New Conservative Path?

As we continue to digest this election, one of the themes will be the next steps for the Republican Party. Commentators are asking what the party has to change if it wants to get back into power. Generally I wouldn't care about this question so much, because I believe that the most that would happen would be a rebranding of the message and a slight focus on different issues. But in the end, I don't expect much change in the overall philosophy.

David Brooks however gave me something to think about in a column he wrote back in May about the conservative movement in Britain. He describes how it changed after a long period of Tory power. Part of the column talks about the movement's focus on reforming a declining social fabric - which I don't really agree with. What I do appreciate, and hope filters here to the US is the following:

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, “On Fraternity.” These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As such, the Conservative Party has spent a lot of time thinking about how government should connect with citizens. Basically, everything should be smaller, decentralized and interactive. They want a greater variety of schools, with local and parental control. They want to reverse the trend toward big central hospitals. Health care, Cameron says, is as much about regular long-term care as major surgery, and patients should have the power to construct relationships with caretakers, pharmacists and local facilities.

What I like about this is that the debate moves from whether we are part of a social community and therefore need to help each other, to how best to accomplish this. My problem with the argument for much greater individual economic liberty is that underlying that belief is the assumption that we do not take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.

I don't have a lot of faith that the American conservative movement will buy into this. I think there is too much individualism spirit in conservatives here. But if it does, I would look forward to the new debates - debates over how best to help each other, instead of whether we should.