How The Democrats Could Take Over And Why They Wont - Road to the Middle Class

IN THE BRITISH generation election on Thursday, June 7, 2001, British Prime Minister Blair routed a confused Conservative opposition to win a second term for his “New” Labour Party. In the new parliament, Labour will enjoy a huge majority. It will hold 413 seats, against the Conservatives’ 166 and the Liberal Democrats’ 52. Tony Blair has now led his party to two successive landslides without precedent in British politics. Never before in his 100-year history has the British Labour Party enjoyed two back to back landslides that gave it a mandate to govern without a coalition.

The pundits have, of course, been out in force blaming the whole debacle on Tory leader William HagueÃ¢â‚¬â€according to the usual well-placed civil servant, he’d make a good management consultant but is hopeless at political strategy. No doubt the pundits are right. Hague lost, and he ought to take the blame. But it’s hardly surprising that the Tories lost. Their Thatcherite program of growth and enterprise has been stolen, fair and square, but Labour. No political party could be expected to recover from such a shock in four years.

So who cares? The Tories have always sounded an uncertain trumpet for liberty, a residue of their part as the paternalistic party of the knights of the shire and ancient wealth in land. Their support for enterprise has always been equivocal, as shown by their unease with Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter and scholarship girl that wasn’t really out of the top drawer. But today’s Conservative Party supporters are similar to Republican Party supporters: middle class traditionalists and enterprisers opposed to Labour’s alliance of workers, welfare-state beneficiaries, and intellectuals.

If New Labour’s Tony Blair can confound the Tories so easily, couldn’t it happen here? Suppose the Democrats abandoned the Gore program of fighting for the people against the powerful, couldn’t they wipe out the Republican Party in a similar political blitzkrieg by grabbing the center with a program of market-driven growth and abandoning their traditional faith in government subsidy and benefits for their favored constituencies?

There is, however, an important difference between the political situations in Britain and the United States. The Labour Party in 1997 was desperate for power. It had lost four successive general electionsÃ¢â‚¬â€in 1979, 1983, and 1987 to the feisty Margaret Thatcher, and in 1992 to the gray John Major. For 19 years its MPs had squirmed on the opposition benches in the House of Commons while Thatcher changed the face of Britain. How could they persuade the voters to give them another chance? The Labour Party was set in British memory as Dad’s Army of economic bunglers. The 1945 Atlee government devalued the pound twice, and the 1974 Callaghan government saw Britain humiliated by Arthur Scargill’s miners and the loony left.

To win in 1997, Blair had to change this deeply held perception. He did so by amending the famous Clause IV in Labour’s constitution that committed the party to nationalization of the means of production and by declaring in the Labour Party manifesto: “I want a country in which people get on, do well, make a success of their lives. I have no time for the politics of envy. We need more successful entrepreneurs, not fewer of them.” He promised not to increase the income tax, and promised not to increase spending for two years.

Naturally, the skeptics assumed that New Labour was just a front, and that as soon as Blair became prime minister the old Labour Party would resume its left-wing follies.

The skeptics were wrong. As soon as he took power, Blair chose the most dramatic way possible of demonstrating that New Labour really was different. He freed the Bank of England from direct control by the United Kingdom Treasury. The job of the central bank was now to establish sound money, not the bail the government out if its messes with coups de whisky. The new policy meant the at the new government would abandon the socialist chimera that political activists know better how to create wealth that do businessmen, bankers, and workers. The first act of Bill Clinton, in contrast, was an attempt to pay off his supporters with the gays-in-the-military fiasco.

In 1997, New Labour was desperate: it had to show it was different. In 2001, the Democratic Party is not. Indeed, at the present moment, after the Jeffords coup, it even feels a little cocky. Al Gore’s class-warfare platform garnered the party a plurality of votes, and Democrats probably believe that just one more big push ought to be enough for them to regain control of Congress and the presidency. The last thing that any Democrat imagines is that it might be twelve or even sixteen years before his party can regain control of the federal government. In 2001 the Democratic base would never vote for a candidate who demanded the slaughter of its sacred cows as the only way back to power. That’s why Democrat politicians feel confident opposing Social Security reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, and school reform. For now, the Republicans are safe from a Blair-style mugging.

Meanwhile the Tories find themselves out-thought, out-spun, and out-campaigned. They have yet to find a platform to counter the Blair combination of economic growth and investment in the welfare state. The Tory manifesto weakly talks about setting people free and returning to common sense, throwing out a Labour Party that “does not understand our country.” But the problem for the Tories is that Blair understands the country only too well. His politics of opportunity and improving public services is exactly what the British seem to want. If the Tories believe in lower taxes, a smaller state, and individual freedom they are going to have to develop policies that start moving their country toward that goal. They need to follow the example of George W. Bush, whose campaign in 2000 was a carefully balanced platform to move America in the direction of freedom and choice by pushing against the received wisdom of the mainstream media culture on taxes, Social Security reform, and school choice.

It wasn’t easy for Bush. In the spring of 2000, during the hiatus between the primaries and the convention, George W. Bush was tested in the Temptation of Dubya. He was taken up to a high mountain and shown the polls by the editorial board of The New York Times. He didn’t really mean to enact his evil Republican tax cut, did her, murmured Satan, expecting an immediate cave-in. Yes, he did, Bush replied. But the polls showed that the country didn’t really want a tax cut, whispered Satan. Then I’ll have to move the country, said Bush. Again, he was taken up to a mountain by The Washington Post. He didn’t really want a tax cut, did he? Yes, replied Bush, he really did.

In the early campaign, Gore ridiculed any tax cut as a “risky scheme.” By fall, Gore was pushing his own “targeted” tax cut. In the spring, Democrats ridiculed Bush’s policy of grasping the third rail of American politics by proposing a partial privatization of Social Security. Wait until we turn on the current, they jeered. By fall, Gore had cobbled together a hastily conceived plan of his own as polls showed that voters were receptive to Bush’s policy. Even on the issue of school choice, Gore wobbled, admitting that in certain cases, he might be for it. Throughout the campaign, Bush stuck to his platform, and succeeded in moving the nation toward his vision of the future.

In Britain, the Tories look like dead meat. A week before the British election, more in sorrow than in anger, the London magazine The Economist announced that it was voting for Labour, complaining that Hague had failed to make the case for “lower taxes, a smaller state, individual freedoms.” The Times and The Financial Times also endorsed Blair.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Bush is mapping out the road to the future of Conservative and Republican politics. It lies in step-by-step privatization of the welfare state, slowly drawing the fangs of the tax-eating monsters: government pensions, government health-care, government schools, and government child-welfare; slowly moving public opinion from statism to freedom not by showy manifestos and declarations of principle by with concrete, sensible policies that ordinary people can understand.

While the conservatives were getting hopelessly tangled in immigration issues and absurdly promising to save the pound, a store of value that has lost 98% of its value in the last century, President George W. Bush has already begun to define the future with his tax cut, his Social Security privatization, and his Medicare reform, though he does wobble in school choice. While the Tories bite the dust, Bush has mapped out a cautious strategy with specific policies that begin the long march towards a smaller state and a freer society.

How the Democrats Could take Over, and Why They Won't

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