WASHINGTON — After assessing the outcome of the recent national elections in Britain, France and Canada, it seems clear that Western conservatism, to paraphrase what James Bond used to say about martinis, has been shaken, not stirred.
As for capitalism, a funny thing happened on the way to the millennial enshrinement of the marketplace and the end of the business cycle: Major Western nations started electing Socialists and Communists.
Nobody is suggesting that the ghost of Karl Marx is moving into the Elysee Palace or 10 Downing Street. Still, it is possible to discern some new directions in tax policy; disinclination to cut back social spending; growing skepticism of central bankers and financial bureaucrats; economic nationalism, and doubts about privatization.
Maybe these are just blips and bubbles, but the resounding French results, in particular, suggest we could be on the threshold of another big shift, like the conservative and free-market trend that crested in the late '80s. However, while that conservative surge relied on markets to bring excessive government under control, any revitalization of the center-left would almost certainly use politics and government to curb the excesses of the marketplace and the capitalist ethos.
In retrospect, the 1980s were clearly a conservative megacycle. Ten years ago, among the Group of Seven industrialized nations from the United States and Canada to Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, conservative parties and coalitions ruled almost everywhere, stronger than at any time since the 1950s. In contrast to the aged, stodgy conservative leadership of those years, the new conservatism of the 1980s was an aggressive ideology, roaring ahead with tax cuts, deregulation of financial markets and dismantling of welfare-state safety nets.
The question now: Is the French election also a bit of a second French Revolution, likely to spread? Or is new Prime Minister Lionel Jospin just another politician who will break his promises?
Half of the increasingly controversial Western conservative agenda, perhaps more, was necessary and constructive. But by the late '80s, ideology had gone too far, and a correction started to build. Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party lost the upper house of its Parliament in 1989 over regressive tax policy--a new consumption tax. In the United States, the GOP presidential coalition cracked up in 1992. Then Canada's governing Conservative Party crumbled in the general election of 1993, an unpopular and regressive 7% general sales tax was its principal albatross. In Canadian elections last Monday, the Conservatives remained in fifth place, still unable to regroup as a national force.
