You know an Opposition leader’s doing well when he makes waves across the pond. And – if an important article in today’s New York Times is anything to go by – Cameron’s succeeding on exactly that front. It’s titled ‘The Conservative Revival’, and outlines what the GOP can learn from Project Cameron. Here’s a hefty assortment of the key points, but I’d suggest you read the whole thing:
“Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American conservatives are on the way down… …The flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way. The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, ‘the whole way we live our lives.’ That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: ‘Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric’ David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological… …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. As such, the Conservative Party has spent a lot of time thinking about how government should connect with citizens. Basically, everything should be smaller, decentralized and interactive… …Cameron describes a new global movement, with rising center-right parties in Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg). American conservatives won’t simply import this model. But there’s a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.”
Of course, this will do no harm to the Tory leader – any degree of global recognition improves his case for being Prime Minister. Especially as Brown’s recent trip to the States was hardly an unmitigated success.
Hat-tip: Politics Home
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