Conservatives Must Compromise or They’ll Lose Their Core Values Entirely

If conservatives continue to pander to the mega rich or those too old to be contributing to the workforce, they should expect the demise of the family unit and mass immigration.

The country with the world’s largest economy can’t fight fires because they have no water in their fire hydrants. The country with the world’s biggest Gross Domestic Product, over $29 trillion last year, has no universal healthcare and is one of only seven countries in the United Nations without paid parental leave. Other than a medal, what is the point of the United States being at the top of the economic leaderboard if their citizens live like they’re in a developing country?

Twelve years ago there were 500 US billionaires and now there are 2,500. By percentage, billionaires are the fastest growing demographic group in America. This is cataclysmic. The tide is not lifting all boats, and trickle down economics hasn’t trickled. Not only are the billionaires slurping up all the money, they’re having an over-represented influence on policy that often favours them and hinders the family unit. It is dystopian that economies in first-world countries are growing, but the working class can’t afford the basic human right of shelter, by way of a home.

Before anyone gets too excited and thinks I am becoming a communist or socialist, I do still believe capitalism is the only way for a free and prosperous civilisation. For me, the most magnetic pull to the Liberal Party is that it places a heavy weight on personal accountability. I hate victimhood. I hate when people expect the Government, not individuals or communities, to solve their problems. Ultimately, I believe the private sector is smarter, more agile, more ambitious and better placed to do a lot of heavy lifting. However. I think we’ve got to a point where our values are in conflict with one another.

I was pondering this over summer and wondering how conservatives might navigate it. As a Liberal Party member, it gave me an irksome feeling that my warming up to regulation and taxes might have meant I am starting to become too soft and losing my conservative-edge. Thankfully I was comforted to find I was in good company. With Tucker Carlson. That’s a joke, Tucker and I are rarely aligned. But it struck me that he - an ultra, ultra right conservative was asking the same questions and spoke critically of market capitalism, albeit in 2019.

He said: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

He went on to demand a “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

The recently elected Republicans have a small window of time to rectify the Democrats' failures and prioritize real, tangible improvements for the working class. If they can’t put their unwavering stiffy for their ideology aside - as Tucker did - they’ll lose the trust and hope of their newly found fan base.

Last year anti-right-wing commentators belittled lower-class voters for taking a chance on Trump, mansplaining that he will never actually deliver for the poor because his goal is to make the rich richer. But I am more compassionate. I don’t think they felt they had a choice.

The Democrats, supposedly the workers Party, became the establishment that was screwing them over. They failed to notice the frog slowly boiling behind them because they were distracted by dumb shit and focusing on emulating the vibe of a unicorn. Already ignored and silenced (probably for being racist) why wouldn’t they pin their hopes on something radical and take a chance on Trump?

That anti-establishment rhetoric has actually worked in favour of right-wing politics around the world for the last few years and allowed them to galvanize an increasingly disenfranchised working class and desperate young voters. They were so successful in fact that many of the right-wing Parties won in 2024’s mega-election-year. But now, they’ll have to start walking the walk.

As well as gobsmacking financial inequality, I believe the working class has also been let down by sloppy, lazy and rare government intervention. The free market has become too free. Too untethered from the greater good, too unbridled from knowledge that profits are not the only metric of a successful, functioning society. The free-market approach only works when there are lines in the sand and industries don’t take the piss. In my opinion, social media, big pharma and processed foods are just some of the industries which have absolutely taken the piss, failing to self-regulate and self-correct when things went awry.

As the tech-boom was taking off, companies prioritised rapid development of technology over all else. Not only did Western governments fail to intervene and put the right guardrails in place to protect and support their civilians, a lot of the time it actually appeared they were running a protection racket for them. Whether Western countries actually stand up to social media giants, as many of them have promised, and put children and social cohesion ahead of tough-talking billionaires will be telling.

The unfettered free for all in the private sector was a stark contrast to the draconian restrictions placed on the individual during the pandemic. Predictably, this led to a growing anti-establishment/anti-institution sentiment, driving individuals into the arms of populism with a visceral resentment from the working class towards the rich and powerful.

For the last few decades many private companies have paid their hard-working employees a pittance, while making a huge profit for themselves and their shareholders.

Societies really only function when you make life as functional and enjoyable for the backbone of the economy and the people contributing to the country's productivity: when you move taxes away from those currently working. But at the moment younger people of family-making age are slaving away to try and get ahead, but their wages haven’t moved at nearly the same rate that boomers' wealth has been consolidated by the skyrocketing long-term increase in value of homes and shares. Luckily for them, the more their capital grows, the more they can use it to avoid paying tax.

Adding salt to the wound is the completely disparate experience of interest rate rises for the rich vs the poor; crippling young and low socio-economic individuals with raging mortgage repayments, while lining the pockets of older Australians with savings in the bank.

As we assess that bubbling resentment, we also need to remember that many companies cried poor during COVID, taking massive Government handouts that ended up as debt to be paid off by taxpayers, then turned huge profits to make their shareholders rich and their CEOs richer.

The Republicans problem is that rectifying things to improve them for the working class, is going to make it harder for their billionaires. The dick-swinging, chainsawing tech-bro oligarchs are committed to the Republicans because they want the historically right-wing governance style of low corporate taxes and the live-and-let-live free market approach which would enable competitive technological development.

On the other end of the Republican’s newly formed broadchurch, is the recently won-over lower socio-economic and growing grassroots who want better outcomes for the working class. Appeasing both simultaneously is going to be tricky.

We saw the first sign of this rift erupt over Christmas when the working-class-Right and tech-Right came into conflict over immigration. Plainly, the tech bros want immigration because they want cheaper workers brought in for their big companies to reduce costs and increase profits, while the working class want those jobs - and higher pay - for local Americans. This puts the Republican’s commitment to capitalism, strong GDP and profits at odds with their largely anti-immigration stance.

If the GOP sides with the billionaires, and don’t bolster the working class, they should also expect population shrinkage to exacerbate. There’s something supremely unhorny about being broke and not being able to afford shelter for your family.

I imagine this conundrum will only continue to grow among traditional conservatives. The people that cry the loudest about the demise of the establishment and the family unit are now also in bed with the ones refusing to take steps to empower them. If conservatives don’t want immigration, they need people to have babies. And people don’t want babies when they can't afford milk.

As we see populations decline across the western world, and boomers start to age out of the workforce, we are going to be left with an increasingly small portion of the population racing on the hamster wheel with the tax burden of the entire country on their shoulders. If we don’t have a sensible discussion about redistributing wealth now, conservatives will need to make peace with immigration, because we’ll need more workers to look after an aging population and more people to spread the tax burden across.

This will see wealthy countries in competition with one another, vying to import workers from developing countries. In my opinion, the entitlement of rich nations to continually assume they can just poach the brightest brains from poor countries every time they have a void is grotesque. A mass exodus brain-drain in developing regions will ensure these countries never prosper and they’ll always be dependent on debt and aid. If the rich countries can’t stand on their own two feet - how will the poor?

I don’t see how the current ultra-free-markets approach can improve the lives of the growing lower-middle class. And I don’t see how you can win democratic elections without appealing to them. Maybe that’s why Donald Trump no longer intends to have them?

If the Democrats have to be 10% less woke, sanctimonious and fucking annoying to appeal to the centre, I think conservatives can be 10% less focused on profits, free markets and GDP alone. The world feels ubiquitously unhinged and both sides might need to make some concessions not only for the greater good, but to be able to remain committed to their own core values. Currently, both are letting their ideological version of perfect be the enemy of good. It’s dumb, shortsighted and driving people away from the centre.