We are now witnessing–most recently in France but also in the United States and elsewhere–the triumph of conservatism. This is not, of course, what you’re hearing. “Europe has turned left,” says The Wall Street Journal, noting that 13 of 15 countries in the European Union now have leftish governments. In France, the socialists have just slaughtered the center-right in parliamentary elections. In Britain, Labor defeated the Conservatives for the first time in a general election since 1979. The conventional wisdom has got the facts right; what’s wrong is the interpretation.
The first definition of “conservatism” (relying on Webster’s) is “the disposition in politics to preserve what’s established.” It is this basic conservatism that has triumphed. People in wealthy democracies don’t want radical economic or social change. Whatever looks like radical change (even if it is fairly mild) stirs their wrath. The dominant political philosophy is: Please do not disturb.
France’s center-right government fell for its efforts to trim the country’s lavish social benefits. Cuts–deemed necessary to reduce the budget deficit–aroused widespread anger. President Clinton’s national health plan in 1993 baffled people and seemed to threaten the doctor-patient relationship. That helped Republicans win Congress in 1994. But two years later, they couldn’t recapture the White House, because their plan to overhaul Medicare seemed to threaten many popular middle-class programs.
What moves electorates is not ideology but psychology. The unifying theme in these and other contests is that voters reacted less to any particular political agenda than to personal threats, real or imagined, that governments might represent. In Britain, Tony Blair won precisely because he made the Labor Party unthreatening. It would be middle class and sympathetic, not proletarian and revolutionary.
This prevented John Major’s government–tinged with scandal–from overcoming its own unpopularity, despite a solid overall record. Under the Conservatives, Britain’s economy became one of Europe’s strongest. Its unemployment is now about 7 percent, compared with Germany’s nearly 10 percent and France’s 12.5 percent. But voters don’t respond to political philosophy so much as to their own yearning for security.
The failure to make this distinction is one reason electoral preferences often seem erratic. Politicians–and many commentators–imbue elections with more philosophical significance than they deserve. As a result, abrupt shifts are routinely declared when they often exist mainly in rhetoric. Here is the conservative writer David Frum agonizing recently in The Weekly Standard over his side’s setbacks:
“It’s baffling. It seems just yesterday–it was just yesterday–that the collapse of communism, the success of Reagan and Thatcher and Kohl . . . were widely thought to have settled the big political questions once and for all. That tedious left-wing project, the search for a third way between liberty and central planning, appeared terminally discredited.”
In fact, electorates never veered to the far ideological right. What brought rightist leaders to power in the 1980s was the upsets of the 1970s: mainly rising inflation and taxes. But there never was a repudiation of the welfare state’s protective cocoon. Even in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the state hasn’t shrunk much. In 1980 government spending was 43 percent of national income. In 1996 it was 42 percent of national income.
People vote their interests. In 1993 the French gave the right-center 460 seats in Parliament. Four years later, the right-center got 242 seats. Had the basic beliefs of the French really shifted so much? Certainly not. In the United States, voters trust neither party; so they rely on a Republican Congress and Democratic president to check each other. This conservatism is pragmatic and, to be frank, selfish.
It may also be delusional. Often it frustrates societies from adjusting to unavoidable change. Europe’s unemployment has been driven up by rigid wages and high social benefits. Companies fear hiring (because labor costs are too high), and the jobless stay unemployed (because the benefits are so generous). Yet even timid efforts by France’s government to modify these policies met with rejection. The socialists’ policies might make matters worse. Their proposals include raising the minimum wage (now $6.50 an hour) and reducing the standard workweek from 39 to 36 hours without pay cuts. Both steps would increase labor costs and make French products less competitive.
The United States does not have this particular problem, but it does share with Europe a reluctance to anticipate an aging society. No one wants to alter popular programs for the elderly, even though everyone knows that these programs will someday have to be altered. The paralysis illuminates a central problem of advanced democracies: How to prepare for change when the constituency against change represents a majority?
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