It could happen here....from the WSJ... The Age of the Unthinkable Tumultuous days in the worlds democracies present an opening for conservative ideas to flourish. By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT And ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE Sept. 9, 2014 7:17 p.m. ET This is turning into an age of the unthinkable, not just in the chaos of the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, but also in the worlds big democracies. In May, India elected Narendra Modi, who was at the time prohibited from visiting the United States, in a landslide; today, Marina de Silva, who only a month ago was the running mate on a losing ticket, is leading the race for the Brazilian presidency. In Mays election for the European Parliament, millions of people voted for what would have once been considered fringe candidates; now the anti-European Alternative for Germany party has won 10% of the vote in Saxony, while a new French poll shows Marine Le Pen, who also wants to leave the European Union, ahead of President François Hollande. But perhaps the most unthinkable event is unfolding in the mother of democracies. On Sept. 18, the people of Scotland might well vote for independence: Having trailed by as much as 20 points a month ago, the separatist Yes campaign is now level or ahead in the polls. If a union that has lasted for 307 years and once ruled a third of the Earths people perishes, so might David Camerons leadership of the Conservative and Unionist Party. The pound will plunge and the London Stock Exchange LSE.LN -0.72% will dive. And that is just the beginning of the troubles for what would remain of the United Kingdom. In foreign policy, the diminished U.K. may well lose its seat on the U.N. Security Council. Its Treasury and the Bank of England would be entangled by arguments about the national debt and oil revenues with Alex Salmond, Scotlands first minister and most vociferous proponent of independence. Politics in the rest of the U.K. would soon be overtaken by wrangling over the 2017 referendum on whether to leave the European Union—a departure that would be made significantly more likely if pro-European Scotland leaves. A Scottish yes vote would also give a jolt to unthinkable ideas far beyond the U.K. Spain would find it much harder to deny an independence vote to the Catalans, while other separatist movements—in Northern Italy, in Belgium, in Quebec—would surely revive. Nor can the U.S. afford to be smug. It arguably started this populist upsurge with the rise of the tea party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. The American establishment has repeatedly pronounced the death of these insurgencies only to see them leap back from the grave. For all the talk about Hillary Clintons presidential inevitability, it would be foolish in the age of the unthinkable to rule out the possibility of a Rand Paul or an Elizabeth Warren at the top of one partys ticket—especially if, as expected, the Republicans take control of Congress in November, gridlock further tightens and frustration with Washington surges. Why is the impossible suddenly becoming possible across the West? The prolonged recession that followed the 2007-08 financial crisis clearly played its part. Each country also has its particular local grievance: The Scottish being fed up with the English is hardly a new development, nor is French hostility to immigrants. But behind all these rebellions sit two great debates. The first, to do with fairness, will push politics to the left; the second, to do with the state, offers an opportunity for the right. Across the West, the idea that the rich have gotten ahead unfairly is rampant. You can see this in Scottish fury at posh Tories and their pinstriped friends. The Scottish National Party, in addition to promising independence, is dangling bigger welfare payments to be funded with higher taxes on the English lairds who own much Scottish land. For the left, fairness has become a political cudgel—whether that means François Hollandes proposed 75% tax on the rich, or Barack Obamas assaults on corporate tax inversion, or Labour leader Ed Milibands diatribes against Britains energy companies. The economics of these solutions may be dubious, but virtually all of the ways to genuinely address unfairness—notably better education and training—will take decades to have much effect. So fairness will remain a political problem for the right. But the current insurgencies also reflect an issue that the right has focused on for decades: the growing dysfunction of the Western state. The Scottish yes campaign may be led by leftists, but it has a founding prejudice that many American conservatives might admire: It is a conscious protest against the over-centralization of British power in Westminster. Much of the Scottish National Partys rhetoric against London sounds like the tea partys fury at Washington. The Scottish yes campaign is also the unconscious result of the overextension of the state. Ever since World War II, the government Leviathan has over-promised and under-delivered. These promises inevitably raise expectations that cannot be fulfilled, resulting in yet more promises, like the Scottish National Partys pledge to increase welfare payments. There was an attempt to reform the state before—the half-revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It achieved many things, notably privatization, but it failed to reduce the size of government on either side of the Atlantic. That was partly because its leaders got things wrong: Thatcher never challenged the police unions, for instance, and she drove centralization harder than any other postwar prime minister, in order to curb left-wing local councils. But it was also because the technology was not ready. Now a once-unthinkable IT revolution is going to make it much easier for governments to produce health care and education more cheaply and efficiently—through wearable gadgets that keep a constant watch on your health and connect you to doctors, and through online teaching courses that put the best teachers in the world at the fingertips of any child. And information about the states failings is much easier to spread: Americans now know that their health-care system costs taxpayers more than Swedens, while delivering a more sickly population, and that their schools are worse than Polands. This is the upside of the age of the unthinkable: Many of the things needed to overhaul the modern state—including technological changes that make it possible to boost the productivity of services and institutional changes that make it easier to give parents choice—are entering the world of the possible. Change is in the air. Britain has been the center of most of the Wests great revolutions in government— Thomas Hobbess Leviathan emphasizing an all-powerful state in the 17th century; William Gladstone introducing small-government liberalism in the 19th century; and Beatrice and Sydney Webb promoting the welfare state at the turn of the 20th century. It would be ironic if a left-wing statist like Mr. Salmond helped inadvertently to launch another great re-examination of government. But another huge debate about the size, scope and nature of the state is coming. Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, respectively the editor in chief and management editor of the Economist, are the authors of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (Penguin, 2014).
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 12:07:53 +0000
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