Cassilis

Interesting column by Tony Blankley in this week’s Washington Times looking at broad political coalitions and whether they are largely ideological or partisan in character. His starting point is the debate in GOP circles about Giuliani’s suitability for the Republican nomination given his opposition to outlawing abortion – it seems the ideological convictions of the Christian right are so ingrained that a Democratic presidency is preferable to a Republican one that doesn’t deliver everything they think it should.

Tony quite rightly takes socially conservative GOP members to task over this and points out that a degree of compromise over your beliefs is a pre-requisite to functioning politics and their obduracy is self-defeating:

“..purity of principle in application is not a functioning governing process - it is a posture. [People] of good conscience must have the courage to judge whether the net effect of [their] political decision advances [their] moral objectives or not…. The decision not to vote, or vote for a third-party candidate with no hope of winning, is itself a moral choice for the outcome such a vote will effectuate. People of conscience will have to decide whether feeling pure by voting "none of the above" is the highest ethical act or not.”

Although we don’t quite have the same broad coalitions in UK politics (certainly not the religious element) we do still have a situation where the major parties have to try and construct a broad coalition distinctly different from their traditional base. Whereas in US politics the parties seem to strain to their extremes to build these coalitions (GOP to the Christian right, Democrats to the hard left / unionised sector) in UK politics it's that amorphous centre ground of floating voters devoid of any real political loyalties but whose support is essential to forming a government. In courting that group the two main parties are required to make the same sort of judgment Blankley refers to – a judgment that’s can in fact be courageous and ethical rather than the act of political opportunism it’s regularly characterised as.

These efforts on the part of both parties create some interesting tensions invariably exploited by their opponents. The Conservatives, so goes the Labour narrative, are either vacuous opportunists or unreconstructed, reactionary right-wingers - there is no middle ground there. Likewise with Conservative attacks on Brown - he's always 'on the verge' of some catastrophic lurch back to full-on socialism or he too is just a cynical opportunist. The reluctance in both parties to acknowledge these commonalities in their political strategy is quite revealing I think.

Labels: Politics