C. S. Lewis used to say that for every new book you read, you should read an old one. Lately I’ve been re-reading a classic, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, published in 1935. This marvelously written book tells the story of how England’s Liberal party fell from a dominant position in the first decade of the 20th century to practically ceasing to exist just a decade later. By the 1920s, the Liberal party had been displaced by the new, and much more left, Labour party. As Dangerfield explained, “the burden of Liberalism grew more and more irksome; it began to give out a dismal, rattling sound; it was just as if some unfortunate miracle had been performed upon its contents, turning them into nothing more than bits of old iron, fragments of intimate crockery, and other relics of a domestic past. . . . [The Liberal Party] died from poison administered by its Conservative foes, and from disillusion over the inefficacy of the word ‘Reform.’ ”
Dangerfield’s account is not entirely coherent, but his prose sparkles with wit and rapier jabs at the leading figures of the era. (He describes David Lloyd George, for example, as “less a Liberal than a Welshman on the loose.”) Fascination with the premise of his title has inspired a number of imitators in recent decades. Geoffrey Wheatcroft offered up a bouncy account of the decline of the post-Thatcher Conservatives in his 2005 book The Strange Death of Tory England, at a moment when it seemed as though the Labour government of Tony Blair was invincible. Historian H. W. Brands gave us The Strange Death of American Liberalism in 2001, which reads today like a prequel to Karl Rove’s hope that the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush was a harbinger of enduring Republican domination.
But there is nothing especially strange about a once-dominant party suddenly finding itself deeply out of favor with voters, and both Wheatcroft and Brands saw their themes quickly falsified by subsequent elections, which saw the return to power of Tories under David Cameron and Democratic party liberalism under Barack Obama. And although the Tories are today mired in the agony of Brexit, Labour is in disarray under the leadership of the seemingly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn, just as the Democrats may well throw away their shot at ousting Donald Trump by choosing a far-left candidate like Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.
Are there cautionary lessons for our time? Mark Twain is supposed to have remarked (he likely didn’t) that “history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.” The best rhyme with the U.K. Liberals’ extinction might be that of the American Whigs, who went from a strong position following the election of 1840 to dissolving a decade later. Still, it is possible to make out some rough parallels between our parties and the issues and dynamics of the Liberal party’s demise. Will someone be writing The Strange Death of Conservative America in a decade or two? Or perhaps the opposite—The Strange Death of the Democratic Party? Either outcome seems plausible, because both parties are under intense internal strain that might be enough to break them apart.
Early in the first decade of the 20th century, the Conservative party broke with London’s prevailing orthodoxy on free trade, calling for quasi-protectionist management of trade, which it euphemistically termed “imperial preference.” Sounds a bit like someone’s trade views today, no? Winston Churchill “crossed the aisle” from the Conservative party to join the Liberals over free trade, and the Liberals routed the Conservatives largely over this issue in the election of 1906, whereupon the Liberals pushed ahead with their reformist agenda of establishing the early building blocks of the British welfare state. In 1910, following a budget impasse between the House of Commons and the House of Lords that resembled our periodic government shutdowns, the Liberals called an election in hopes of smashing the Conservative party again at the ballot box, and especially targeting the power of what could be called the bastion of Britain’s “deep state”—the House of Lords. But like Theresa May’s recent general election miscalculation, the election ended in a tie between the two major parties, with Irish unionist parties providing a tenuous working majority in the House of Commons for Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith.
Between 1910 and the onset of the Great War in August 1914, the Liberal party temporized through one political tumult after another, with their inclination for moderation and compromise increasingly whipsawed by the growing intransigence and radicalism of rising factions, such as trade unionists, Irish nationalists, and militant suffragettes. The simmering controversy over Irish home rule, which reached new heights during those years, resembles in some ways the bitterness and deep anger of our long-running debate over immigration, involving some of the same arguments about identity, ethnicity, and sovereignty. The violence of the British suffragettes during this period makes Black Lives Matter look like a tea party. The physical assaults on politicians and vandalism of their residences, the widespread shop-window smashing and arson (107 buildings set ablaze in the first seven months of 1914) are matched only by the government’s treatment of imprisoned suffragettes, whose brutal force-feeding makes waterboarding seem tame. And the series of rolling strikes in major industries was as much about politics—building up the nascent Labour party—as it was about wages and working conditions, like the wave of teachers’ strikes rolling from state to state right now in an obviously coordinated effort to assist the Democratic party in the midterms. In the background there were mounting worries about the rising power of Germany, for which today we can substitute the worry over China.
Underneath was the perception of economic trends and problems that sound very familiar to our time. Despite healthy economic growth, real wages were falling, and the profits from productivity gains seemed to be captured more by capital than labor. New business formation was said to be lagging. Dangerfield’s report reads like a tolerable anticipation of Thomas Piketty: “The independent small entrepreneur—that dream of Liberal economics—had vanished from the earth; the great illusion of the middle class was over; wealth was in the grip of other and fewer and more formidable hands.” He discerned the rise of what today is often called the “Davoisie” or the “globalist” class: “The new financier, the new plutocrat, had little of that sense of responsibility which once sanctioned the power of England’s landed classes. He was purely an international figure, or so it seemed, and money was his language, like a loud and glittering Esperanto; it was a language, moreover, which England’s upper classes seemed unable to resist.”
The grievances of different causes and interests were starting to congeal into a broad-based movement armed with the rising ideologies of socialism and radicalism. The “profoundly conscience-stricken state of mind” of the Liberal party was inadequate to the moment. The party’s habitual method of moderate reform proved unequal to the insatiable appetites of the aggrieved. The Conservative party was happy to exploit every Liberal agony, often refusing parley over reform measures they might have supported in other circumstances. As Dangerfield characterized the moment, it was the spectacle “of a democracy passing from introspection into what looks very like nervous breakdown. . . . The two parties were no longer on speaking terms. Their leaders communicated with one another only through liaison officers.”
Just about the whole catalogue of today’s American scene can be found in this century-old story: a barely elected government that targets the power centers of the opposition party; the inter-party bitterness and complete lack of cooperation; the breakdown of democratic norms; and a heightened restiveness among protest groups who took to the streets. About the only thing missing from the parallel is a figure comparable to Donald Trump, but such a figure is impossible in British parliamentary politics.
So all of the current frothy talk about how American democracy is under supreme strain, if not in crisis; how democratic norms have been shredded; that we’re seemingly just an executive order away from jackbooted authoritarianism is hardly a new spectacle in modern democratic life. But historical consciousness is in short supply, especially among liberals who think the world began the day before yesterday.
The coming of World War I in August 1914 interrupted the Liberal party meltdown and restored at a stroke the unity of Britain’s political class, though party conflict and intrigue still intruded into the administration of the war effort. But the normal national unity that comes with the sudden onset of war does not permanently alter underlying political divisions, as the United States rediscovered after 9/11. World War I only postponed the Liberal party’s obsolescence, and by the early 1920s the rising Labour party administered last rites. A lot of Liberal voters migrated to Labour, but enough went over to the Conservative party to enable its dominance for the next 20 years.
The parallels may not be exact, and the dynamics of American party politics seem more stable than Britain’s, but it is not a great stretch to see the Democratic party emulating the agony of the Liberal party over a longer time horizon—say, from the 1960s to the present moment. The old moderate liberals have gradually lost out to the incoherent ideological fanaticism of the identity-politics left. The Democrats’ large victory behind Obama in 2008 and its subsequent steep fall look a lot like the Liberal party after its 1906 landslide. It is conceivable that a loss to Donald Trump in the 2020 election by an identity-politics candidate or radical campaign will convulse the Democratic party down to its foundation.
The wild card in the deck—or is it a joker?—is Trump, who is still unproven in a serious foreign crisis, let alone as the commander in chief in a wartime situation. A botched foreign crisis, an economic calamity, or some other catastrophe could yet wreck the fortunes and structure of the Republican party, as could a credible primary challenge to Trump in 2020. At the current time the prospect for either party’s cracking up cannot be excluded. As Churchill liked to say, the future, though imminent, is obscure. But one thing we should stop saying is that the intense frictions and party stresses of our moment are extreme or unprecedented.
