AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE’S DREAM, SEEN WALKING IN LONDON:

I’ve long urged American conservatives to take the last words Ronald Reagan left for us to heart. You can see them on the gravestone at his resting place in his beloved California: “I know in my heart … there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.” You can imagine my joy when I saw Johnson utter the identical sentiment. “My mother,” he told the Tory faithful at their annual conference this year, “taught me to believe strongly in the equal importance, the equal dignity, the equal worth of every human being on the planet.” Somewhere the Gipper is smiling.

This principle, more than Brexit, defines why Johnson’s Tories won seats in places the Labour Party has dominated for decades (in some cases, for more than a century). Working-class men and women could see that, like them, Johnson was an outsider despised by the London elites. They could see he had the courage to take on those elites, including the ones inside his own party. Just as working-class Democrats cast off 40 years of heritage to vote in 1980 for another outsider belittled by elites, so working-class Britons turned to Johnson, the only party leader who saw them as equals. The result: Johnson’s Conservatives beat Labour among the rich, middle class and poor on Thursday, something they have never done before.

Populist conservatism can unite America, too. It alone gives a home to suburbanites and working-class men and women of all creeds and colors. It alone brings us together rather than pulling us apart. And it rests on that most American of principles, the one that the world first heard expressed politically in an American document justifying revolution against a British king.

It’s (somewhat) easy to unite people against an elite as corrupt and incompetent as ours, or Britain’s. I’m less clear about what comes next. I’d rather see a system less prone to takeover by such people because it’s smaller and weaker and less prestigious.