Crisis sends people scouring the past, in search of a way forward. Talking to Conservatives in the months since their catastrophic loss last July, even before Kemi Badenoch flopped, I kept finding the conversation turning to a time and place that seems a world away from our stagnating land: the booming, bullish America of the early 20th century. And in particular to the US president Theodore Roosevelt, the great “progressive Republican”. It’s a label that resembles more recent attempts to escape outdated orthodoxies, such as “Red Tory” and its newly resurgent twin, “Blue Labour”. So can Roosevelt offer the Conservatives what those movements never achieved: a political programme that is not just popular, but transformative?
As an antidote to our timid, worn-out, pissed-off politics, Roosevelt is hard to beat. Here was a high-born New York weakling who built himself up by force of will into a real-life tough guy. When his wife and his mother died on the same day, he grieved by decamping to the Dakotas and turning himself into a rancher. (Admittedly, he left his child behind with his family.) As police commissioner in New York, he fought corruption; when America went to war with Spain over Cuba, he resigned from government and leaped into the fray. By the time he was 42, he’d hammered out a barrage of books about hard-won victories, such as The Naval War of 1812 and The Winning of the West. In 1900, to contain their turbulent son, the Republican establishment shunted him into the vice-presidency under William McKinley. But months later, an anarchist shot his boss, landing Teddy in the White House.
It’s hard to imagine Badenoch – or Jenrick, or Mel Stride – aping Roosevelt’s antics: jumping off a horse in Colorado, for instance, to kill a cougar with a knife. And in office, Roosevelt directed all that energy against the overweening power of corporations like Standard Oil: bringing a battery of anti-trust cases, creating a Department of Commerce and Labor, pushing for legislation against the abuse of workers. He made a point of travelling the heartland, meeting voters face to face. He would break taboos to get things done, intervening in talks between unions and bosses to resolve a miners’ strike. He appears to have been guided by a rare sense of moral mission.
For some of our more thoughtful Conservatives, all this is makes Roosevelt quite a draw. In the wake of fighting the companies that wrapped Grenfell Tower in lethal cladding, Michael Gove was looking for a historical figure of the right who had championed an active state. Roosevelt, who was “undeniably conservative”, fitted the bill. “He believed in national greatness,” Gove told me. “He was in no way a squish or a milquetoast liberal, or unafraid of proclaiming the virtues of his country and its way of life.”
Gove recently became the chair of the right-leaning think tank Onward’s editorial board, having worked with Nick Timothy MP and Gavin Rice on its “Future of Conservatism” project. (Timothy is not currently officially affiliated with Onward.) Rice, now the think tank’s head of political economy, similarly admires Roosevelt’s attempts to use the state for “generating economic fairness, productive markets that deliver rising prosperity for all, not just for economic elites, and prioritising the national interest”. Rice was inspired by the sociologist Robert Putnam, whose 2020 book The Upswing charts how, in the decades after Roosevelt and the progressive movement used government to tackle corporate concentrations of power, ordinary Americans flourished.
Some other younger Tories think likewise. Andrew O’Brien, until recently at Demos, was once an enthusiastic Thatcherite, but when George Osborne’s shrinking of the state failed to revive growth, it forced O’Brien to reconsider. In search of centre-right models for state intervention, he looks to Harold Macmillan, but admits that for today’s Conservatives, Roosevelt is “more dynamic”. Another long-time Conservative told me campaigning for leaseholders’ rights had opened his eyes to “market abuse” everywhere – by alcohol and gambling lobbies, and the alliance between big food companies and supermarkets. He too appreciates Roosevelt’s battles against concentrations of power, suggesting that the long alliance between Tories and economic liberals is at “breaking point”.
Attacks on “vested interests” often default to targeting the state, but the precedent of Roosevelt’s power struggle with corporations might help extend the attack to rent-seeking companies. Gove, who once battled the “Blob” in education, argues that the right should do the same in the private sector. In government, he denounced the big housebuilders as a “cartel”. He now singles out the tactics of private equity, and the water industry’s exploitation of weak regulation.
In recent weeks, these questions have snapped into focus with the government’s latest dash for growth. Some of its announcements could be cast as a Rooseveltian push to overcome special interests for the nation’s benefit: overriding Nimbyism; steering surplus capital in pension funds towards investment in our infrastructure. The Water Bill, meanwhile, promises criminal sanctions against negligent company bosses; through the workers’ rights reforms, state power will restrain exploitative practices. But at the same time, the government has swung the opposite way. It has replaced the assertive chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) with the ex-head of Amazon UK; a hundred CMA jobs are scheduled to be cut. Regulators must now be “pro-business”; Starmer has assured Donald Trump that deregulation is a priority.
Some of the Conservatives I spoke to share the criticisms of the CMA. But O’Brien points out that the UK’s mergers and acquisitions regime was already “very liberal”. Rice argues this can lead to “asset stripping”, “offshoring of production” and “profit margins for private equity”. Viewed through a Rooseveltian lens, Labour’s deregulatory turn suggests an opportunity for Conservative reinvention – offering to break from neoliberal shibboleths, reasserting the interests of ordinary Brits. Who knows, they might even strive to revive that postwar model in which government cooperated with British-owned companies in the national interest. It’s striking to hear David Davis – another Conservative admirer of Roosevelt – call for the state to curb corporate excess, by outlawing share buybacks, for example. He regrets that, in response to the politicised “de-banking” of Nigel Farage and others, Rishi Sunak’s government failed to “summon the bank chairmen” to No 10 to tell them “if you’re doing this to anybody… your bank licence is at risk”.
Michael Gove worries that his party appears to serve the “already rich”, and calls for a “Rooseveltian approach, which was about making capitalism more dynamic and also addressing its abuses”. And in 2023, Paul Marshall, owner of Unherd and GB News – and now Gove’s patron as the owner of the Spectator – told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that we need “a new Teddy Roosevelt – someone who is prepared to take on the vested interests, to rid the business world of cronyism, regulatory capture, and false virtue”. But is there a single conservative thread that pulls all this together – sufficient to rescue the world’s oldest democratic party at its lowest ebb?
On 31 August 1910, pursuing a quixotic bid to return to the White House, Teddy Roosevelt travelled to Osawatomie, Kansas. There, before a crowd of 30,000, he proclaimed “the New Nationalism”. This, he announced, “puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage”, and “regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare”.
This was the idea that underpinned his politics. Invoking the “nation” is a conservative cliché, but Roosevelt’s version was unusually focused on the people who actually lived in the country, not some fantasy to which most of them failed to match up. This makes it more detachable than many species of nationalism from poisonous ideas. Which is good, because Roosevelt’s thinking included plenty of those, from an imperial zest for conquest to a rather relaxed attitude to preserving liberty via racism and eugenics. None of these obsessions attract the Conservatives I spoke to. In the US, where there is also a revival of conservative interest in the Progressive Era, Republican attacks on corporations are often framed in anti-woke terms, such as by targeting diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Roosevelt-curious Tories here, by contrast, tend to name-check left-wing writers on political economy like Brett Christophers, David Edgerton and Joanna Blythman.
But there is a distinctively conservative aspect of Roosevelt’s idea of nationhood they seem to admire: his emphasis on character. Employers should treat their staff decently, for instance, because it bolsters the virtue of the nation. Adam Hawksbee, ex-deputy director of Onward and now working in the private sector, suggested there is a lesson for Conservatives in a speech Roosevelt gave in Syracuse, New York, in 1903, which contended that the “line of cleavage between good citizenship and bad citizenship” is moral, not material – it separates “the rich man who does well from the rich man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad conduct”. Today’s Tories might also heed what Roosevelt told that Osawatomie crowd: “Ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”
In his later years, Roosevelt’s concern about the future of America extended to queasier territory: the birth rate. In a US that was absorbing waves of immigration, this was entangled with a racist agitation about having enough of the “right” sort of Americans. But what the British Conservatives I spoke to take from this is nothing like that. They argue that, while many people still want to have children, they are held back by economic obstacles like unaffordable housing. They suggest that the tax system could be more family-focused, and that working parents could do with stronger rights. They also worry that people are giving up on society. Amid signs that the young are souring on democracy, Roosevelt’s ideas seem to offer a way to revive a sense of common citizenship, so that people still want to raise kids here.
Since the Reagan-Thatcher rupture of the 1980s, Roosevelt’s insistence that the state must be the people’s instrument against powerful interests has been twisted out of shape. Government was recast as the people’s enemy, leaving CEOs free to squeeze pay, cut service quality, juice their share price, and trouser exorbitant bonuses. Polls suggest the British public thinks the rich have too much power. This has helped lay the ground for today’s despairing, self-defeating populism.
Could the recovery of a vision of a Rooseveltian active state forging a flourishing national community help to push back the tide? Michael Gove hopes so. He noted that Roosevelt was reacting both to vested interests and to those who savaged them. Gove thinks Roosevelt’s example “shows that a mainstream leader of the right can address those root causes”, such that “those populists at the moment who may not have answers, but do have the rhetoric and the emotion and the ability to connect can be – no pun intended – trumped”.
But after 14 years in office, can the Conservatives credibly propose this, especially having presided over so many scandals? When they tried, with Theresa May’s “just about managing” rhetoric, or Boris Johnson’s “levelling up”, they struggled to make headway. Perhaps Reform itself will get there first: it has called for water nationalisation, and promised to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Yet a party whose membership is swollen with red-trousered Thatcherites and funded by a property investor would have to become something very different to pull this off.
And Labour? It may not be ready to embrace a rumbustious left-wing populism that pushes back against corporate interests in patriotic terms. But the man who brought Teddy Roosevelt’s championship of an active state to fruition was the American president that British social democrats most revere. If they’re not keen on Teddy, Labour could do much more to channel the popular counter-populism of that other President Roosevelt: the father of the New Deal, FDR. Either way, while contemporary America is in deep political trouble, its history could yet give British politics a desperately needed injection of new energy and ideas.
[See also: The prophet of the new right]
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