In April 2013, Nigel Farage was on the rise, and Boris Johnson wanted to calm Conservative nerves. “He’s in our constituencies, wooing our audiences, nicking our votes,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph. But panic, he said, was premature. “We Tories look at him – with his pint and cigar and sense of humour – and we instinctively recognise someone who is fundamentally indistinguishable from us,” Johnson wrote. The alarm was simply that “of a man confronted by his doppelganger” – “he’s a blooming Conservative, for heaven’s sake”.

Today, Johnson’s flirtations with Farage are often seen as the symptom of a newly feverish, out-of-character Conservative party. In this view, a party once prized – in its own eyes at least – for its pragmatism, patience and common sense now rushes forward, unrecognisably, with revolutionary zeal. “The Tory party has crossed their rubicon,” Matthew Parris mourned in The Times on 1 November, announcing that, after 50 years, he was backing the Lib Dems. “I’m still not sure whether I left the Conservative party, or whether it left me,” Rory Stewart had lamented the previous month.

But Johnson is more in keeping with modern Conservatism than he may seem, and he was right to find common ground with Farage – in 2013 as now. While their election masks may differ, the Faragist dream for Britain buried within Brexit is the same one that has excited Conservatives for nearly half a century: of a nation loyal to both profit and a mythologised past; at once enclosed in a unique, sovereign territory and exposed to the homogenising market forces of a globalised world; open for business, closed to foreigners; a Singapore-on-Thames, steeped in sepia tones.

Margaret Thatcher was the first to make this contradictory vision real, mixing free-market fundamentalism with xenophobia and social traditionalism. But, in many ways, Enoch Powell was the project’s true pioneer. Johnson is a worthy heir. With his promises to “unleash” capital, clamp down on immigration and ramp up law and order, Johnson represents not so much a break with the modern Conservative tradition as a naked apotheosis, stripped of all its surface charm.

Powell is remembered for his incendiary anti-immigration incitements. His zealous faith in the free-market is largely forgotten. But before Thatcher, he too said society had no meaning beyond the market, and he boasted close ties with the Institute for Economic Affairs. Thatcher studied his speeches and delivered her own Powellite prophecies, warning in 1978 that Britain might be “swamped by people with a different culture”. History has allotted them different roles: Powell, the xenophobe; Thatcher, the free-marketeer – but, much like Johnson and Farage today, their political personas were always two sides of the same coin. As Powell coyly reflected in 1988, “that which used to be called Powellite has recently been redesignated Thatcherite”.

Thatcher delivered her own Powellite propehecies, warning in 1978 that Britain might be “swamped by people with a different culture”. Photograph: PA

Whichever term is chosen – Powellite, Thatcherite or Faragist – this Conservative project has always been populist, radical and transformative, an active rebuttal of small-c conservatism’s associated values of scepticism, patience, and judicious reform. Economics was the method, as Thatcher said; the aim was to change people’s hearts and souls. Johnson lacks such ideological drive: if anything, like all Thatcher’s children, he simply pursues the same project with more pragmatism. But his taste for creative destruction – flirting with Farage, playing up the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, saying “fuck business” – is very much his own.

The Brexit referendum was a moment when the Conservative mask of moderation slipped: even the party’s rhetorical commitment to political stability and aristocratic restraint vanished, and the contradiction between “Little England” and “Global Britain” came to the fore. (Before settling on “Take Back Control,” one suggested and favoured slogan for Vote Leave was “Go Global.”) But as Powell and Thatcher showed, this contradiction – however much chaos and conflict it causes – says little about the party’s electoral prospects. “In our intellectual way,” Stuart Hall wrote in 1987, as he tried to make sense of Thatcherism’s seeming ideological incoherence, “we think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual – that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation.”

For the Conservatives, if not the country, this trademark mix of market freedom and state force, national optimism and nationalist fear, has been a huge success. Since Thatcher’s first victory in 1979, the Tories have won the most seats in every election but three. Yet the party’s gain has been the nation’s pain. Society’s infrastructure has withered away, poverty and inequality have spiralled, prejudice runs free, and instability defines almost every level of life, public and private. As the Tories declare the dangers of national debt, they impose an economic system where household debt has reached record levels. The party recants their commitment to the NHS like an incantation, while cosying up to Donald Trump and Britain’s free-market thinktanks (and then handing Amazon free access to national healthcare data).

But for today’s lapsed Conservatives, pained by Johnson’s presence, their sudden crisis of conscience comes from somewhere else: a conviction that only the party, rather than the country, is in a bad way. In his column, Parris pleaded for a “return to Tory sanity” – apparently any time pre-Johnson. “You might say the lunatics are running the asylum,” a recent FT editorial declared, under the headline “British voters face an impossible choice.” It’s a recurring lament. (In this moment of political polarisation, the so-called “politically homeless” is a booming demographic, perhaps only outgrown by the actually homeless – with whom they seem to have little solidarity.)

But madness, as the old adage goes, is defined by wanting to repeat the same doomed approach again and again. So it is with the Conservatives: it’s the blind attachment to an economic model, despite the social devastation it has wrought, which should be the real cause for concern. A now-notorious poll of the Conservative party’s ageing membership in July put this single-mindedness plainly. A majority are willing to tolerate anything – the break-up of the Conservative party, the break-up of the United Kingdom – except a Jeremy Corbyn government in order to deliver Brexit. Hall saw the same “scorched earth” strategy in Thatcher’s day, “socially destructive and ideologically extreme”.

In 1981, as Thatcher’s radical vision became reality, the philosopher Gerry Cohen published a paper – similar in sentiment to Hall, different in style – titled “Rescuing conservatism from the Conservatives”. For Cohen, Thatcherism signalled the complete abandonment – the “betrayal” – of conservative values by Conservatives. Cohen was a Marxist, but he felt that – faced with capitalism’s restless need to remake everything for the purpose of profit rather than people – the left was now the more natural home for conservatism. At a time when the political and economic consensus is even more destructive, not just on society but the planet, Cohen’s observation only seems more apt.

The market’s insatiable impulse to maximise value leads to the loss of what is actually valuable in people’s lives, even according to Conservatives: a sense of continuity, control and local community. Modern Conservatives still like to pay lip service to these erstwhile values. But they can apparently afford little else, preferring to stoke fears against imagined threats. “They blather on about warm beer and old maids cycling to church,” Cohen wrote, “and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom.” This duplicity is the story of Conservatism for the last 50 years: whether Powellism, Thatcherism, Farageism, or the rest. Some Conservatives might not like what they see, but Boris Johnson is a fitting figure to carry the torch. Their alarm is simply that of a man confronted with his doppelganger: he’s a blooming Conservative, for heaven’s sake.

• Samuel Earle is a writer based in London