THERE MUST BE A WAY to beat those guys. There must be a way to beat the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair triangulators, those political magpies who steal ideas from the right and left and mix everything into a Third Way souffle, light on intellectual coherence but apparently delectable to voters. There must be some political weakness in their approach . . . but so far nobody has found it. Bill Clinton has survived a massive scandal, and Tony Blair is now more popular than any British prime minister has ever been after two years in power.
Which leaves conservatives casting about for strategies that will help them regain the dominance they enjoyed in the 1980s. Earlier this month British Conservative leader William Hague made a pilgrimage to New York, Washington, Texas, and Ontario to consult with like-minded leaders, such as George W. Bush, on how to revive the Right. Hague didn’t exactly emerge with a blueprint for triumph. But over the past two months he has managed to string together a series of speeches that hint at the beginnings of an antidote to the Third Way. Whether we like it or not.
Hague’s approach is defined first by what it isn’t. It is not American-style values conservatism. British conservatives have never been comfortable talking about issues like abortion. When Hague toured through Washington, he did not meet with too many social conservatives. More interestingly, Hague also downplays the free market. He does make the usual calls for smaller government, but he goes out of his way to distance himself from Thatcherism. On January 19, in his most important speech as Tory leader, Hague declared that Conservatives “must shed the image that we are nothing more than a party obsessed with economics.” He discards the free marketeers’ goal of tax neutrality, the idea that fiscal policy should not favour one sort of behavior over another. More generally, he warns right-of-center parties not to allow the Third Way types to push them further to the right. At an international conservative confab in Istanbul in January, he declared, “The Left has tried to clone our political beliefs because those beliefs are shared by the great majority of voters. . . . The last thing we should do in response is to abandon the political ground to our opponents in search of some right-wing utopia.”
What Hague plays up is nationalism — of a sort. “The Third Way is a threat to the British Way,” he told his audience at the Centre for Policy Studies on January 19. He began that speech by citing a series of left-wing historians who now contend that Britishness is obsolete. Their point is that Great Britain was a product of the imperial age, when the English, Welsh, and Scottish had to unite to fight wars on the continent and elsewhere. Now in the age of the global economy and the European Union, the British union no longer makes sense.
This judgment, Hague continues, is at the heart of New Labour’s most ambitious policies: plans to devolve more and more power to Scotland and Wales, plans to allow more power to drift from Westminster to the European Union in Brussels; trial balloons to radically alter the British two-party electoral system with proportional representation; the “modernization” of the House of Lords. All of this, Hague says, is an attack on the British way of life. “The prime minister is in effect holding a dagger at the heart of what it is to be British. . . . People will wake up and find themselves in a different country,” he warns.
All of this nationalist fervor is honey to the Euroskeptic right wing of the Tory party. But Hague’s centrist tendency is evident when you look at how he defines Britishness. When former prime minister John Major was asked about the British identity, he waxed nostalgic about warm beer and cricket on summer afternoons. Hague goes out of his way to reject nostalgia and the romantic/historical sort of patriotism. Instead, he offers a cool, with-it brand of chauvinism. He celebrates “the Britain proud of its world class designers and good restaurants . . . the Britain which watches MTV . . . where more people go on holiday in Florida than Butlins . . . ” The Britain that is “urban, ambitious, sporty, fashion-conscious, multi-ethnic, brassy, self-confident, and international.” The problem with conservatives, he implies, is that they fell out of step with the times. They were so busy fighting old battles or longing for the Thatcherite glory years, they missed the cultural changes of the 1990s, all the new attitudes that came with prosperity. Hague would never use the word, because it is so Blairite, but he’s trying to modernize the Tories, to retrofit nationalism for Sensitive New Age Guys in minivans.
The first feature of sensitive new age nationalism is that it allows you to be sensitive in your policy prescriptions. Hague is an ardent admirer of the Bush brothers’ compassionate conservatism. Last week, in Ontario, he gave a speech his aides billed as the “Good Samaritan” speech. “We want to say that you the voter are too smart to need a party to tell you what to do and that low taxes are a good thing,” Hague explained while in Toronto, “But we also want to say that if times are hard, the Conservative party will be compassionate and will look after you.” Can you imagine Margaret Thatcher saying that?
The second product of this approach is that it allows Hague to be a decentralizer. This is in direct contrast with the Thatcherite approach, which centralized power in London on the grounds that the local governments had been captured by the loony Left. But Hague, for example, wants to reverse the Tory education policies, abandoning the national curriculum in favor of a decentralized, American-style system. Hague has also learned to wax eloquent about faith-based community organizations and other civil-society institutions.
So far the response among London’s conservative commentariat has been harsh. Phrases like “vacuous spin doctoring” and “toe curlingly awful” are being used to describe Hague’s new age nationalism. Part of the negative reaction is due to the crankiness of the Tory press at the moment.
But there is another reason conservative intellectuals detest this sort of repackaging. Unlike left-wing intellectuals, who have seen dreams of a Swedish social-welfare utopia go down the tubes, conservative intellectuals still have confidence in their ideas. Unlike left-wing intellectuals, they are not so desperate for political victory that they will meekly swallow their creeds and salute pabulum.
Any rightish politician who tries to come up with some politically centrist platform is going to have to endure a torrent of abuse from his right. For William Hague, solace may come from the knowledge that while his squishy nationalism may sound vacuous, it’s not as if anybody else has come up with a sure-fire strategy to beat the Third Way.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
