When you think of George W. Bush, ‘philosophical influence’ isn’t the first phrase that springs to mind.
When you think of George W. Bush, ‘philosophical influence’ isn’t the first phrase that springs to mind. But the former president has as good a claim as anyone to be a philosophical influence on the Cameron project. Although the intellectual debt was never acknowledged because of Bush’s unpopularity in this country, David Cameron adopted a great number of Bush’s tactics as he tried to detoxify the Conservative brand.
Bush had shown Cameron how the right could win in a post-cold war era when the great economic questions appeared to have been settled. As George Osborne, Cameron’s closest political ally, wrote in this magazine in 2004 in a piece supporting Bush’s re-election bid, Bush ‘found an answer to this question: what is the right for in the age of Clinton–Blair? The Conservatives would do well to listen and learn.’
It was obvious from Cameron’s actions that he had listened and learned. Like the American president, he made education the centre of his political pitch, worked hard to make his party appear more diverse and articulated a compassionate conservative philosophy. Bush talked about putting ‘conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity’; Cameron about how ‘Conservative means will deliver progressive ends’.
Cameron, again like Bush, embraced bits of the welfare state that his party had long been suspected of wanting to privatise. Bush said, ‘Medicare does more than meet the needs of our elderly, it reflects the values of our society.’ Cameron said, ‘The NHS is an expression of our values as a nation.’
This homage was all the more striking because the shine had already come off Bush before Cameron won the Conservative leadership in 2005. Osborne conceded in that same 2004 Spectator piece that ‘even among Conservative MPs, let alone with Conservative supporters in the country, it pains me to report that we Bushites are a minority’.
Aware of Bush’s global unpopularity, the Cameroons publicly went out of their way to distance themselves from the Texan in the White House. In February 2006, William Hague went to Washington and said that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners had led to ‘a critical erosion in our moral authority’. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Cameron delivered a speech that lamented the ‘unrealistic and simplistic’ policies that had been pursued since the attack on the twin towers and set out why he wasn’t a neoconservative, distancing him from the intellectual driving force behind the president’s foreign policy agenda.
Bush’s overall approach, though, was still a guide. Cameron was constantly trying to produce the conservatism that Osborne hoped he had seen triumph at the Republican convention in 2000. As Osborne wrote four years later, it was ‘a conservatism for the 21st century: interested in social problems, not just economic ones; concerned with the vulnerable, not just the well-off; accepting of cultural change; relaxed rather than shrill’.
But Bush’s time in office exposed the limitations of his philosophy and the problems with turning your back on fiscal conservatism. The financial crisis demonstrated the dangers of running deficits even in good times as Bush had done.
In office, Cameron has pursued a very different economic course from the former president. Bush signed new entitlements into law; the prime minister is cutting back existing ones. Cameron is governing as a staunch fiscal conservative. His coalition’s flagship policy is its plan to eliminate the structural deficit before the next election.
Fiscal conservatism is now the glue holding the British right together. Conservatives accept the coalition principally because of its position on the deficit. Whatever Lib Dem policies might have been attached to them, the budget and the spending review were essentially Conservative, and that is enough for most Tory MPs and activists. Even those backbenchers furious with Cameron’s approach to the European Union are largely holding their fire because of the coalition’s commitment to cuts.
The Prime Minister’s economic policies offer an alternative to the neo-Keynesian policies that have been so popular in the English-speaking world since the financial crisis hit. Moreover, by making the deficit the primary political issue, Cameron has turned the financial crisis and its aftermath from being an opportunity for the left into one for the right. The British left now faces its own crisis of definition: what’s the point of Labour when there’s no money to spend? At the same time, deficit reduction offers the right a chance to push through spending cuts that would not be politically possible in other circumstances.
Intriguingly, there are signs that the American right may be following Cameron’s lead. The Tea Party movement is motivated by a variety of factors but its primary appeal is its commitment to limited government. Obama’s Republican opponent in 2012 will almost certainly run as a fiscal conservative.
An early favourite among the Republican establishment for the nomination in 2012 is Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana and the nation’s premier fiscal hawk. Normally someone who is 5ft7 and has a receding hairline would not be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. But Daniels’s success in turning Indiana’s $200 million deficit into a $1.3 billion surplus in tough economic times and still comfortably winning re-election in a state which Barack Obama took in the presidential election has people talking.
Those close to the Conservative leadership do warn that Bush’s example is still vital in one regard: centre-right leaders must wear their compassion on their sleeves. Parties running on a fiscally conservative ticket have to work particularly hard to show that they have a heart.
If the cuts do kickstart the British economy, then Cameron could succeed Bush as the model for the centre-right across the English-speaking world. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Republicans could end up returning Cameron’s compliment.
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