How should conservatives respond to the present age of populism?

The world is going through an angry and authoritarian spasm. Populists of Left and Right thrive by elevating grievances over potential solutions. Liberal doctrines – free trade, low taxes, private enterprise – are being squeezed by tribalism and identity politics.

There is an ugly element of Führerprinzip in the air, too. Followers of Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have at least this much in common: that they will follow their leader through 180 degree rotations, clinging to some past position against what they imagine to be hostile media even after their principal has climbed down. As the popularity of interventionist policies grows, so does impatience with constitutional constraints and the demand for a strongman.

How should free-market conservatives respond? Many of our doctrines, after all, are counter-intuitive, running up against millions of years of evolution. The claims made by protectionists, whether of the Corbynite/socialist or Trumpian/nationalist variety, have been proved false a thousand times. But they feel plausible. “We can’t carry on with a trade deficit!” “We need to protect strategic industries!” “We can’t compete with slave-wage economies!” “We should be self-sufficient in food!” All these ideas lead, over time, to poverty. (Singapore imports all its food, water and electricity, while North Korea has elevated self-sufficiency – juche – as its supreme principle. Where would you rather live?) All, though, chime with our hunter-gatherer instincts.

Small-government conservatives should begin by recognising the limits of their popularity. Classical liberals tend to be slightly to the left of the centre of gravity on cultural issues, and well to its right on economic issues. They – we – can achieve a great deal as part of a broader conservative alliance. But we are only ever the riders on the back of an elephant. That great beast is impelled by forces that have little to do with economics: patriotism, distrust of officialdom, resentment of political correctness and so on. The wise mahout can steer the animal to a degree; but he cannot make it move against its will.

Perhaps the most influential classical liberal in Britain during the second half of the 20th century was Ralph Harris, who founded the Institute of Economic Affairs. Shortly before he died, he told me something quite extraordinary. After the 1950 election, which had seen the obliteration of the Liberal Party, he and a handful of free-marketeers had debated how to inject their ideas into the mainstream.

Some wanted to preserve the purity of their precepts, meeting occasionally at the Mont Pelerin Society and publishing their tracts, rather in the manner of those Irish monks who, at the edge of the known world, painstakingly copied out Christian texts during the Dark Ages. But Ralph saw no point in doctrines that were not implemented, even if patchily and messily.

The problem was that, in those days, neither of the two big parties was friendly to classical liberalism. Clement Attlee’s Labour was unapologetically socialist, of course, and was busily engaged in nationalising the means of production. But Churchill’s Tories were hardly free-marketeers. My party, at that time, was imperialist, paternalist and mildly protectionist.

Still, Ralph and his allies regarded it as the more promising of the two, and set about trying to convince individual Conservative candidates and MPs.

They succeeded. Enoch Powell was one of the first to understand that Britain’s post-war problems were largely the result of bloated government, and he was soon joined by Geoffrey Howe, Nick Ridley and others.

The breakthrough came with the winning over of Sir Keith Joseph, a brilliant intellectual who until then had been a textbook paternalistic Tory, chiefly interested in the social work that he carried out through a family trust. Reading Hayek and Friedman, and listening to Alfred Sherman and Anthony Fisher, Sir Keith was transformed. “It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism,” as he later put it. “I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.”

Except that he had been. His previous views had been squarely in the tradition of One Nation Toryism – the pragmatic tradition of Benjamin Disraeli and Stanley Baldwin, of Randolph and Winston Churchill, of Harold Macmillan and R.A. Butler, of David Cameron and Theresa May.

Sir Keith went on to win Margaret Thatcher to his new creed. But let’s not delude ourselves: he and she were only ever the mahouts, never the elephant. They could steer the mighty pachyderm as long as it was content to move; but, ultimately, the elephant was carrying them, not the other way around.

Purely libertarian parties – ACT in New Zealand, say, or Gary Johnson in the United States – have never risen above single figures. When free-marketeers spend their time arguing about pornography and drugs, they sound eccentric. When they argue about fractional reserve banking and a return to the gold standard, they still sound distant from most people’s concerns.

But when they concentrate on the areas where they agree with traditional conservatives – welfare reform, tax cuts, school choice, Euroscepticism, property rights – they can achieve extraordinary things, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did.

Conservatism is an instinct, not an ideology. The elephant has a powerful, though unspecific, sense of where it wants to go. It is moved, not by any philosophy, but by what Disraeli called “the sublime instincts of an ancient people”. Don’t jab your goad into that great beast: that won’t end well for you. Rather, coax it, encourage it, whisper into its vast ear and, if your arguments are as good as you believe they are, it will respond.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP and author of Why Vote Leave published by Head of Zeus