Learning from Britain?

David Brooks asks us to cast our eyes across the pond, and be influenced by what is happening in Britain, vis-a-vis the Tories. He points to their recent electoral success (we noted that here, and I've been meaning to write a post replying to it all week - this isn't it, but maybe this weekend time will permit), and contrasts our continuing electoral woes.

Brooks must be careful, however, not to oversell Tory success. And that limits the force of the argument that we should learn from what they did "right" - no pun intended. Are their fortunes improving because they did something "right" (even assuming that politics isn't contextual and that there are globally "right" answers)? British conservatives may be on the way up because the other side of the seesaw is on the way down: the election, it seems to me, far more clearly expressed frustration and discontent with Labour than it expressed approbation for conservative policies old or new. If there's a lesson for either American political party here, it's not one that Republicans can take advantage of, and one that Democrats can no longer take advantage of. It's this: when the public hates the incumbent, make it easy for the public to use you as a tool with which to assail the incumbent. That's what happened in this country two years ago: America far more squarely rejected us than it embraced the Democrats.

Brooks acknowledges this, kinda sorta: "[i]t’s not only that voters are tired of Labor," he says: it's that "[t]he Conservatives have successfully 'decontaminated' their brand," thereby providing an outlet. Thus, with the left/center-left vote split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, a unified and minimally credible party on the center-right ought to be able to clean up. The same prescription only applies when the same conditions hold; they don't - quite apart from all the micro-level differences, more broadly-speaking the American polity is simply nothing like Britain's - so we should be interested in what the Tories are doing, but it should be taken with a grain of salt.