NY Times: Tories' "Conservative Revival"

Upper-case 'C' Conservatives in Britain know all too well what it feels like to need a revival — 'twas only a short eight months ago that Labour looked ready to re-up for another five years of fun. But now all that's changed, and beaten-down American lower-case 'c' conservatives are starting to take notice of Mr Cameron's Tory resurrection.

In today's New York Times, op-ed columnist David Brooks points to the Tories' "socio-centric" platform as a roadmap back to relevancy for the rudderless post-Bush US conservative movement.

"The flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way."

Brooks posits that the Republicans have much to learn from Cameron, given the Tories' success in local elections, and points to a "global movement" of Cameronesque centre-right politics in "Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg)."

"They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control. …

American conservatives won’t simply import this model. But there’s a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness."

Written by Andrew Levy on 9 May 2008 6:56 AM. There are 0 comments so far. Permalink