The new campaign battleground: 'Society' vs. 'state'

This column by the New York Times' David Brooks (also reprinted in today's National Post) doesn't mention Canada, but it is required reading for anyone who's trying to figure out the underlying politics of our next election campaign.

It revolves around how Conservatives are on the rise in Britain because they've changed - not just their strategy or tactics but their entire thinking.

The role-of-government debate is over; "quality of life" is the new discussion. Raw individualism is out; "society" is in.

"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," Brooks writes.

It doesn't take too much thinking to see the parallels here in Canada. The child-care debate leaps to mind as a good example of society versus the state.

While the Liberals weren't looking the last few years, Canada's own Conservatives have roughly tacked their policies along the same path, modelling their tax and social platforms around society and neighbourhood and communities. Liberals will try to pitch this simply as the Conservatives' lack of faith in government and institutions - and some of that characterization is well-founded - but they will risk looking anachronistic if they allow themselves to be cast as the advocates of big government. The same is true for the New Democrats. The Greens, interestingly, probably do more talking about society than they do the state, which may explain why they're on the upswing here too in recent years.

We do know that Conservative strategists have been borrowing from the playbook of their counterparts in the U.K. - the high-tech "war room" in Ottawa's suburbs is a direct imitation, according to senior campaign planners.

So it's probably a good idea to look closely at what the U.K. Conservatives are teaching Canadians, and vice versa, about the nature of the political debate in the 21st century.

Comments

[MikeD]

It occurs to me that for the Conservatives NOT to be perceived as "the party of top-down mechanistic control" would require a sea change on the order of simultaneously discovering a time machine and a trans-warp dimensional conduit AND fronting one's House ranks with a Party House leader whose message is something other than Rewind / Replay: "Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated". (Needless to say, my next sentence or two is simply unwriteable without using the words "snowball" and "hell".)

[Imethisguy]

Is there anybody anywhere in this 21st century (outside of the Liberal and NDP caucus) that does _not_ think that a

"lack of faith in government and institutions"

is

"well-founded"

[Wascally Wabbit]

Mike is clearly a Doctor Who fan, but, even in her worst excesses, Dame Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, never paraded around in a conical tin suit mumbling "Exterminate them"...although clearly she often thought that about "Wets"!
As one who holds both British and Canadian passports, I have a somewhat broader perspective about what's happening over "the Pond" besides "Corrie".
Seems to me that British politics are about half a generation ahead of those in North America.
Churchill, with all his jingoistic rhetoric, was just what they needed during the darkest hours of WWII, but he was quickly discarded when the state had to pick up the pieces.
Similarly, Atlee, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson et al. were bounced once things were back on track, and the paternal Haorld MacMillan and a succession of hereditary titles carried the Tory banner until Thatcherism came, destroyed, and was in turn destroyed, thank the Lord, by a newly rebuilt Labour party, more centrist, under Blair.
It's not surprising that the pendulum is swinging back, in part because the smarter Tories (and there are a few) realize that they have to re-invent themselves if they want to regain power (and isn't that what it's all about?).
Obama, IMO, has simply taken the best of Clinton and Blair and put his own mark on the model.
Fortunately, the Right Wing has, through Bush and Cheney in particular, taken the failed Thatcherism theory (that Mike Harris picked up a generation after it was found wanting) and taken it to such excesses that their brand could be out in - (funny this) left field - for half a generation - until they too re-invent themselves and become an attractive alternative to Democrats again.
Let's hope that Obama gets elected, and he and those who follow him, can be as effective as Tony Blair in undoing the mess that these right wing ideologues always leave behind!

[paul]

This is ground that begehot in The Economist also covered much earleir this week (Interesting to see how columnists seems to 'be inspired' by one another)- he explored how the New Labour (or NuLab) tenents are being adopted wholesale by the British Conservative Party and by being more NuLab than Labour, the Conservatives are picking up traction. I'd argue this 180 degrees from what we're seeing in Canada our Conservative Party is jumping back in time, not forward.

[Wascally Wabbit]

Susan - I pimped your blog to some of my readers south of the border.
They in return pointed me to this link to a video discussion between Robert Reich (Labour Secretary in Bill Clinton's administration) and Glenn Loury on "America's post-ideological politics"...kind of compliments David Brooks' piece...

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=485f6992a92cf8e1b7439e2e05ebe271fbf184da