The first definition of “conservatism” (relying on Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, third edition) is “the disposition in politics to preserve what’s established.” It is this basic conservatism that has triumphed. People in wealthy democracies-not everyone but clear majorities in most countries-don’t want radical economic or social change. Whatever looks like radical change (even if it is, in fact, fairly mild) stirs their wrath. Woe to the political leaders who, somehow, unleash this powerful undercurrent of cautiousess and fear. The dominant political philosophy is: please do not disturb.
Voters punish politicians for suggesting unwanted upsets in the status quo. 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 and qualify for Europe’s single currency-aroused widespread anger. President Clinton’s national health plan in 1998 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 sowed suspicion that a Republican government might savage many popular middle-class programs.
What moves electorates–especially the swing voters who determine winners–is not ideology but psychology. Of course, political traditions and circumstances vary among countries. But the unifying theme in these and other contests is that voters reacted ]ess to any particu]ar political agenda than to personal threats, real or imagined, that governments might represent. In Britain, Tony Blair won precisely because he made the Labour Party unthreatening. It would be middle class and sympathetic, not proletarian and revolutionary. It would not do the bidding of the unions. It would not propose vast new spending.
Labour’s new respectability 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, according to the standardized rates of the Organization for Economic.@ooperat@on and Development. 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 mystifying and the swings seem erratic. Politicians-and many journalistic and academic 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, tlqte 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.!n 1980, average inflation was 15 percent in Europe and 9 percent in the United States. But there never was a wholesale 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 48 percent of national income. In 1996 it was 42 percent of national income.
People vote their interests-or what they view as their interests. In 1998 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 the most controversial schemes of the other. This conservatism is pragmatic and, to be frank, selfish.
It may also be delusional. All too 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 Franee’s governmment to modify these policies met with rejection. The socialists’ policies, if adopted, might make matters worse. Their proposals include raising the minimum wage (now $6.50 an hour) and reducing the standard workweek from 89 to 86 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 and Japan 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 is emblematic of the present electoral conservatism, which is more seared than thoughtful. It illuminates a central problem of advanced democracies: how to prepare for change when the constituency against change represents a majority?
