Alex Massie Wonders Why a Center-Right Nation Never Elects Conservative Presidents

The UK Labour Party’s 12-year grip on power seems set to end at the next elections. Conventional wisdom would attribute the Tories’ success to a mix of the bad economy, public fatigue with Labour scandals after more than a decade in office, and David Cameron’s success in moving the party to the center. Some see here a lesson for the Republicans—to win, you need to take advantage of Democratic mistakes, but also modernize the party. John O’Sullivan writing in National Review is having none of it and says there are no positive lessons to be learned from Cameronism. Alex Massie takes Sullivan’s article apart and then moves on to a more provocative point:

Equally, if a return to “true” conservatism is all that is needed for victory, why is it that, by the conservative movement’s own strict standards, there has been only one truly conservative president since the Second World War? Reagan is the only Republican president who hasn’t been written out the movement. This suggests that, far from being a guarantee of electoral success, Reaganism might better be viewed as an outlier, not a reliable template for future victories. The United States may well be, by international standards, a centre-right nation, but common sense dictates that the “centre” bit matters just as much as the “right”.

I’d venture that there’s something to that. Relatedly, try as some might to deny it, I just don’t see any way to deny that Bush-era governance was substantially more dominated by the conservative movement than was Reagan-era governance. Reagan was constrained by congress for a longer period of time (1983-88 years versus 2007-8) and dominated congress less definitively (even in 1981-82 he needed conservative Democrat votes in the House and he dealt with a much more robust bloc of moderate Republicans) at the height of his powers. His administration, meanwhile, included a number of members of the moderate wing of the party in positions of influence. Conservatives like Reagan better because he was more successful. But he was more successful in large part because his administration was less thoroughly dominated by the hard-right. That put them in a position to forge statesmanlike compromises on Social Security and the 1986 tax reform as well as engage in some course-corrections of policies that didn’t seem to be working. The conservative element was obviously there, but more moderate elements were crucial ballast and integral to Reagan’s successes.