American conservatives liked to think that they were different. European pantywaists might keep voting for high-spending governments, but the US was founded on a popular revolt against taxation. As a Republican strategist put it to me during the convention in Tampa: "Our voters aren't French voters. You can win on a pro-cuts ticket here".
Many of those conservatives are now in a state of stunned despair. They gave it their best shot and lost. As a commenter in the National Review put it:
"We put up an impressive, mainstream guy with super credentials, who did well in the debates and was amply funded. The result? A repeat of 2008, basically. If I'd known it would turn out like this, I would have backed a Gingrich-Palin ticket. More fun, less expensive – same result."
The past 48 hours have seen a spate of articles arguing that the Republicans can never win again. Demographic changes have put them on the wrong side of too many voters, especially immigrants and ethnic minorities. The electoral college system means that, like British Tories, they must significantly outperform their opponents in the popular vote simply to draw level.
Such things are always written after defeats, of course. I remember reading similarly gloomy forecasts about the Labour party after 1992, yet it was only one election away from 13 years of office.
Nonetheless, Republicans have a problem – as do centre-right parties across the developed world. Many voters believe that they are living through a crisis of capitalism, that the credit crunch was caused by deregulation and that the deficit should be filled by taxing the bankers who, they have been assured, created it in the first place.
In vain does the conservative respond that, in a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail and the losses suffered by bondholders and shareholders rather than taxpayers. Nor is it much use pointing out that you won't find a more regulated sector than the financial services: the FSA's guidebook now runs to 10,500 pages, and the compliance costs forced small banks out of the market, thus creating the "too big to fail" phenomenon. As for arguing that we could expropriate every banker in the land and barely dent the deficit, well, good luck with that one.
Candidates who promise "growth not austerity" thus currently have the advantage over those who maintain (correctly) that it was debt-fuelled growth that created the mess in the first place.
In one sense, though, America was different. Republicans largely held on to the extraordinary Congressional gains they made two years ago, having focused almost exclusively on the unsustainable levels of taxation, spending and debt. Fiscal conservatism, when presented honestly and decoupled from social conservatism, commanded a majority. When David Cameron called the Obama victory a victory for the "common ground", he was rightly stating that social conservatism is less mainstream than it once was. Plenty of US voters supported gay marriage and the legalisation of soft drugs while at the same time voting for anti-tax candidates. For what it's worth, I would have been one of them.
Conservatives the world over need to grasp the difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes the two positions happen to coincide; often they don't.
Republican congressional candidates ran successfully on anti-corporatist and anti-elitist platforms. Mitt Romney, by contrast, supported the bailouts, and seemed a throwback to the preppy, northeastern, unsuccessful GOP of the mid-20th century. Like so many European rightists, he seemed to smile upon crony capitalism. As in Europe, voters were unimpressed.
The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks. It's not often one gets the chance to write this but, when it comes to the bailouts, especially the euro bailouts, Marxists are right. Working people are being forced to support a privileged few.
Conservatives are supposed to be against public subsidies and nationalisations. When they line up with wealthy bankers and bondholders against taxpayers, they lose. They deserve to.
The Guardian
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