The New Traditionalism:

Targeting the ‘Enemies Within’

The consequences of the incompatible expectations created by the
political right in the 1980s continue to be played out, writes Chris Grey

The electoral achievement of the political right in the 1980s, in the US and the UK, was to knot together the ideology of free-market globalisation with traditionalism and nationalism.

It always contained contradictions, most obviously between the national and the global, but also in the way that free-market economics undermines traditional social values.

Even the traditionalism was contradictory, grafting patrician and paternalistic conservatism on to a more populist appeal to aspirational but socially conservative voters.