Published May 9, 2025
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s historic, embarrassing failure to be installed on the Bundestag’s first vote merely underscores an increasingly undeniable trend: traditional post-war Conservatism is fading fast.
That observation would have been risible twenty years ago. Pro-market, pro-internationalist Conservative parties were either in power or the main opposition almost everywhere in the Western world. The Left-Right divide had narrowed in the 21st Century as centre-left parties accepted market economics and centre-right parties accepted both the welfare state and a slow shift away from traditional morality.
Nevertheless, a time traveller from the 1950s would recognise virtually every Western country’s politics as being derived from that person’s generation.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
