By David Frum
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Stephen Harper in Canada. Tony Abbott in Australia. John
Key in New Zealand. And now, impressively reelected, a second-term David
Cameron in the United Kingdom.
Center-right leaders are in charge of every one of
America’s closest English-speaking allies. Only in the United States does the
liberal left govern. With Hillary Clinton holding strong leads in the polls
over all her likely opponents, this form of “American exceptionalism” looks
likely to persist for some time to come. Why?
Their American detractors may grumble, but these other
conservatives are indeed “real conservatives” (Harper and Abbott tend to be
more popular among their U.S. counterparts than Cameron and Key). After coming
to power in 2010, the Cameron government cut personal and corporate income
taxes. It imposed tough new work requirements on physically capable welfare
recipients. Government spending as a share of GDP will decline to pre-2008
levels next year. Thanks to Cameron’s reforming education minister, Michael
Gove, more than 3,300 charter schools (“academies,” as the British call them)
are raising performance standards in some of Britain’s toughest neighborhoods—a
15-fold increase since 2010. Under the prime minister’s leadership, the post
office was privatized.
More reforms will follow in the next government. Cameron
has pledged further tax reductions, including eliminating death taxes on family
homes. Restrictions on home construction will be relaxed. Government’s share of
GDP will be pushed down with the goal of undoing the Blair-Brown spending spree
that began in 1997.
Cameron Conservatives, like conservatives in the
Anglosphere and Germany, converge with and diverge from Republicans in the
United States in significant ways. And these ways are crucial to their
electoral success—and, I’d argue, supremely relevant to the comparative failure
of their American counterparts.
• Center-right
parties in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have all made
peace with government guarantees of healthcare for all. These conservatives do
not abjectly defend the healthcare status quo; they attempt to open more space
for competition and private initiative within the health sector. But they
accept that universal health coverage in some form has joined old-age pensions
and unemployment insurance in the armature of an advanced modern economy. In
this, their American counterparts are the true outliers. Before 2010, the
United States provided the industrial world’s most lavish single-payer health
system for citizens over 65—a hugely expensive and hugely inefficient system of
tax subsidies for private insurance—at a total cost per U.S. taxpayer that was
more than Canada spent on healthcare per Canadian taxpayer. And that system
still left tens of millions uncovered and tens of millions covered but still
exposed to large healthcare costs that they could not possibly afford. The
pre-Obamacare American healthcare system was indefensible, and non-American
conservatives are stronger for not having to try and defend such a thing.
• These parties
have updated for the 21st century their core message of respect for family,
work, and community. None seek to police women’s sexual behavior or to impose
restrictions on women’s reproductive choices. All have accepted gay equality,
with Australia on the verge of a parliamentary vote to permit same-sex
marriage. They are parties comfortable with racial inclusion and competitive
with ethnic-minority voters—the Canadian Conservatives particularly so; people
of Chinese origin are Canada’s second-largest non-white ethnic group, and in
the country’s 2011 election, Canadian Conservatives won two-thirds of the vote
among Canadians who speak Cantonese at home.
• The parties
are all unapologetically nationalist—an especially important stance in the
United Kingdom, whose sovereignty is endlessly infringed upon by the European
Union. In particular, all advocate an immigration policy determined by the
national interest, not the interest of would-be immigrants. The Cameron
Conservatives have pledged to reduce net immigration below 100,000 people per
year. Tony Abbott’s government has halted the kind of migration now convulsing
Europe with a “no exceptions” policy against illegal immigration by boat.
Canadian immigration policy is determined by a points system aimed at selecting
migrants who will flourish economically in the country, with the result that
Canadian immigrants—like U.S. immigrants before 1970 but not U.S. immigrants
today—attain higher levels of education than the Canadian-born population.
• The parties
are tough on terrorism, extremism, and international disorder. David Cameron
has defined the security threat facing the U.K. as not only “violent
extremism”—the Obama formulation—but all ideological movements that reject
democracy and equal rights, “whether they are violent in their means or not.”
And while making clear that the West has no quarrel with Islam and its
believers, Cameron, unlike Obama, has been willing to state explicitly that the
extremism that threatens Western democracies is, obviously, “Islamist
extremism.” Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott have been especially firm and
consistent supporters of Israel. As Chris Pyne, one of the many strong friends
of Israel in the Australian cabinet, said during last year’s Gaza War, “Whenever
there has been a congregation of freedom-loving nations versus
non-freedom-loving nations, Australia has always been prepared to be in the
fight and always on the right side. And that’s how we view the State of
Israel—that we are on the right side.” Harper has been a forceful advocate
within NATO for the defense of Ukraine. When Harper encountered Vladimir Putin
at last year’s G-20 meeting, I’m told he said, “I have only one thing to say to
you: Get out of Ukraine.” Putin replied, “I’m not in Ukraine.” Harper retorted,
“And it’s because you say things like that that I have nothing to say to you.”
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, these conservatives don’t
fetishize the music, fashion, or religious practices of some of their voters in
a way that prevents them from reaching all of their potential voters. Unlike
their U.S. counterparts, they accept that healthcare security actually
supports—rather than inhibits—the entrepreneurial risk-taking of a dynamic
free-market economy. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they have found ways to
both enforce immigration laws and to make immigrant populations feel at home
politically.
Of course, these conservatives differ among themselves in
important ways. And their success is conditional; all face political challenges
at home, including a tough re-election for Stephen Harper in Canada later this
year. But what they all show their American counterparts is that the fear of a
“tipping point” beyond which a state plunges into socialist dependency is
utterly misplaced. Countries with universal health coverage, for instance, can
be hospitable to conservatives—if conservatives can resist the impulse to
repeal that coverage. It’s the resistance to the program, not the program
itself, that sinks conservative hopes. Politics doesn’t tip. It evolves. And
winning conservative parties evolve with it.
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