Wolf Howling: John Major

Monday, May 11, 2009

Should Republican's Emulate The Tories?

With the GOP's star temporarily in retrograde, everyone is chiming in on what ails the Republican Party and how to fix it. Reagan is dead, according to Jeb Bush. The right's stand on social issues is what's killing the party, says Olympia Snow. Howard Dean has declared capitalism a failed experiment (I love the degree of utter historical ignorance needed to make that statement). People want big government and lots of social spending according to Paul Krugman. Rush Limbaugh is killing the party, according to Colin Powell. Have I missed anything? Oh yes, become like Britain's Tory Party. That was today's helpful suggestion from James Forsyth of the UK's Spectator Magazine.

Mr. Forsyth's suggestion is based on his assessment that Republicans of today are similar to the Tories of 1997, when the Tories suffered the most decisive electoral defeat in British history. According to Mr. Forsyth, if Republicans merely tone down the social conservatism, or make of it an economic issue rather than a moral one, as Tories are trying to do in Britain, then perhaps Republicans can revive their party. If you don't follow British politics that closely, it sounds like a reasonable suggestion. But the truth is that the Tory Party has repackaged itself as a light version of the socialist Labour Party and it is reasonable to expect that, while they will assuredly win the next election, they offer no viable solutions to the serious problems Britain is experiencing.

The Tory Party came to power in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. She worked tremendous changes in Britain (a short recapitulation of which you can read here) until she lost an intra-party fight as leader of her party in 1990 over her opposition to further integration in the EU. John Major took her spot, but a series of problems led to an absolute trouncing of the Tories in 1997. There are at least three similarities between Britain of John Major's days and the Republican Party of today. Most importantly, there were severe economic problems that occurred on Major's watch. Interestingly, the worst of it, Black Wednesday, George Soros had a major hand in creating. Further, the Tory brand and their claim to family values became tarnished through a series of widely publicized scandals - most of them sexual. And lastly, the press, led by the BBC, and academia were virulently liberal. These at least mirror some of the problems Republicans have suffered through over the past few years.

So how is it now that the Tories stand on the precipice of power? A part of it is, as Mr. Forsyth suggests, that Tories have recast some conservative issues, such as marriage and children born out of wedlock, on economic grounds. But he ignores that the Tories have gone much further, in many cases adopting Labour policies and punting on the really big issues. For example, the Tory Party still has not taken a firm position on the two existential issues facing Britain, whether to allow the people a vote on the EU's Lisbon Treaty - which saw Britain surrender its sovereignty to the EU - and what to do about the problems of open border immigration and the massive Muslim influx.

Beyond that, in many cases, its been the Tories who have tried to outdo the socialists on avant garde issues. For example, not only have Tories jumped on the global warming bandwagon, but David Cameron's advisor on issues dealing with green policy was a key witness advocating that three people who sabotaged a coal plant last year should be found not guilty. When Bishop Nazir Ali went public with charges that there are Muslim areas in Britain that have become enclaves non-Muslims dare not tread and that multiculturalism was an abject failure, it was the Tory Shadow Minister who was the first to call the good Bishop misguided. And it was just a few days ago that another Tory Shadow Minister appearing on a BBC game show threatened to kill Carrie Prejean because she spoke out against gay marriage - such is the Tory attitude towards free speech and their embrace of the most radical gay agenda in the Western world.

Tory popularity today is not because of their "conservative" policies, its because the Labour Party has bulloxed up the country economically and pursued radical social policies that have, one, attacked Britain's proud history, and two, that have made a multicultural mess of the country. The Tory Party does not present a real choice for the British electorate, unfortunately. And nor would a Tory model present a reasonable model for the Republican Party.

An English Lesson For E.J. Dionne

Dionne really is such low hanging fruit, going after his insipid columns is akin to taking a few practice swings with a bat before stepping up to the plate. Today he completely mistakes what is going on across the pond as the basis for his suggestion that McCain make a sharp left turn to be more like Obama.
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You can find EJ Dionne's column here. Dionne's message therein to McCain today - ditch conservative principles and become more liberal, just like the Tories did, and you stand a chance of winning the election.

There are just a few problems with that. First and foremost among them is that Republicans lost power when they lost their mooring from conservative values. They spent our wealth like drunken Democrats. When the now indicted Sen. Stevens put the Bridge to Nowhere on the Senate map, all but a few Republicans walked across it like lemmings. But that aside, looking to the UK, it is true that the Tories would never be mistaken for conservatives in the U.S. They are Labour lite - but they have been that way for the better part of a century. Voters are not warming to the Tories because the Tories have suddenly changed brands. To the contrary, they are utterly rejecting Labour, whose ideas are pretty much the mainstream socialism that Obama promises.

I've been calling Britain a laboratory in modern socialism for years. If there is a lesson to be learned from the British experience, it's that socialism is a grand failure.

As to why the Tories lost power in the first place - they sacked Margaret Thatcher because of her opposition to the EU. When Thatcher came to power, she did so on the heels of hard economic times. She revamped the British economy and tore the economic heart out of British socialism. She was villified for it, and when she lost power, that did not mean the end to the Tory problems on Europe. That, plus a series of sex scandals and some bad economic times did in Thatcher's successor, John Major. The Tories imploded, much as Republicans in 2006.

Now, after eleven years of mucking things up like only socialists can do, we are being treated to the spectacle of Labour embracing conservative principles in an effort to hold onto power. The latest Green Paper on policing, promising a devolution of power, is about as far off the left playbook as Nancy Pelosi embracing drilling in ANWR. So, to the extent that there has been movement in the political parties over the past decade in the UK, its been the movement of Labour towards the center left occupied by the Tories.

That aside, EJ did chuck in a few laughers with the best being far and away to assert that Gordon Brown and Obama share a "broadly center left world view." Gordon Brown is anything but center left. And to claim that there is anything about Obama that can be characterized as "center" or even "center left" is laughable. This is a guy whose voting record is well to the left of the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress, who wants to declare Iraq a defeat, and who wants to institute cradle to grave socialism in the U.S. That is "center" only if you are in Cuba or Venezuela. Even China has given up that ghost.

Oh well, Dionne may never get anything right in his columns, but he always provides fine entertainment - unintended, though it may be.