The United Kingdom’s general election resulted in the Conservatives winning the largest number of seats in the House of Commons — but even winning 96 seats put the Tories 21 short of the 326 seats needed to have an overall majority. Moreover, the Tories blew a fairly long and sustained lead in national polling.
As often happens, the lessons to be drawn from the election seem to confirm the prejudices of those drawing them. For example, NYT polite-company-conservative columnist David Brooks told PBS:
The Republican Party and the Tory party had very similar problems post-Thatcher and Reagan. The Republican Party has gone in a more small-government, Libertarian direction. The Tory party has gone in a more communitarian — This is a broken society, we’re going to do schools, we’re going to do nurse-family partnerships, much more centrist. And they’ve actually done quite well.
The reliably left-of-center E. J. Dionne wrote:
The Conservatives under David Cameron won the most votes and the most seats. The big Tory gains reflected Cameron’s shrewd understanding that only a moderate and forward-looking conservatism stands any chance of victory.
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Cameron’s genius was to accept that the future of conservatism lies in winning over moderately progressive voters in the classes doing reasonably well in this new economic world. In his post-election statement offering to form a governing alliance with the Liberal Democrats, he began by declaring victory for “a new, modern Conservative Party,” a socially concerned, open-minded and tolerant band you don’t have to be ashamed of supporting.
Cameron understands — as many Republicans in the United States seem not to — that conservatism needs to sand off its rough edges and present itself as a stabilizing, unifying force.
In contrast, before the election, John O’Sullivan debated the Tories’ waning campaign in The Spectator (UK), writing:
I think that the Tory leadership as a group forgot how to manage its “broad Church” coalition. They went from realizing that the base was insufficient for victory to believing that it was an obstacle to victory. In pursuing centrist voters they were insouciant about losing voters to their right. Their desire to demonstrate Tory support for public services led them to embrace Labour’s budgetary strategy until shortly after the roof fell in. And they tried only fitfully to integrate their new ideas into the party’s tradition and sense of itself. Not only did this approach drive some traditional conservatives into UKIP, but it also gave an impression of inauthenticity and even cynicism. It prevented the Tories from deriving any political benefit from Labour’s budgetary implosion. And it may even have prepared the ground for the Lib-Dem surge by validating their brand of politics in advance-but I concede that’s a stretch. Mr. Massie thinks that the problem is that the leadership did not pursue the strategy of alienating the base consistently and vigorously enough to convince centrist doubters. We will have to differ.
Who has the better argument? Over the weekend, the Telegraph reported:
Analysis of results shows that in at least 21 key marginal seats, Ukip’s share of the vote proved enough to allow Labour or the Lib Dems to see off strong Tory challenges.
The extra victories would have been enough to fill the 20-seat shortfall needed to hand David Cameron an outright majority in the Commons.
However, the report does not — and really cannot — address the question of whether the Tories might have lost some marginal seats had they appealed more to those conservatives who have defected to UKIP.
What Brooks and Dionne overlook is that George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” and that platform was often enabled by the Congressional GOP. Moreover, in 2008, the GOP nominated John McCain — a man viewed across the spectrum as more moderate than Bush. Indeed, Barack Obama could have won the presidency just on the basis of Bush defectors, which suggests that alienating your base vote is bad political strategy. But maybe an unpopular war, a growing recession and a meltdown in the financial markets had more to do with the electoral showing of the party in power, whether it was the GOP here, or Labour in the UK.
However, Brooks and Dionne also imply (if you read them in full) that the Tories’ failure to capture a majority reflects a mood in the UK that is unwilling to commit to fiscal responsibility, despite the tumult already growing in other EU states. The rise of the Tea Party movement is good news on that front here, but the Right should not mistake it as a broad sentiment. There is still plenty of education to be done on the subject. If the GOP fails as badly as the Tories on that front, they will risk suffering the same fate. And if that happens, all Americans suffer, because the tough budgetary choices in our future get only tougher the longer they get kicked down the road.
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