What is going on with the political right globally?
Across the Western world legacy parties are seemingly on their way out. In the UK, the Conservative Party looks set to be replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. In the US, the Republicans have been radically transformed under Trump. In Australia, the Liberal Party is now at perilously low levels of support.
What explains this?
One can point to individual policy and campaigning mistakes, but the real answer to this crisis goes deeper.
To understand what is going on it is helpful in some ways to go back to the great British parliamentary debates of the 19th Century where William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party, battled Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Conservatives.
Mr Gladstone’s Liberals had a policy platform which many on the centre-right recognise – they stood for free trade, an interventionist foreign policy in defence of universal human rights, and an emphasis on “liberal values” as the glue which held the nation together.
This Gladstonian liberalism is by and large what the Howard era right in Australia still believes. It is essentially what every “classical liberal” think tank in Australia believes. It is what the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, George W Bush, and so called “NeverTrump” Republicans in the America still believe.
But Disraeli, a conservative, did not believe in any of these things.
For starters, he was sceptical about the utopian claims of free trade. Trade agreements between nations, he insisted, needed to be carefully negotiated, and reviewed regularly to ensure national interests were not harmed. He cautioned that there are those who “would have you believe that free trade is the cure for all ills, but it is a medicine that may poison as much as it heals.”
This was a view shared by Australia’s longest serving prime minister.
Despite his affection for the “Mother Country”, Sir Robert Menzies was in favour of tariffs even on British manufactured goods to build up our nation’s own industrial capacity. Current trade current agreements including the one with China that allows 100 per cent of their products to come into Australia duty free, he would have thought deeply unwise.
He would have been shoulder-to-shoulder with Andrew Hastie in his concern about the current state of manufacturing in Australia.
Disraeli, like other great conservative leaders, was also instinctively wary of the evangelical nature of Gladstone’s foreign policy. When the “Grand Old Man” of the Liberal Party wanted to deploy British troops in Eastern Europe to check Russia’s perennial ambitions, Disraeli instead used wise statecraft to bring about peace which lasted for a generation.
“Dizzy” (as he was affectionately known) would have also cautioned modern politicians, who love to use overblown Churchillian rhetoric regarding conflicts, that foreign policy should not be “conducted on the principles of a sermon”. He would have viewed the disastrous “forever wars” in the Middle East and elsewhere over the last 30-plus years as the tragic consequence of what happens when his counsel of prudence and realism is abandoned.
Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli believed that a nation is more than simply a bundle of liberal axioms.
US vice president JD Vance’s statement that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation” is something he could have written himself about Britain.
While mass immigration was not the same issue in his day, the great conservative prime minister would have likely been wary about how easy it would be to import and integrate vast numbers of people by simply getting them to sign some sort of liberal corporate values statement.
Disraeli also recognised that liberalism unchecked had a tendency to concentrate riches in port cities and people there could become untethered from the rest of the country. In his day he called such types “cosmopolitans”. Today we call them “globalists” or “teals”.
He also knew that great disparities in wealth had caused political radicalisation such as we see again today.
The Liberal Party of Gladstone, after dominating British politics in the 19th Century, almost completely died out in the early 20th century. This will be the fate of all centre-right parties that continue to embrace 1990s unbridled open-borders liberalism without the balance that Disraelian conservative insights provide.
“There is a new politics emerging in this country where we get to reshape the economy and make it work for families, community, and industry”, says Andrew Hastie, correctly.
In many ways the new politics will draw on lessons from the past that have been forgotten and urgently need to be relearnt.
First published in Daily Telegraph 30 September 2025 as “Manufacturing to migration, some lessons from the past for the Liberals of today © Dan Ryan 2025. All Rights Reserved.
