Crack-up, part Deux
FRUM, DAVID
Crack-up, Part Deux by David Frum It's been another bad week for conservatives. In France, the second round of legislative elections on June 1 proved every bit as devastating to conservatives as...
...He hopes to make good his political losses from the slowdown of the growth of one program with political gains from speeding up the growth of others...
...The rebuke to President Jacques Chirac was all the more stinging because of the sheer preposterousness of the campaign promises of socialist leader Lionel Jospin: He promised to hire 350,000 more civil servants and to cut the work week from 39 to 35 hours without reducing anyone's pay...
...Contributing editor David Frum wrote last week about the worldwide conservative crack-up...
...Why wipe away their tears when they're told that they can't have a new balloon to replace the one they just broke...
...The humbled governments in both France and Canada were led by men whom reasonable people considered reasonable people...
...Canada's political stability has broken down even more completely...
...To avoid the turmoil of a France or a Canada, democracies that need to shrink overambitious public sectors must do so in ways that offer voters attractive tradeoffs instead of a dismal sense that everything is getting worse in every way...
...the old Conservative party holds on to ancient loyalties in the east...
...The $85 billion in tax cuts over five years that the Republicans got out of this deal will pay for capital-gains and estate-tax relief...
...At the same time, waiting lists are lengthening at the state medical monopoly, educational standards are deteriorating, and city streets are becoming dirtier...
...Both governments were consistently praised by self-proclaimed moderates, who hailed their sensible, balanced approach to the fiscal problems of the modern state...
...France's electoral system, which is designed to squeeze out small parties that fail to come to terms with the big ones, held the xenophobic National Front to only one of 577 seats...
...In his cunning way, the president knows that...
...No wonder that pollsters are detecting rising levels of alienation: For most people, government is increasingly a rip-off...
...The populist Reform party dominates the West...
...Democratic electorates seem to think the way Cleese does...
...The biggest gainers: the socialist New Democrats and the Progressive Conservatives, who began the campaign to the government's right and ended it far to the government's left with promises to cancel the government's scheduled cuts in social spending...
...But to tell them that you're doing all this to shore up the finances of the state, while in return they get . . . nothing at all . . . is to beg to be kicked out of office...
...As governments fail to come to grips with the crisis of the welfare state in ways satisfactory to their electorates, even their basic political stability comes into question...
...Are there lessons here for other countries...
...You could call it the John Cleese plan...
...The whole country seems to have taken another giant step toward dissolution...
...The Republicans, unfortunately, will not be able to do the same...
...In France, the second round of legislative elections on June 1 proved every bit as devastating to conservatives as the first round a week before: The socialists won 268 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, with another 39 going to the Communists...
...On top of that, there are federal and provincial sales taxes of up to 15 percent on everything one buys, taxes on gasoline and telephone calls, and payroll taxes for the Canada Pension Plan (which were just increased massively...
...After all, they voted themselves lower taxes and rising services in the 1980s...
...That's why he ensured that he got plenty of room for new porkbarrel spending for his constituencies as his price for agreeing to Medicare reductions...
...Which means that instead of offering Less Government and Lower Taxes, the Republicans are on the verge of mimicking John Major's Tories, Chirac's Gaullists, and Jean Chretien's Liberals to offer the voters in 1998 the GOP's own distinctive version of Nothing for Something...
...Even in tax-cutting Ontario, individuals hit combined federal-provincial income-tax rates of nearly 50 percent at incomes of $50,000...
...In Canada, for example, the average family is now paying more than one-third of its income in taxes...
...And both have just suffered brutal punishment at the hands of their own people...
...The two conservative parties won only 247 of the seats in the Assembly...
...In 1997...
...In explaining why Medicare must be fixed, it's important to stress the public-spiritedness of the Republicans' actions, that Republicans are acting as they are with a view to the good of the whole polity...
...The governing Liberals saw their parliamentary majority slashed to a nerve-wracking 155 out of 301 seats...
...Worse still, Monday's result completes the destruction of Canada's system of national parties...
...With ever-rising incredulity, he struggles to understand: "You mean, I give you money and in return I get . . . nothing at all...
...They were cutting social spending, it's true, but hesitantly, carefully, all the while trying to salvage as much of their welfare states as they could...
...Communists...
...The Republicans are in the midst of signing off on a budget deal that takes away a great deal from Medicare beneficiaries and other powerful domestic interest groups...
...That's right and proper: Unless something is done, Medicare will wreck the public finances of the United States...
...On the very next day, Canadians were taking their own more cautious lurch leftward...
...but nobody except an editorial writer ever willingly traded public services for a balanced budget or European unity...
...and the separatist Bloc Quebecois is reviled in English Canada...
...The trouble is that it's very hard to govern a democracy over the protests of its own people...
...People will consider trading public services for lower taxes...
...Who said the French were chic...
...Only it isn't very funny...
...There's a Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese, playing a wealthy executive, has the concept of charity explained to him for the first time...
...Even the Liberals, the only party with any remaining pan-national appeal, have lost their grip on the West and French-speaking Quebec...
...That, however, won't stop the Republican party from trying...
...But it might also be prudent to have in the holster some more material inducements—like substantial and immediate tax cuts...
...The public is composed, Michael Kinsley has complained, of "big babies...
...Conservative parties that offer their people large, offsetting tax cuts—even if that requires larger spending cuts—stand at least a fighting chance of convincing them of the need for spending reductions...
...But the Front still won some 15 percent of the popular vote in the first round of balloting, indicating a truly disturbing degree of alienation from the institutions and moral norms of the Fifth Republic, and indeed the modern world...
...It's one thing to reduce their unemployment benefits and make their pension schemes more lavish...
...What did they think was going to happen...
...Some especially flinty types may think that publics suffering from rising taxes and declining services are getting only what they deserve...
...You can't govern a parliamentary democracy when any five backbench members of parliament can put a pistol to the prime minister's head, and you can't offer the voters stark and clear alternatives to government policy in a five-way political debate...
...But $85 billion over five years won't begin to pay for a middle-class tax cut, especially since the Republicans have conceded a big chunk of that $85 billion to the president for his "targeted" tax cuts to the families of university students...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
