Borrowing From the Brits

Caught up in election fever, I wonder whether the Washington elite will notice a fine article in the current Weekly Standard by Fred Barnes about the British Conservative revival. The tongue-in-cheek title — “First, Lose Three Straight Elections” — belies what actually is a more cheering message for the Republicans.Mr. Barnes spent some time in London interviewing a wide range of people, and his conclusion is that American conservatives can benefit from lessons that took the British Tories more than 10 years and three successive defeats to learn. A year ago the Conservative leader, David Cameron, was trailing Gordon Brown, then the new Labor prime minister, in the polls. Now Mr. Cameron is so far ahead, he’s out of sight, and the Labor rank and file are mutinous.You can read the article online, but here is a summary of the Barnes thesis. It takes time: not necessarily a decade, but Republicans should be patient and not expect to bounce back quickly if they lose again in November. It’s not about ideology — it’s about you: Republicans should confront, as the Tories already have, their own unpopularity. They need to fight on broader ground: don’t concede issues such as health care or welfare that are not your natural territory. Nor should they ignore elites, even liberal ones.In fact, they should capture liberal jargon, just as President Bush appropriated “compassion.” On the other hand, Mr. Barnes thinks Republicans should forget slogans: the Tories had some atrocious ones before they realized that this approach would not work.The hardest Tory lesson for the Republican Party probably is also the most important: you need a leader. Mr. Barnes has no specific suggestions, but he notes that even if Senator McCain wins, he may have little interest in reviving Republicanism.Let me add my own observations. First, I think the Cameron version of conservatism cannot be imitated too slavishly in America.For instance, social liberalism is much less acceptable — at least where same sex marriage is concerned — in America than in Europe. It is okay in Britain for senior Conservatives, such as the party’s trade spokesman Alan Duncan, to take advantage of the new civil partnership law to solemnize a homosexual union that is, in the eyes of the law, marriage in all but name. It is even okay for the party leader, Mr. Cameron, to be seen to approve of such unions and to congratulate Mr. Duncan.But it would not be okay for Mr. McCain to endorse same sex marriage, or even civil partnerships. The electoral price would be too high. He and his successors will have to find other issues on which to build common ground with the liberal elites.Second, American conservatives should be wary of falling into the habit of stealing their opponents’ policies merely because they have lost confidence in their own. Now that recession is in the air, conservative economic policies will start to pay dividends. This is not the time to promise big government programs.It is true that Mr. Cameron and his financial spokesman, George Osborne, have stuck to a promise to “share the proceeds of growth” between the state and the taxpayer. But what if there isn’t any growth to share for a year or two?As Mr. Barnes rightly points out, the Conservative revival really dates from the moment last October when Mr. Osborne uttered the previously forbidden words “tax cuts” — specifically, a promise to take middle-income families out of range of inheritance tax, and perhaps eventually to abolish it altogether.Death duties are deeply unpopular, because they confiscate wealth that has already been taxed at least once during the victim’s lifetime, and because they strike at the worst possible time. So this was a clever move, which forced the government to follow suit.Unfortunately, Messrs. Cameron and Osborne have not followed up this promising start. Instead, they have merely talked about carbon taxes — shifting the burden onto mobility.So Republicans should not abandon the most successful policy of the Reagan and Bush administrations — tax cuts — merely because the Conservatives have played down the success of Margaret Thatcher’s tax cuts in stimulating the ailing British economy of the 1980s. That would be the wrong lesson to learn.Third, Republicans could learn from their British Conservative counterparts not to lecture the poor from the lofty heights of the wealthy. Mr. Cameron is not, even by British standards, a very wealthy man, but he is rich beyond the wildest dreams of most voters.His lifestyle — including riding his bicycle to the office — has been carefully planned to play down his privileged background. That fools nobody. He still will be castigated by the press if, as prime minister, he gets the tone wrong when he addresses hard-pressed families who are in danger of losing their homes.The best thing that could happen to Mr. Cameron would be an Obama victory. He would then be able to contrast the new wave of world leaders who have emerged in the new century with the tired old guard, including Gordon Brown, who belong to the 1960s generation. Just because Republicans can learn from the Conservatives does not mean that Conservatives want Republicans to win.Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint.

Borrowing From the Brits

Borrowing From the Brits

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