[A-List] Europe/US rivalry: right wing politics

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

The Tories think the tide is with them. They are wrong

Talk of an ideological renaissance for the centre right is so much hot
air

Hugo Young
Tuesday June 11, 2002
The Guardian

When I was last in Washington, I took a tour of the rightwing thinktanks
and it made a big impression. This came not from the brilliance of the
tanky ideas, still less their novelty. Much of what they had to say
about economic and foreign policy was familiar attitudinising that's
been around for years. What knocked a European out was the confidence of
these wonks that they were making the political weather. Gales of
belief, cataracts of utter certainty, engulf the city of George Bush in
support of the low-tax, small-state, anti-centrist, anti-gun-control
dogmas that he and they believe in. There isn't a country in the EU
where an undefensive right can begin to match the elan that services
American conservatism.

For European rightists to visit Washington is therefore therapy. "We owe
a huge debt to President Bush for showing us the way," Iain Duncan Smith
said yesterday, speaking in that city to a gathering of conservative
leaders from 37 countries. The centre right, he suggested, was on the
march, smashing the leftists, from Clinton onwards, who were so recently
in charge all over the place. This sort of talk must be very comforting.
But it overlooks how, outside America, the terms of trade have changed.
What any longer is the centre right? Does it even exist as a distinctive
ideological position? Is any such trend, in truth, discernible?

Take Jacques Chirac and the rightists, for want of a better word, who
will be elected to run France next weekend. Chirac, as recent victor,
should be the iconic model for the trend. Yet he's not a rightist anyone
in the US or even Britain would easily recognise. He's another French
statist, as are almost all French politicians. True, he promised a tax
cut, but compromised it with the usual contradictory election pledge to
raise public spending. Chirac got where he is today not by the power of
his ideas, of which he appears to have none, but by an electoral
accident that gave the National Front enough support to guarantee his
landslide victory, before withdrawing it sufficiently to enable the old
left and old right to divide the parliament between them.

The reason the left will lose the final carve-up has little to do with
leftism. Lionel Jospin's Socialist government had a respectable economic
record. It was in surreptitious ways, such as privatisation, less
leftist than many people expected. No great contest of ideas preceded
its defeat. Quite the contrary. As the presidential campaign unfolded,
the efforts of each side to copycat the other rendered it almost
meaningless, which helped let in Le Pen.

Elsewhere, there have been a few more divides. Denmark and Portugal
elected rightist governments with agendas that mark them off from their
predecessors. Norway went right and so did Holland, where immigration
and identity, the one issue on which some modern rightists dare to be
distinctive, swung the vote. In general, however, the pattern seems to
have less to do with ideology than incumbency. The main reason why the
brief social democratic ascendancy in Europe is vanishing is that the
social democrats happened to be in charge when disillusionment with all
politicians reached new depths, and the patience of electorates was
overtaken by rage or apathy or both.

Men and women, in other words, now matter more than manifestos. Few of
the measures once central to definitions of left and right any longer
disclose much choice or difference. One section of the political class
is reluctantly elected to replace another that's been found wanting. The
new lot may pay lip service to the reduction of the state, or
anti-Brussels sentiment. Herr Stoiber may sound like a better friend of
German business than Herr Schröder as their autumn election struggle
unfolds. But when IDS proclaims the rise of a whole new orthodoxy, he's
whistling in the wind. People with new labels are chosen to replace
people with old labels. The new ones are far removed from a
distinctiveness that would change the world. They're prophets as unsure
what to think as they are insecure about what others will think of them.

No centre rightists show this more clearly than the British Tories. They
have no idea where they're going, except towards an election in which
they can claim they're not responsible for the mess. They fiddle
tentatively with ideas, as long as these don't deviate too sharply from
the norms that they claim, exultantly, are being swept away on a
centre-right tide.

They upbraid the centre left for being preoccupied with image over
substance, while being much the same themselves. The government, after
all, has to govern: make choices, do things, unavoidably produce some
substance. The party of IDS is concerned exclusively with how it looks:
is it sufficiently sensitive, is it talking to the vulnerable, has it
shed the images that engendered so much hatred? That's what obsesses
Tory managers. Accused yesterday of getting nowhere on policy, IDS
rejected the complaint partly on the grounds that he needed time to look
around for ideas, but also because he's truly comfortable only when
mobilising the voters' infinite capacity for complaining that public
services aren't good enough. That's about the size of centre rightism,
in Britain as in mainland Europe.

The legend it's purloining, to draw strength from what the great Mr Bush
is doing, is compassionate conservatism. This phrase is IDS's equivalent
to Blair's third way, as vapidly reassuring, though decidedly more
oxymoronic. It survives in Bush's rhetoric, a front for some of the
least compassionate social strategies of any US government since Herbert
Hoover's. Only in education could it seriously be claimed that Bush has
shown a priority that might be termed compassionate - if a word so
dripping with condescension is appropriate for so elementary a service.
Otherwise, Bush's trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy says all there
is to say about his version of conservatism.

This was deplored in the Washington thinktanks, however, for not being
enough. That couldn't happen anywhere in Europe, including Britain.
That's the difference between rightism, which means something, and
centre rightism, which has come to mean little more than the faction
that's opposed, out of convenience and ambition, to the centre left.
There are people in the British Tory party who would like it to be a
party of the right. It used to be thought that Duncan Smith was one of
them, and there's much evidence in his record to that effect. But now,
even while invoking his hero Bush, he has changed, moving on to the
soggy, uncertain ground where Europe and America simply do not coexist,
knowing it's the only way he stands a chance of being elected.

We should be glad of this. Ironically, Europe's most pro-American party
shows us how deep, at certain points, is the gulf between us. But let's
hear no more talk of tides and revolutions. One lot of struggling
pragmatists vies with another, to keep the home-grown fascists at bay.