Keen On

Were politics chess, liberals had white; they moved first. Conservatives had black; they countered liberalism’s opening moves. In time, the initiative changed hands. Conservatives, who began as anti-moderns, came to master modernity, for the right was in telling ways the stronger contestant. So write Edmund Fawcett in his exemplary intellectual history, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. As the author of the equally excellent Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Fawcett is as well positioned as anyone to determine who is winning today’s grand ideological chess game between Liberalism and Conservatism. So, I asked Fawcett - in our bewildering age of Trump, Harris, Orban, Meloni, Starmer, Le Pen and JD Vance - is it liberals or conservatives who are most successfully reinventing their ideologies to master the desires of 21st century electorates?Edmund Fawcett was the Economist‘s Washington, Paris and Berlin correspondent and is a regular reviewer. His Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published by Princeton