The Opinions - How to Survive in Politically Volatile Times

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

In this episode, the columnist David French and Rory Stewart explore how small-c conservatives can keep hope alive in the midst of a populist onslaught.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur and Vishakha Darbha. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. 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, trying to figure out how to stand up against Donald Trump. And there are people like me, I left at 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. That's why I wanted to talk to Rory Stewart. He's the 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. Well, thank you so much for having me. Let's just start with the basics. I want to go back and talk about the arc of conservatism in the UK. When did you realize your party was changing, that it was becoming something unrecognizable to you? Well, it actually happened surprisingly suddenly, and of course the changes will have been happening under the surface deeply. You know, and we can now see the ways in which what happened in the 2000s as part of the,

story, the financial crisis, the rise of social media, the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. But on the surface at least, British politics continued surprisingly normally. It felt like ideology had finished. We were in the center ground. 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. And this 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.

And is there a moment where in hindsight, in your experience, you look back and you realize, oh, this was a leading indicator, or this was even something in my social circles that in hindsight, I realized that this was a sign that I perhaps wasn't in sync with my own movement. I'll give you an example from my experience to help illustrate the question. I was at a conservative gathering when Donald Trump in 2015 mocked John McCain's military service and said he preferred people who hadn't been captured. When I heard that, I had an instinctive anger at that, that how dare you? But then as I heard it, in the audience, the audience burst into laughter and applause. Now, it was my first sign, wait, what's going on? Is there a moment like that or moments like that where you look back and you say, the signs were building? I wasn't able to really see them.

Or was it really as sudden as the vote outcome as Brexit? Well, I mean, it felt sudden, but looking back, I think there were moments. I think 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 what any of the detailed implications of Brexit were. we had moved well, 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 of that might be. final example I guess which was probably the most devastating of all was I ran to be

prime minister against Boris Johnson and I imagined that whatever else the British would do they would not vote for Boris Johnson Boris Johnson's kind of extraordinary buffoonish character who had was essentially a television celebrity and a joke and 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 as being prime minister. He's not suitable. He's not a serious person. And 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 be prime minister and become prime minister. But secondly, devastating for me as a party, because I thought, you know, how on earth can this party possibly go this person. But most importantly, it will, devastating for me as a citizen of Britain and as a Democrat, to think how on earth did my nation, how on earth did my voting system end up with somebody who's so

manifestly unsuitable? You know, you used the word devastating, which I think is, it's a word that tracks with me in a number of ways in all of the arenas that you just mentioned. But there's one that I also think is very much in play in the United

States, and I want to ask you if it's in play, in Britain as well, that it's also devastating in the personal realm in this sense that the movement of the Republican Party from the Reagan, more libertarian-inflicted ideology towards this very angry populism. 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, just vigorous social sanction, to where if you had disagreements, you were a traitor, and it had an immense social pressure that was accompanying it, so that 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? Absolutely. And it continues to be a phenomenon. So I am perceived as a traitor, and that's been a very kind of central part, particularly of the social media discourse. But it's more than that, too. I mean, you end up with a range of writing media, ranging from podcasts to television stations,

who will then characterize me as representing everything that is wrong with the global elite. That there are two boxes which people operate in. there are the people, and these are, you know, 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 move across, I become all those things. I become a traitor. I become an elitist.

I become completely out of touch. I'm unable to, in inverted commas, read the rule. And then other things. I support illegal immigrants raping British girls, right? I endorse whatever dystopian features of our society exist. I'm responsible for.

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'm corrupt. I'm degenerate. I am physically weak. So there's a lot of stuff about, you know, how many press-ups can I do?

So I got in a big argument with J.D. Vance. So Vance said that I think I have an IQ of 130, and actually I have an IQ of 110, right? So for Vance, the attack was Rory is stupid. But for a lot of his followers, they then say, and I bet J.D. Vance can do it. do more press-ups than you can. And you're a girl, you're not a proper man. And 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. 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're a person who you served in the British Army, a member of the Black Watch Battalion, correct? That's right, yeah. 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 of the communities we once belong to. And you got right back in the fray. You got right back in the argument. Talk about your own 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? Well, I saw it as existential, which is a kind of, I guess, a pompous way of saying that I thought that Boris Johnson,

posed a kind of catastrophic impact on the British economy, but also standards in public life, our constitution, but more generally that he was going to destroy everything that I cared about, everything that made me proud. So 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 read a book. I have the podcast in the UK called The Rest of Politics. But, of course, that carries with it the fact that I am now an enormous hate figure and I now get attacked by J.D. Vance and I get attacked, obviously, as you can imagine, by all the UK equivalents. I think 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 to deter, in many ways to deter others, to say, look at what we do to people who disagree. Look at how we can destroy, 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 of the sidelines in the face of that kind of social pressure in the case of that kind of social punishment? Well, I think the first thing is, to be honest about the fact that it's not easy. And there definitely have been moments where I have been tempted to give up. And 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, it carries a huge cost. And nor would I want to suggest that I'm doing this always for the right reasons. I mean, obviously, I like to tell myself I'm doing it for high moral goals, but there's also an element of me that's 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 This idea that I'm somehow part of a group defending the space for more liberal center-right

views on Twitter is absurd. 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 can't really. I mean, 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 that despite the fact that

theoretically my reputation should be entirely trashed, oddly that 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 of my podcast grows all the time, the number of people reading my books grows all the time. So there's some sort of, I mean, I think we've entered very sadly an era of complete shamelessness. And just as on the amongst my enemies, people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance do things which I would have thought would discredit them forever. And yet they continue to have immense popularity and support. The same, of course, is also true for their adversaries. So I constantly am getting email messages. 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, that a citizen who doesn't have a platform? What is it that we can do? What is the message for people like us. And it's one of the hardest questions that I get, quite honestly. It's not, there's not an easy pat answer. Words like stand or speak sometimes feel kind of grandiose and also vague. And I wonder how you respond to that question. 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 of citizens. that, yes, of course, politics is about policy and, of course, it's about communication. But most importantly of all, it's about your character.

And what we're fighting at the moment with populism around the world is a fundamental challenge to the underpinnings, the moral underpinnings, the democracy. Democracy sounds like a kind of big, vague word. But underneath it are very, very precious ideas. The idea of truth. The truth is central, absolutely central to our ability to think, relate to each other, form relationships. Ideas for quality.

What is it that makes us human? What is it that we are? What is it that we have in common? What duties do we have to each other? Which leads us 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 matter, 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, the question of never allowing your moral intuitions to be silenced, to understand that you have to find a way of living out those values, and that you cannot simply retreat, 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 the world. It has

sustained since the revolution ideals which are very precious not just to Americans but to humanity and you cannot allow this orange buffoon to become the symbol of your nation. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, David. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vishaka, Fibylette, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker,

Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuilovsky, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.