It was thirty years ago that elections in the United Kingdom presaged an epochal change in American politics.\u00a0 After three decades of Labour hegemony presiding over the sloughing off of the British Empire and the near-collapse of the British economy, Margaret Thatcher’s Tories swept into office, and spent the next decade first saving, then reviving Britain, and finally leading it back to the head of Europe’s economy.<\/p>\n
A year later, Reagan did the same for America.<\/p>\n
This year, we’ve been faced with the vision of the French president Sarkozy chiding Obama on his risible Iran policy.\u00a0 Angela Merkel has extended the center-right lead in Germany.\u00a0 Berlusconi isn’t going anywhere just yet. Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to \u201cirrational exuberance,\u201d greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right\u2019s failures.<\/p>\n German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To this student of German and German history, the Sozialdemokraten<\/em>‘s slow bleeding is wonderful to see.<\/p>\n Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer\u2019s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.<\/p>\n Some American conservatives demonize President Obama\u2019s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism \u2014 but it is Europe\u2019s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, as has been noted elsewhere, “conservative” has always meant something a little different in Europe:<\/p>\n Europe\u2019s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.<\/p>\n Europe\u2019s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d\u2019\u00c9tudes Politiques, \u201chave adapted themselves to modernity.\u201d When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany\u2019s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the \u201cAnglo-Saxon model\u201d of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which means European conservatives would be Blue Dogs by American standards, to be sure; it also means that the Euro left is even more insane than ours is.<\/p>\n Oh yeah – our left isn’t doing all that well either:<\/a><\/p>\n Though Democrats maintain an edge in party support over Republicans, Americans’ tendency to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party is lessening, coming down from the heights it reached near the end of the Bush administration. The changes in party support have been mainly among those who do not have a firm party commitment — those who initially identify as independents but express a leaning toward either of the major parties.<\/p>\n In fact, Gallup has found that independents are more likely to oppose than support healthcare reform<\/a>, and to express concerns about increased government spending and the expansion of government power<\/a>. Thus, the drop in Democratic support is partly a response to concerns about the policies Obama and the Democratic Congress are pursuing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m feeling better about 2010 every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was thirty years ago that elections in the United Kingdom presaged an epochal change in American politics.\u00a0 After three decades of Labour hegemony presiding over the sloughing off of the British Empire and the near-collapse of the British economy, Margaret Thatcher’s Tories swept into office, and spent the next decade first saving, then reviving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHas the left hit a high water mark in Europe?<\/a><\/p>\n