Posted on 06/19/2002 9:12:31 AM PDT by Jean S
Too often, we look at our nation’s politics in the abstract, without a global context — but adding that context can yield new insights.
When Bill Clinton won in 1992, his victory was matched by the success of center-left parties throughout the world that brought liberal, labor or social democratic governments to 13 of the 15 member nations of the European Union (EU).
George W. Bush’s triumph is, likewise, part of an international surge in center-right parties that have put conservative or Christian democratic parties in power in seven of the EU nations once run by the left (Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Holland and France). In France, the left didn’t even make the second round runoff election. Germany might switch next.
Why is the right winning?
Leftist parties have always focused on economics in general and income redistribution in particular. Indeed, most modern social-democratic parties were founded as a political expression of the labor movement’s demand for industrial fairness. When such parties existed before the age of the unions, labor has taken them over, as with the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century United States.
But economics no longer work as a key political issue. Globalism determines the winners and losers of the economic game much more than any national policies. International bankers are replacing nation-state presidents and premiers as the key movers and shakers in the markets. The left’s agenda is a fantasy. Voters realize that a promise to raise incomes is as serious as one to change the weather. (Indeed, with the saliency of global warming and climate change as issues, perhaps the weather is more amenable to political intervention.)
Economic decisions are made in Brussels, Zurich, New York and the other centers of high finance. If you’re visiting Washington about economic concerns, the man to see is Alan Greenspan in the Federal Reserve Building. You can wave at the White House as your taxi takes you there.
The right has never bothered much about economics. It knows, implicitly, that its favored clients — the rich — won’t win much public sympathy. Burying their implicit message of income redistribution — upward — the right has long based its political appeal on social issues like crime, immigration, morals, social standards and such. These issues remain potent even in a global economy.
The left is talking economics and the right is talking values. That’s why the right is winning.
Can the left come back? Absolutely.
For examples of how to do it look at Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom.
Clinton was elected as the ultimate liberal/left jobs candidate. His 1992 campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid,” did well as America struggled to emerge from its 1991 recession whose effects lingered well into early 1993. The Democrat was, of course, helped by the Independent candidacy that year of billionaire Ross Perot, who drew 19 percent of the vote, mostly from likely Republican voters. Needing only 43 percent of the vote to win in a three-way contest, Clinton won by using the old left technique of an economically based campaign.
In his 1996 race for reelection, Clinton briefly claimed credit for turning the economy around but focused heavily on social issues. Signing Republican-sponsored legislation to wean welfare recipients from lifelong dependence on the dole, Clinton featured his efforts to improve education, ban guns, hire extra police, cut the budget deficit, extend family leave for new mothers, support for abortion rights, and battle to keep drugs and tobacco away from children.
Across the ocean, Blair was also finding social issues as the key to his campaigns. Rather than hew to the traditional Labour agenda of helping to put more pay in the envelopes of the working man and woman, Blair promised to reduce waiting times at health clinics, raise educational quality, reduce crime, battle public corruption and improve the environment. Economic issues received short shrift amid Britain’s Tory-induced prosperity as Blair surged to victory on social issues.
The enterprising Social Democrat will find a plethora of values positions on which to run in place of the traditional bread-and-butter issues. Global warming, pollution, education standards and healthcare reform, for example, are great issues for any liberal candidate.
But, here the left needs to copy a bit from the right. Triangulate — solve the problems that normally concern the other side. When Bush focuses on education, he steals the message of the left and co-opts it just as surely as Clinton did when he signed welfare reform legislation. When the left invades the territory of the right and solves problems that normally reside on the other side of the fence — crime, immigration, drugs and moral values — it can be a hard force to stop.
But when the left campaigns on economics, it’s a pushover.
With a very few exceptions, I don't see conservatives winning on almost any issue.
This caused me some consternation.
Libs just don't seem to understand the ideas of rewarding merit, talent, and hard work. To them, it's "redistributing income upward".
Ridiculous. I just don't get the mindset.
The left-leaning mindset can be described in one word---- "perverse."
You think the profits of your industry should be yours? Well, no, they shouldn't.
So what if you worked for it. So what if it was your idea. So what if you went to the trouble of setting it up, finding investors, getting loans, taking risks, working nights and weekends.
Your profits should be handed over to those who sat home watching TV till your factory was up and running, and then showed up for a job.
So what if they give the least amount of effort they can. So what if they do something utterly simple, invest no passion or money or energy. They have a "right" to just as much as you do.
Why? Because if I can make you give your money to them, they will vote for me. That's why. Now pay up.
Simple. Because we've re-defined what the "right" is. The "right" of 1999 is probably equivalent to the mainstream democrat of 1959. The "left" now consists of only the worst kind of communist lunatics.
Sort of like saying more people are living in poverty because we've doubled the level of income that defines someone as "poor".
Giving less of your money, in the form of taxes, to the government is somehow income redistribution. These people don't even pretend to make sense. Morris would do well working for Big Brother in the Ministry of Information.
Liberals don't believe in merit.
To them, everything is a random roll of the dice. Some people are born privileged, some are born underprivileged. Wealth is a static quantity, to be looted or borrowed or redistributed - but they have no concept of creating wealth. One day, there was a big pile of gold in the desert, and "the rich" just got there first and took it all, leaving no chance for anyone else. "Fundamental fairness" thus demands that liberals use government power to even the score.
If you are making money through your own merit, some liberal will inevitable try to guilt-trip you into giving it up (with a finder's fee for himself, of course). The best thing conservatives can do in the face of such demands is laugh in the demander's face...and be prepared to defend their wealth and their right to keep it at all costs.
Excellent point. The entire spectrum is shifting to the left. George Bush would have been considered an extreme leftist 40 years ago. It is almost to the point now that centrists are considered right wing extremists.
One other thought. If the left runs on the economy why is it that they consistently poll poorly when it comes to the economy?
LMBO! Exactly where did you learn about politics, from a comic book? What an asinine remark. No one except the political fringers --- malcontents, misfits and militants --- of FreeRepublic believe such trashtalk. Get serious and take a class or two in political science and/or political history. With rhetoric like that, you'll never be taken seriously around here, especially not by true conservatives.
Take it serious or dont but the list has been gone through ad infinitum and keeps growing.
260 billion dollar per year increase in government spending under GW
50 percent increase in the department of ed's budget. A department that didn't exist 40+ years ago.
Free prescription drugs for old people
Oh and don't forget free home downpayments for poor people.
I didn't get my knowledge about politics from comic books, which is what your rhetoric sounds like. And I don't agree with Bush on every issue either.
I'm looking at the current budget data from OMB, for fiscal year 2003. Bushes 2002 budget, his first, totaled $2.052 trillion. For 2003 the budget is increased to $2.128 trillion. That's a $76 billion increase from 2002 to 2003, or 3.57%. I have no idea where you came up with this figure of $260 billion. The biggest increase in Bushes 2003 budget, is a 14.5% boost in the DoD budget. If homeland security and 9-11 emergency spending is excluded, nondefense spending rose by 3.3 percent in 2002 and is slated to decline by 0.4 percent in 2003.
President Bush campaigned on a strong education agenda, that highlighted responsibility, accountability and vouchers. He got two out of three in the education bill he signed into law. I think the Education Dept should be abolished, but I'm not POTUS.
While I support phasing out social security and medicare, I also respect my elders. The elderly poor in America should be assisted by both private enterprise and through the good will of the American people.
Down payments on homes for the poor is social engineering and is something I don't support.
Like I said, I don't agree with Bush on every issue, but he isn't a liberal, today or forty years ago. He also isn't a dictator, doesn't control the Senate, has a slim majority in the Hosue and is working with some serious "Beltway" gridlock. Retaking the Senate would help advance the Bush agenda and electing more conservative Republicans to office would also help out a lot. According to NRCC chairman Tom Davis, there are some 50 bills that have passed the House and are stuck in the Senate, dying on Daschle's desk. There are Bush political appointments and judicial nominees that can't get a vote in the Senate because of all the liberal obstructionism that goes on against Bushes agenda and Republicans in general.
What would you do to solve the problems facing America today? Remembering of course, how slow the political process is and how hard it is to gain a governing majority.
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