CONSERVATIVES everywhere like to think of themselves as practical people, rooted in reality, resolutely dealing with the world as it is, not as some ideology would like it to be.
So it is slightly odd to discover the current mood of conservatives in the world’s two greatest English-speaking democracies. In America, the Republican party’s ascendancy is just about embedded into the political landscape. It has won seven of the last ten presidential elections. In the past decade Republicans have controlled both Houses of Congress for a longer period than at any time in 50 years. Out in the country, the party dominates statehouses and governors’ mansions.
But this week American conservatives are demoralised. In his second term George W. Bush has stumbled from one failure to another — pension reform, Iraq, Katrina. And now, in the most unnecessary and self-inflicted of wounds, he has infuriated his own supporters by picking for the Supreme Court someone whose principal qualification seems to be that she is a friend of the President. Harriet Miers, who looks desperately out of her depth, is likely to dash the last hopes of conservatives for a real change in the country’s judicial direction. At their apogee, then, American conservatives are looking down in alarm and despondency.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, it is Britain’s Conservatives who ought to be in wrist-slashing mood. Only five months ago they lost their third straight election — the first such unsought hat-trick in more than a century, securing less than a third of the vote. They have been through four leaders in eight years; their membership is dwindling and ageing.
But at Blackpool this week the party was partying as though it was 1979. All week at the annual conference there was an umistakable whiff of excitement, of possibility, in the air. It was not just the confined energy of all that ambition — five candidates and their hopeful followers fizzing around the conference and its fringes. It was a palpable sense that, after more than a decade of catastrophically heavy weather, the political climate may at last be changing to the Tories’ advantage. At their nadir, then, British Conservatives are looking up at the stars.
I exaggerate on both counts, of course. American conservatives are not dead yet. And Britain’s Conservatives are not off the operating table.
But there is movement in the placid waters of the politics of the Anglosphere. Could it be that, like two ships that pass in the night, the two most successful parties in Western political history, are about to swap fortunes?
Transatlantic political divergence is something relatively new. For decades British and American electoral cycles moved broadly in line. The Right was in the wilderness in the immediate years after the Second World War. In the 1950s a moderate, efficient conservatism ruled on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1960s was the era of liberalising government in both America and Britain. Then, following the economic ruin of the 1970s, radical, neo-conservative governments took office in both countries and pursued almost identical policies to generate renewal.
This may all have been part coincidence, but more likely it reflected a shared political heritage and similar popular reactions to the conditions of the time. But since the turn of the century that pattern seems to have been decisively broken. For the first time in its history Labour has won three straight elections; meanwhile the Democrats were losing two. Barring something unimaginable, the period from 2001 to 2009 — with Republicans in Washington, Labour in London — will mark the longest period of transatlantic political dissonance in more than 70 years.
Are Britain’s politics then detaching themselves from America? There are certainly trends that are pushing the two political cultures in different directions. In the past decade two factors that have favoured Republicans have been absent in Britain. Religion has played a decisive role in a way that is unimaginable in secular Britain. And national security considerations have loomed large in American debate but have mattered less in Britain.
Yet these differences can be overdone. The reason America’s conservatives are suddenly so gloomy, despite their electoral success, is that many are wondering whether they have much to show for their ascendancy.
Despite what many outsiders think, America has not become a theocracy in the last 20 years. Its abortion laws remain among the most liberal anywhere; it retains a far more rigid separation of Church and State than in most of Europe — even in Britain. On top of this enduring liberal legacy, conservatives have to confront the reality that their small-government goals have been sunk by one of the most free-spending presidents in history.
There is, too, a broader conservative disillusionment. The Republicans who came to power in Congress in 1994 promising to shrink government, hand power back to the states and eliminate corruption have become just another bunch of Washington politicians, more concerned with upholstering their own power than with freeing the people.
In Britain, meanwhile, Conservatives may start to profit from a growing frustration with the failures of the welfare state, a recognition that continually feeding Leviathan is a cause without end or ultimate success. Tony Blair may be promising reforms, and Gordon Brown may promise to keep those promises, but doubts about the rest of Labour are proliferating.
In any case, the Tories look as though they may start to benefit from a growing backlash against the political correctness of modern Britain. Their commitment to put more focus on the family, self-responsibility and better standards of behaviour chimes with people, as does their assault on the lunacies of multiculturalism.
In short, in recasting themselves as a more compassionate party under stronger, more engaging leadership (whoever he is) the Tories may be finding the right formula to engineer a revival in the fortunes of the Right.
Who knows? Britain’s battered Conservatives may really be in better shape than the victorious Republicans.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
