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| Official photograph of David Cameron (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The party instead won an outright majority this week.
An interesting Atlantic article makes the point that in the leading English-speaking nations, the US is the only one without a center-right government. The others do, in no small measure, because:
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, these conservatives don’t fetishize the music, fashion, or religious practices of some of their voters in a way that prevents them from reaching all of their potential voters. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they accept that healthcare security actually supports—rather than inhibits—the entrepreneurial risk-taking of a dynamic free-market economy. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they have found ways to both enforce immigration laws and to make immigrant populations feel at home politically.
Of course, these conservatives differ among themselves in important ways. And their success is conditional; all face political challenges at home, including a tough re-election for Stephen Harper in Canada later this year. But what they all show their American counterparts is that the fear of a “tipping point” beyond which a state plunges into socialist dependency is utterly misplaced. Countries with universal health coverage, for instance, can be hospitable to conservatives—if conservatives can resist the impulse to repeal that coverage. It’s the resistance to the program, not the program itself, that sinks conservative hopes. Politics doesn’t tip. It evolves. And winning conservative parties evolve with it.
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