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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By John O'Sullivan
March 14, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Where is conservatism heading in the English-speaking world? This question
is currently being answered in the four countries of the Anglosphere —
namely, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Britain — in four distinctive ways.
THE UNITED STATES
I will assume that American readers have a rough grasp of the state of
conservatism in the U.S. as revealed in the Republican primaries. It is
currently — as it has been for many years — a struggle for dominance in
the movement between economic and social conservatives.
Readers abroad who rely for guidance on their mainline foreign
correspondents (who in turn rely on the establishment media in the U.S.) may
have the impression that this is a vicious battle between incompatible
gangs of lunatic extremists. But as Tim Stanley writes on his Daily
Telegraph blog, the struggle is really a less fundamental one between the
country club and the church picnic.
Each of these contenders for the soul of conservatism is accustomed to
cooperating with the other. Both are fairly conservative. So, unless Romney
is a sheep in wolf’s clothing — which seems to be the principal anxiety
about him among Republican voters — this is also a struggle that both sides
can afford to lose.
To put it in negative terms: A practicing Mormon such as Governor Romney is
unlikely to be morally radical; a Catholic moralist such as Senator Santorum
is unlikely to continue the economics of overspending and debt; and a
visionary futurist such as Speaker Gingrich is unlikely to tolerate either
the government’s Luddite obstruction of innovation or its enforcement of a
new morality of subsidized bohemianism.
All conservatives can ultimately live with the victory of any of the leading
candidates. All will gain somewhat by the adoption of their favorite
policies. All will be disappointed from time to time — but very few to the
extent that they will leave the Republican coalition.
American conservatism remains vigorous and fundamentally healthy. Its
rhetorical excesses and its internal battles — however inconvenient from
the narrow standpoint of party management and electoral discipline — are
evidence of that health and vigor. What it needs to acquire from the
primaries is a leader who has both the firmness to adopt a strong program of
reform — combining, say, the Ryan plan and tea-party principles — and the
rhetorical skill to persuade the American people of its necessity.
Such a leader is easier to describe than to find. Reagans and Thatchers don
’t grow on trees. Do other conservative leaders in the Anglosphere give
Americans either hope or guidance?
Conservatism is thriving both in Australia and in Canada — but doing so in
very different ways. It is advancing in Australia by boldness and in Canada
by caution.
AUSTRALIA
In Australia the key moment in internal conservative politics occurred in
December 2009 when Tony Abbott became leader of the Liberal party by
defeating his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, over the latter’s support for
Labor legislation introducing a carbon-emissions trading scheme.
Abbott’s election was greeted with glee by both the Labor government and
the left-wing media, which saw him as an unelectable right-winger. But he
won a moral victory by holding Labor to a draw — 72 parliamentary seats
each — in the 2010 election. Today his Liberal-Country Coalition enjoys a
10 percent lead over a faction-ridden Labor government uneasily reliant for
its tiny majority on three independent MPs.
Abbott is a brilliant but unorthodox conservative politician. He emerged
from the social-conservative wing of his party — and some free-marketeers
are uneasy about him — but his program includes bold cuts in spending and
the repeal of recent Labor “reforms” (including the carbon-emissions tax
that narrowly passed this year). He is stealing away blue-collar voters —
until recently Labor’s core vote — both because of his robust personality
and because he defends ordinary Australians against the bright ideas of new
Labor elites. He manages to combine populism with pragmatism in a rare, if
not unique, mix.
In a 2011 study of Abbott that should be read in full here, Paul Kelly of
The Australian summed him up as follows: “[Abbott] has a conservative set
of values that he champions yet his policy outlook is highly flexible and
pragmatic. . . . Because Abbott is seen to stand for enduring values he gets
away with multiple policy switches with impunity.”
Currently Abbott is expected to win an election that must be held some time
in the next 18 months — and to do so on a program that is boldly
conservative but not dogmatically pure.
CANADA
Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, offers a very different approach
— but one that makes good sense in the Canadian context: He underpromises
and overdelivers.
Conservatism was seen until recently as a doomed philosophy in a Canada
permanently governed by a large and ideologically sprawling Liberal party
with brief intervals of power granted to a “Progressive Conservative”
party that, as its name suggests, was like a schizophrenic confined in a
state asylum.
Harper has been described (by an admirer) as “Canada’s Nixon” — a
cerebral politician who quietly calculates the steps necessary to gain his
objectives and then, having also calculated the opposition to them,
methodically sets about achieving them.
The objective of replacing both the Liberals and the “Red Tories” as
governing parties by a genuinely conservative party was surely too ambitious
even for a Nixon. There must have been many disappointments, second
thoughts, and adaptations along the way. Still, that is what has actually
happened, and Harper was a leading player at every stage of the game.
He first set about undermining the Tories by helping to found a rival
conservative party, Reform; then he amalgamated Reform with rump Tories to
form the Conservative Party of Canada; next he led the CPC into minority
government on a “softly, softly” program of moderate reform; finally, last
year, he gained a clear majority and made the CPC the natural party of
government in an election in which the Liberals fell into third place.
This is an impressive record by any measure. Still, conservative Canada-
watchers such as Mark Steyn, David Frum, and indeed me have sometimes
suggested that Harper’s gradualist conservatism in government was so
gradual that it was unlikely to shift Canada rightwards — to a smaller
state or a more self-reliant society or a more patriotic national self-image
— to any real extent.
After six years, social conservatives do feel let down — though not very
far down, since they had modest expectations of a political leader who has
avoided issues such as abortion and embraced conventional views on
immigration. For other conservatives, however, that judgment looks
questionable in ways large and small.
Building on the earlier budget-tightening of Liberal prime minister Paul
Martin, Harper has cut the size of government to one of the smallest in the
advanced world. Canada’s tax burden is now similarly low, at about 31
percent of GDP. And its budget deficit, though somewhat higher as a result
of the 2007–11 world recession, is on course to disappear by 2013. Overall,
Canada’s economy is one of the freest, according to the Heritage
Foundation’s index.
More subtly, Harper has embarked on a series of measures to restore the
cultural atmosphere of Canadian life along pre-Trudeau lines: promoting the
armed forces and restoring pride in Canada’s military record (a very
glorious one in truth); installing royal portraits in Canadian embassies;
imposing a language requirement — French in Quebec, English elsewhere —
for permanent residents; and, just recently, giving government support to
repealing the anti-free-speech powers of Canada’s misnamed Human Rights
Commissions. Even on immigration, which has risen under his government,
Harper has made it serve Canada better by tightening refugee provisions,
cracking down on fraud, shifting from permanent to temporary worker visas,
revoking passports fraudulently obtained, and moving from “family
reunification” to economic need as the main basis of policy. Canada’s
postwar drift from lumberjack to cross-dresser, as in the Monty Python song,
has begun to reverse.
Moreover, the pace of gradual change is accelerating. Having complained in
early 2011 that Harper had disappointed the Canadian West by failing to
tackle federal intrusions on its rights and interests, journalist Kevin
Libin had to return to the topic post-election and concede that Harper had
now delivered on every count. See full article here.
Abolishing the Wheat Board and the federal gun registry may seem modest
measures from the outside, but abandoning Canada’s obligations under Kyoto
was neither small nor gradual; it was a sharp and frontal challenge to a U.N
.-sponsored world consensus. And it was accepted with relatively little
resistance within Canada — suggesting that Harper had gone a long way
towards establishing conservatism as the nation’s new governing philosophy.
BRITAIN
But it is Britain’s David Cameron who has attracted the most attention in
the U.S. as a possible model for the GOP and American conservatives. New
York Times columnist David Brooks has espoused Cameron’s “Big Society,”
his new brand of social or communitarian or “localist” conservatism, and,
unlike other intellectual supporters, has even made a decent stab at
explaining what it is. Other writers critical of the current contenders for
GOP leadership have followed suit.
Mr. Cameron arrived in Washington yesterday. His arrival had been heralded
by a short overture on the Foreign Policy website by Spectator blogger Alex
Massie, about the lessons Cameron represents for the American Right.
Although leavened by admissions that Cameron’s “localism” hasn’t really
achieved much, that the Cameron Tories in opposition endorsed Labour’s
runaway spending, which helped precipitate the crash, and that his
government’s supposedly draconian budgetary plans are “only different in
degree” from Labour’s (in fact they are slightly less severe), Massie’s
main theme is the standard Cameron narrative that the GOP should learn to “
detoxify” its image in order to win new voters, as Cameron succeeded in
doing by “going Green” and avoiding traditional Tory issues. But as the
joke about such an election goes: Great campaign, pity about the result.
For those eccentrics interested in a more thorough dissection of the Cameron
narrative, please go to my own analysis in NR here.
But it might be quicker and simpler to read some recent British newspaper
headlines. In particular, the London Sunday Times ten days ago led off the
news with a front-page banner headline shouting: “Tax Battle Rages over How
to Hit the Rich.”
The story beneath it described how the so-called Quad of leading Cabinet
ministers who set the political strategy for the Conservative–Liberal
Democrat coalition government — two Conservatives and two Liberal Democrats
— were now debating new, or at least higher, taxes for the forthcoming
March budget. Similar stories about higher taxes have been in every daily
paper since then.
If one goes behind the headlines, moreover, one discovers a curious and
complex quadrille being danced by the Cameron Tories and their Liberal
Democrat partners over tax policy.
Both parties agreed in the coalition negotiations to a Lib-Dem proposal to
take people earning $16,000 or less out of taxation altogether. The Tories
extracted no quid pro quo for this.
It is a very different story for the higher tax brackets. Tory backbenchers
have been arguing for several months that the 50 percent top rate of income
tax should be reduced to 40 percent.
Good reasons for this change have been piling up: The 50 percent rate
becomes a punitive 58 percent when local and social-security taxes are added
; it sends a message that Britain is hostile to successful enterprise; it
deters high-earners from settling or staying in Britain; and it raises very
little revenue into the bargain. And on top of all that, the British economy
is stuck in a mild recession and would benefit from the stimulus of a cut
in the higher tax rates — or so a politically mixed group of economists
recently declared.
In this new atmosphere, Liberal Democrats — who had been loudly boasting
all year that they would stop their Tory colleagues from cutting taxes on
the rich — now announced that they were not ideologically opposed to this
particular cut. Of course, it would have to be “paid for” by other taxes
on the rich.
But why by other taxes? Might not this and other tax cuts be financed by
cuts in public spending? The proportion of Britain’s GDP now taken by the
public sector has recently risen to about 50 percent. It has been rising,
along with Britain’s net indebtedness, throughout the two years of the
coalition government. Surely the Tories must now be pressing their Lib-Dem
partners to accept spending cuts in order to finance the desired growth
package of tax cuts? Right? Well, apparently wrong.
According to press reports, it is the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, who
has set his face against any further spending cuts.
Again, why?
A desire to conciliate his Lib-Dem partners? Perhaps.
A fear that spending cuts would depress demand and delay any tentative
recovery? Possibly — if cutting expenditure were the whole of the policy.
But the idea is to cut spending in order to finance a tax cut in order to
stimulate the economy. When the public sector is half of the economy, it
should be easy to find cuts whose recessionary impact would be modest
compared to a tax stimulus of about the same size. Yet no such search will
be undertaken.
That suggests a more direct political motive. George Osborne enjoys the
reputation of being a shrewd political strategist because his steering of
the last election campaign did not result in an outright Tory defeat.
Looking ahead, he may calculate that the Tories cannot afford to cut
spending at all if they are to win the Middle Ground next time. Thus they
cannot cut taxes for the rich, however sensibly and profitably, unless they
hike taxes on the rich at the same time. Thus the Sunday Times headline.
Or, to borrow the logic of Angela Lansbury in the movie The Manchurian
Candidate: “Are they asking, ‘Shall we levy new taxes on the rich?’ No,
they are asking, ‘Which new taxes shall we levy on the rich?’”
This sets the scene for an elegant tax quadrille in which the Lib-Dems
advance, kneel, and proffer a new tax on the rich; the Tories bow, indicate
reluctance, and retreat; whereupon the Lib-Dems return with an alternative
tax on the rich, at which the Tories quibble, turn on their heels, and . . .
you get the idea.
In the last ten days the Lib-Dem proposals have included a “mansion tax”
of 1 percent annually on homes worth $3 million and above; a cut in tax
relief for the pensions of those in the higher tax brackets; a new and
higher rate of council tax for those with homes worth more than about $500,
000; and a so-called “tycoon tax” that would require millionaires who
legally avoid the highest tax rates — by, for instance, giving large sums
to charity — to pay not less than 20 percent of their income in tax.
Unfortunately for Mr. Osborne and the Tories, almost all these proposed
taxes would hit not only “the rich” (however broadly defined) but people
living in large houses (often purchased from the highly taxed incomes of the
pre-Thatcher years) in the south of England, many of whom are retired and
dependent on fixed incomes far lower than those they enjoyed in employment.
Most of these are Tory voters, at least for the moment.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the latest twist in this saga may be
that Cameron has decided a cut in the 50 percent tax rate is simply not
worth all this trouble.
The Cameron Tories have got themselves into such trouble because of a
decision they made in opposition: namely, that they would not challenge the
fundamental premises of Gordon Brown’s socialist economics. They assumed,
as Mr. Massie points out, that the boom would continue indefinitely. So they
would not seriously challenge Labour’s spending plans lest they be asked
the embarrassing question: “Which schools and hospitals would you therefore
cut?” They would not argue that “exit” was at least equal to “voice”
— and maybe superior to it — as a strategy for improving public services,
lest they be accused of wholesale privatization. They would not maintain
that tax cuts were a more efficient form of economic stimulus than increases
in public spending, in case they were suspected of wanting to starve the
public sector. They would not incorporate the incentive effects of marginal-
tax-rate cuts in their tax-and-spend calculations, for fear of being called
Reaganites or Republicans. And having abandoned the intellectual tools of
anti-socialist economics, they now find themselves fighting on enemy
territory and calling for tax hikes on the rich to pay for tax cuts for the
rich.
This passivity on economic policy was a subset of the larger decision of the
Cameron Tories not to challenge the cultural assumptions of modern
metropolitan liberalism across the board. To be sure, there were areas of
policy, notably education and welfare, where serious thinking produced
effective, sensible, and distinctively Tory policies. But on crime,
immigration, public order, human rights, the European Union, national
sovereignty, and much else, there was a climate of reluctance to adopt
policies, even to think thoughts, that might clash with the prevailing
opinions in the governing elites. In government, this climate has worsened,
because the Liberal Democrats in the coalition are usually in agreement,
often fiercely, with the elites, institutions, and policies that most Tories
see as foolish, damaging, or even hostile. This produces confusion and
paralysis in official policy.
As a result, almost every day there is a crisis or a serious embarrassment.
In the last week there have been three such events in addition to the comedy
over taxes on the rich.
First, a Cabinet minister, Francis Maude, urged the electoral necessity of
the Tory party’s seeking support from gays and ethnic minorities. That is
incontestable in itself; the Tories, like other parties, should seek support
from all social groups. But as Janet Daley pointed out in a Daily Telegraph
column, Maude did not appear to grasp that the gay marriage he endorses
unconditionally would be anathema to the majority of ethnic Britons who are
either Muslims or evangelical Christians. That settles nothing, of course;
gay marriage must be either supported or opposed on grounds of principle.
But it does suggest the hollowness of an electoral strategy that treats all
minorities (and all members of minorities) as interchangeably progressive.
Second, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a distinguished political scientist (and,
as it happens, an old friend), resigned on Sunday from a official commission
established to advise the government on how best to reshape British human-
rights law. Should the U.K. regain some legislative sovereignty over such
matters from the European Court of Human Rights (as most Tories, perhaps
including David Cameron, wish)? Or should the U.K. retain a status quo in
which European judges determine such matters as whether convicted terrorists
should be deported and whether convicts in prison should have the vote (as
all Liberal Democrats and some Tories contend)? Four experts, including Dr.
Pinto-Duschinsky, were appointed to the commission by the Tories, and
another four by the Lib-Dems, under a supposedly neutral civil-service
chairman. Pinto-Duschinsky resigned because, he said, he and others had been
marginalized and sidelined owing to his insistence that the wishes of
Parliament be respected on human-rights issues. As a Holocaust survivor, he
told the Daily Mail here, he was especially outraged when commission members
compared parliamentary sovereignty over human rights to Nazism. In effect,
the commission was rigged to produce an anti-Tory result.
The third such event is a comic codicil to this. In the same week that Maude
advocated gay marriage and Pinto-Duschinsky resigned from the rigged
commission, British government lawyers were found to have argued in
submissions to the ECHR that two Christian women had no human right to wear
crucifixes at their place of work. Comment is surely needless.
Alongside Tony Abbott’s combination of enduring values and flexible
pragmatism or Stephen Harper’s gradualist encroachment on power, there
seems little that American conservatives should want to copy in the confused
, directionless, and easily thwarted record of Cameron conservatism. That
may yet change, of course. Until it does, this charming, intelligent, and
resourceful natural politician — but oddly passive and detached executive
— will find a very compatible ally in the White House.
— John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. |
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