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Editor’s Note: Convictions held by those in the modern-day Liberal Party no longer stack up to the conservative superheroes of the past, writes Will Kingston in this sobering article from Sky News.

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In essence, it’s an opportunity for socially awkward nerds to dress up as their favourite superheroes at comic book conventions. Harmless fun, for the most part.

There’s one group of socially awkward nerds that has developed a more dangerous cosplay habit.

Conservative politicians.

We live in the age of the “cosplay conservative”.

Faking It

Across the Anglosphere, right-leaning politicians are cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of the conservative superheroes of yesteryear: Reagan, Thatcher, Menzies and Howard.

They know the scripts. They parrot the lines.

Some quite literally wear the costume, although Liz Truss discovered that a Thatcher-inspired wardrobe was no guarantee of Thatcher-esque longevity.

The reality is few of them share the same convictions.

In the UK, notionally conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak donned his costume at the Conservative Party conference, vowing to emulate Margaret Thatcher by “fundamentally changing [the] country.”

How? Everyone born after January 1, 2009, will be banned from buying cigarettes – which is an industry that Thatcher supported.

It’s the sort of kindly authoritarian claptrap that she would have reviled.

Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, loves it.

It was originally her idea.

Across the pond, the GOP’s costume hasn’t changed in over 30 years.

It was recently dusted off at the second Republican primary debate, held in the [drumroll please] Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

It’s become a “quadrennial tradition”, according to Bloomberg Columnist Joshua Green.

“Every cycle, GOP presidential candidates show up to genuflect to ‘The Gipper’… and try to persuade Republican voters that they’re the best suited to take up the mantle of the sainted 40th president,” he wrote.

Of course, the debate itself contained precious few examples of the hawkish foreign policy, small government instincts and free-market economics that characterised Reaganism.

Compromised

Closer to home, cosplay conservatism has become the default setting of today’s Liberal Party.

‘The party of Robert Menzies’, as Liberal politicians so like to say, is no longer the party of Robert Menzies.

Unlike Menzies, they don’t champion the freedom of the individual.

The Morrison government’s COVID response revealed there is no institutional instinct towards personal liberty in the Liberal Party.

Unlike Menzies, they don’t consistently promote free enterprise.

WorkChoices died the year the iPhone was born, and yet its ghost still scares Liberals away from the industrial relations arena.

Unlike Australia’s longest-serving PM, they show little inclination towards reining in government largesse.

Tony Abbott’s first budget is almost a decade behind us, but the scars of poorly communicated spending cuts are still visible on the Liberal psyche, if not the economy.

Most, unlike Menzies, have retreated from the battlefield of ideas.

It was Menzies who said:

“Modern history is full of examples of great movements that disappeared because they had ceased to have any genuine reason for existence.

“The important thing is to have a faith to live by.”

Here’s the thing.

Putting on the ‘John Howard costume’ is easy.

But living by a political faith, as Mr Howard did, is hard.

As Mr Howard’s former deputy prime minister, John Anderson, recently asked me:

“Do you think we [the Howard government] had a constituency for deficit reduction? Of course not. We had to make the case.”

Making the case for conservatism is hard.

But it always has been.

It requires discipline, persuasion, and the promotion of new conservative ideas, rather than mere reactionary instincts.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, not even the best costume can substitute for those virtues.

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Will Kingston is a columnist at SkyNews.com.au and a panellist on The Bolt Report at 7 p.m. every Tuesday on Sky News Australia. He also hosts The Spectator Australia’s ‘Australiana’ podcast.