Right to the Center

Matt Miller writes:

Consider John Edwards, who the press and Republicans have cast as the heartthrob of the resurgent “left”. The centrepiece of Mr Edwards’ agenda is a call for universal health coverage. It sounds radical to American ears, perhaps. But Margaret Thatcher would have been chased from office in the UK if she had proposed a health plan as radically conservative as Mr Edwards’ – under which private doctors would supply the medicine, and years would still pass with millions of Americans uncovered.

Mr Edwards wants to lift the minimum wage substantially, and to boost wage subsidies for low-income work besides. But the outer limits of Mr Edwards’ ambition would leave low income work less generously compensated than the minimum wage and subsidy blend enacted by Britain’s New Labourites Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – arrangements Conservative party leader David Cameron says suit him just fine.

On taxes, Mr Edwards wants to return marginal rates for high earners from 35 per cent to the 39.6 per cent level that existed under Bill Clinton – rates slightly lower than those in force after Mrs Thatcher got through cutting them. Mr Edwards jawbones against outsized CEO pay that is divorced from performance – a concern that arch-capitalist Warren Buffet trumpets at every opportunity. Mr Edwards’ plans for college aid would still leave American graduates far deeper in debt than anything conservative parties across Europe would tolerate.

Mr Edwards and others question the received wisdom that “free trade is good no matter how many people get hurt”, but here again, this is not as “leftist” as some seem to think. We know this from the recent American debate on immigration, where not a single market-loving economist made the case for unfettered immigration of unskilled workers. Why not? Because of the social havoc it would cause. [...]

I could go on, but you get the point. The fact that a Thatcher-Cameron-Buffet agenda can be hyped as “populist” says more about propaganda success and media norms than anything else. Over three decades, America’s conservative movement has so deftly shifted the boundaries of debate to the right that even modest adjustments to the market system can be cast as the second coming of Marx without anyone blushing.

America's political consensus is almost absurdly to the right. But because people still need to run to the left of each other, the rhetoric on offer frequently sounds like the rhetoric of the left, even as its actual prescriptions are decidedly within the mainstream of our fairly conservative consensus on economics. And vice versa in other countries, where rhetoric of the right can refer to almost comically leftist policies. where the center is much further left -- and in other countries, the precise opposite happens.

The French election was an excellent example. The rhetoric there was much the same as the rhetoric here, but it was actually referring to a consensus far to the left of ours, and so even the right wing radical Sarkozy was offering nothing but a couple market-friendly tweaks across the edges of France's expansive public sector. He's further to the Left than anyone running in America. Here, John Edwards is speaking boldly for the left, but doing little more than shoring up some holes of inefficiency and insecurity within our market-heavy approach. His support for the 40-hour, rather than 35-hour, workweek puts him considerably to Sarkozy's right.

Part of the lesson here, incidentally, is that large scale social reforms are incredibly hard to rollback. No American politician would publicly question the existence of Medicare, though many on the right viciously opposed its creation. Same goes for Social Security, which Bush, in 2000, promised to leave untouched, and which, in 2005, gave him his first major defeat when he attempted to privatize it.

One day, when we have a universal health care system, even hardline conservatives will promise to strengthen and protect it, and they will disavow their forefathers who battled so mightily against its passage. The fight for the passage of major social programs is infinitely harder than the battles for their perpetuation.