The current Weekly Standard (October 4, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 03) carries a piece by Henry Olsen (a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute), “As Sweden Goes…The Worldwide Tea Party.” This excellent analysis of recent center-right electoral victories and influence successes is a timely reminder of what is at stake in the United States in this mid-term. Olsen is at pains to point out the kinds of accommodations between deficit-reducing fiscal conservatism and prudent welfare-state conservatism that condition these dismissals of prior political elites in Europe and Australia.
Nonetheless, despite voters’ fiscal conservatism, they do not want to uproot entirely the welfare state. Australia’s Abbott started his campaign by pledging not to reintroduce WorkChoices, a law deregulating labor markets passed by the last Liberal prime minister, John Howard, which proved so unpopular that voters toppled Howard’s government despite a booming economy. In Sweden, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s right-wing New Moderates party has successfully argued that lowering taxes, increasing the number of Swedes at work, and decreasing those on the welfare rolls is the best way to pay for Sweden’s social model. [Emphasis added.]Much can be said about the need for Republicans in the United States to pay heed to the reality that they “can ride the wave of populism and fiscal conservatism to victory now, but they will need to reconcile Tea Party populism with Americans’ attraction to the welfare state if they are to simultaneously govern and forestall a third party effort in 2012.”
I would counsel, however, that we not make the mistake of thinking that electoral swings in the United States can be as readily digested as transient electoral swings that we have witnessed in mainly parliamentary environments. What is called “populism” greatly understates what is transpiring in the United States at present.
The great achievement of the “tea party movement” has been precisely to eschew political institutionalization. That does not rule out a third-party movement in 2012 (if the political establishment disappoints in the manner of its reflexive initial reaction to Christine O’Donnell’s win in Delaware). It does, however, invite attention to a deeper dynamic in the United States, with potentially far more long-lasting implications. Think of the “tea party movement” as a social movement rather than a political movement, and we will draw nearer to the true “old Europe” – 1789 Paris.
The consistently disappointed hopes of United States citizens have spawned a move that threatens to colonize the Republican Party and to relocate it from the country club to the community room. The current electoral shifts in Europe take place around well-established and subsisting class and political alignments, which vary in salience and size from time to time. The current shifts in the United States bear the portent of shifting the social bases that make political alignments possible.
If the “tea party movement” is thought of as nothing more than a prelude to the 2010 mid-term elections, with a reversion to the mean of institutional party control thereafter for future elections, it will have proved ultimately inconsequential whether there is a third party in 2012 or not. It the creative disruption of this movement sustains beyond the mid-term elections, as I predict that it will, we will have entered a new phase of United States politics.
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