Europe’s Hidden Conservatives

Why are politics so different in Europe and the United States, considering that the two have wealthy economies and share a lot of cultural roots? Do Europeans and Americans really have sharply divergent views about war and peace, taxes and welfare, and trade and development? It’s true that Europeans have become somewhat less religious than Americans and that European governments provide somewhat more public housing, retirement income, health care and other “social benefits” than the U.S. government does. These are differences. But they are also magnified out of proportion by the workings of democratic politics. In a democracy, major parties and coalitions craft their platforms and rhetoric to attract the “median voter,” that is, the hypothetical voter at the exact center of the political spectrum, whose swing can determine an election. In most European countries, the median voter is, for example, both less religious and more dependent on government than the median voter in the United States. This makes political differences appear very stark, by tugging American politics to the right and European politics to the left. For example, American liberals when running for office have little choice but to sideline provocative progressive language and instead loudly proclaim conservative-sounding themes like individual responsibility, the private sector, and toughness on crime and national security. Democratic presidential candidates in particular assume this centrist pose — just think of John Kerry in the home stretch of his 2004 campaign or Hillary Clinton today. Democrats steer clear of any suggestion that they want to make America more like, say, Europe. This positioning is so thorough that Europeans and other outside observers are often unaware that a sizable left-liberal minority even exists in the United States. The opposite happens in Europe. In countries like Germany, France, Spain and Sweden, center-right politicians compete for a very different kind of median voter, leaving them little choice but to avoid talk of toughness at home or abroad, and instead to defend the welfare state, strict secularism and a kindler, gentler foreign policy. Germany’s Christian Democrats, for instance, often compete with the Social Democrats to see who can raise public pensions more, not to cut or reform them. In the same way, European business leaders who understand supply-side incentives, job creation and taxes and regulation more or less like American conservatives do, are careful to censor “radically” free-market talk so an not to marginalize themselves politically. And European conservatives avoid any suggestion that they want to make their countries more like America. This positioning — in this case to the center-left — is so thorough that Americans and other outside observers might not even realize that every European country hosts a sizable minority of conservatives. The perception that Europe is uniformly center-to-center-left is reinforced by the fact that public expression is often monopolized by a collusive journalistic, intellectual and Eurocrat elite whose “arrogance [is] almost beyond belief,” in the words of American conservative commentator William Kristol. Mainstream European press discussions of free markets, America and robust conservatism are so routinely paranoid and hyperbolic as to make Howard Dean look temperate by comparison. This collusive expressive elite conceals what are sometimes important divergences between elites and average European citizens. Consider last year’s country-by-country debates over the proposed European Union constitution. In a country like the Netherlands, parliamentarians and journalists overwhelmingly favored this treaty. Many of their citizens seemed not to agree. So long as this discontent was limited to public opinion polls, elites could explain it away as a shallow fit of popular temper. The true extent of the elite-popular divergence was only revealed when citizens rejected the constitution in a referendum by 62 percent to 38 percent. Who knows how much dissent like that was concealed by the fact that 15 of the 25 EU governments preferred not to hold even consultative referendums for adopting a proposed constitution? So Europe might just be waiting for a breakthrough by ideas a lot more like those that are currently politically dominant in America. William Kristol has suggested that, in a way, Europe is stuck politically in America’s 1990s, with a cultural and political elite plagued by drift, failure and scandal — but without the breakthrough achieved in America by reform-minded conservatives like Rudy Giuliani and, yes, Newt Gingrich. If anything, though, Western Europe sometimes seems even stuck further behind than that. Many Europeans still respond to unemployment with protectionism and government jobs programs; leaders routinely speak of corporatist-style “social dialogue” between the state and major interests; a center-right prime minister argues that subsidized agriculture is central to France’s economic dynamism; few expect Europeans to act resolutely to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and governments try to stem globalization with what one scholar calls a “social democratic Maginot Line.” All this calls to mind nothing so much as the 1970s. Gradual changes in European societies, economies, and politics might yet make Europeans more like Americans, instead of the other way around.