and I get attacked, obviously, as you can imagine, by all the U.K. equivalents.

French: One of the interesting elements of this is, I think, often the attacks against you are not necessarily designed to silence you, because you’re not going to be silenced. You’ve demonstrated that abundantly over the course of the years. I think they’re designed, in many ways, to deter others. To say, “Look at what we do to people who disagree. Look at how we can, at least in certain segments of the population, destroy their public reputation.” How is it that you have been able to motivate people to get off the sidelines in the face of that kind of social pressure, that kind of social punishment?

Stewart: Well, I think the first thing is to be honest about the fact that it’s not easy, and there definitely have been moments when I have been tempted to give up. It’s certainly true that I’m psychologically healthier and I sleep better when I’m not looking at my Twitter feed.

So I wouldn’t want to suggest that somehow I am some sort of immune moral campaigner or it doesn’t carry a huge cost. And nor would I want to suggest that I’m always doing this for the right reasons. I mean, I like to tell myself I’m doing this for high moral goals, but there’s also an element of me that just doesn’t like being bullied, enjoys arguing and fighting with people and somehow tries to convince myself that I don’t want to vacate the space to these people.

But as my friends point out, that’s a little irrational. I mean, this idea that I’m somehow part of a group defending the space for more liberal center-right views on Twitter is absurd, right? I mean, it’s a cesspit of hate. And I’m not changing anyone’s mind. I’m not persuading anybody. So how do I encourage people to keep going?

I notice many of my friends are leaving. Many of my friends have stopped doing it because they don’t think there’s anything productive in it. But I suppose I would say to them that it’s very remarkable — despite the fact that theoretically, my reputation should be entirely trashed — oddly, the modern world is so odd that your reputation somehow isn’t quite affected in the way that you’d expect. In fact, the number of listeners in my podcast grows all the time, and the number of people reading my books grows all the time.

I think we’ve entered, very sadly, an era of complete shamelessness. And just among my enemies, people like Donald Trump and JD Vance do things I would’ve thought would discredit them forever. And yet they continue to have immense popularity and support. The same, of course, is also true of their adversaries.

French: I had an event I spoke at last night where people came up to me and were wanting me to sort of say: What’s the message for me? What is it that a voter, a citizen who doesn’t have a platform can do? What is the message for people like us? And it’s one of the hardest questions that I get. Quite honestly, there’s not an easy answer. Words like “stand” and “speak” sometimes feel kind of grandiose and also vague. I wonder how you respond to that question.

Stewart: I think you’re right. It’s not an easy question, but I think it’s important to put morality at the heart of our role as citizens — that yes, of course, politics is about policy and it’s about communication but, most important of all, it’s about your character. And what we are fighting at the moment with populism around the world is a fundamental challenge to the moral underpinnings of democracy.

“Democracy” sounds like a kind of big, vague word, but underneath it are very, very precious ideas. The idea of truth is central — absolutely central — to our ability to think, relate to each other, form relationships, ideas of equality. And what is it that makes us human? What is it that we have in common? What duties do we have to each other? Which leads us to the idea of justice.

And I think these things sound like big words, but thinking, reflecting in your own life about why those things matter, why morality matters, why how you treat minorities matter, how you treat other countries matters, how you treat allies, how you treat relationships, how you stand up for values matter, then translates into everything else. It translates into how you speak to other people, what you’re prepared to accept and not accept, whether you boycott, whether you join demonstrations, whether you write, how you vote, whether you stand for office.

But above all, I think, never allow your moral intuitions to be silenced. Understand that you have to find a way of living out those values and that you cannot simply retreat, that you can’t allow the degradation and the coarsening of our democratic and moral life and that the United States, in particular, is one of the great miracles of the world. It has sustained since the Revolution ideals that are very precious — not just to Americans but to humanity — and you cannot allow this orange buffoon to become the symbol of your nation.

French: Thank you so much for joining me.

Stewart: Thank you very much for having me, David. Have a great day.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

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