While the U.S. was reeling from the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath, across the Atlantic another event of significance to the conservative political world took place: The Conservative member of Parliament Danny Kruger defected to the Reform party. He is not the first to do so, but as Michael Gove, former cabinet minister and now editor of The Spectator, commented, earlier defectors were either “shop-soiled, eccentric, or unknown.” Kruger, by contrast, is a highflier, a man of impeccable reputation and one of the most constructive and careful Christian voices in politics anywhere in the world. His speech to the House of Commons (which hardly any of his colleagues had the good manners to attend) stands as a graceful and thought-provoking contribution to discussion of our cultural challenges from a Christian perspective.
I had the pleasure of engaging with Kruger in London some years ago, at a discussion on expressive individualism. I came away with the impression of a man who was well-read, thoughtful, and worried about the deeper impulses driving those things in our societies that are undermining our very coherence as communities. He is a man who looks for underlying causes and is not mesmerized by mere symptoms or whatever grabs the immediate imagination of the activist classes.
In 2023, he published Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation, a philosophically-grounded manifesto for conservative thought and action. What Kruger does in this book is important: He responds to our current cultural problems by developing a robust understanding of what it means to be human, something that for him (as for many of us) has a deep religious component. For society to thrive, we need people who are virtuous, people who love virtue, people who practice virtue. We need people, in other words, who understand what it means to be made in God’s image. This is at the heart of Kruger’s Christian humanism, and presumably central to his disillusionment with the Tories whose vision of humanity now often includes radical dehumanizing views of abortion and euthanasia.
The future of Danny Kruger will be fascinating, for his chosen calling—electoral politics—is itself enmeshed with realities that militate against his Christian humanist vision. We live in an age of social media, and it is evident that success at the polls depends to a significant degree on the ability to harness that. This is not the era of cogent arguments made with grace and learning but of online posts, short and snappy videos, smart-aleck one-liners. As with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage’s own success has rested to a significant degree upon his facility with such as a means of galvanizing his supporters.
Social media is not a neutral tool. It rests upon and reinforces the ethical universe of expressive individualism, the very cause of so many of our problems: It emphasizes personal performance; it has no place for personal responsibility, modesty, or humility; and it incentivizes transgression. It has an appetite for destruction. Nobody “builds their brand” on social media platforms by careful argument and respectful engagement with those who differ. The name of the game is to discredit and dehumanize the rival by any means necessary, preferably the brash and the outrageous. It is to smash through the sacred taboos, whether of past generations or political opponents. In this, the online left and the online right are two sides of the same coin, driven by a ressentiment that would be buffoonish if it were not so destructive. Each defines itself by negating in the most colorful language whatever it is that the other side considers holy. That is not where Kruger stands in style or substance.
Further, Kruger’s message speaks to the trans issue—the real trans issue. In 2024, the mantras on the far end of the Christian right directed to anyone who was less than full-throated in their support for Donald Trump were twofold: You do not know what time it is, and they are coming to trans your kids. Despite the election result, these mantras continue, but with an important twist: If you think that the “vibe shift” on transgenderism or orders banning men in women’s sports—welcome as they are—are the beginning of the end of the trans problem, then it is you who do not know what time it is. They are still coming to trans your kids. Indeed, they are coming to trans us all.
Gender may be fading as the immediate target but what it means to be human—whether it has any normative meaning at all—remains center stage. The aim of transhumanizing us via smartphones, TikTok, AI, abortion rights, euthanasia, eugenics, and all the other harbingers of technological progress is one of the big issues of our day. Modern technology is a spiritual problem, not simply an economic or technical one, as Kruger also hints toward the end of his speech and voices in his book.
Kruger is without a doubt the most intellectually and politically substantial recruit to the Reform party since its inception. Indeed, he is one of the most thoughtful, honorable, and articulate thinkers among conservatives anywhere. His vision of a society, putting a true humanism at its center, is compelling. The question is: Will his message, vital as it is, help to reshape both the Reform party and U.K. politics and perhaps offer a model of thinking and behavior to us all? The imperatives of social media, with its rewarding of the very expressive individualism that undercuts that vision, raise serious doubts about whether that will prove the case. But as a Christian, Kruger knows that neither truth nor virtue necessarily triumph in temporal affairs, yet we are still required by our faith to model to the world around us what it means to be truly human in all of our thoughts and actions.
