Commentary No. 8, Jan. 15, 1999
"The Dilemma of Conservative Parties"
In a sense, conservative parties shouldn't exist. The heart of conservative doctrine for the last two centuries has been that the states should legislate as little as possible and that social decisions should be primarily the responsibility of "traditional" social structures: the family, the "community," the religious institutions, the local aristocracy where it exists. A party is a non-traditional organization designed to operate in an electoral setting in which the majority of the voters choose representatives who can then legislate on behalf of the voters. Parties were something forced upon conservatives by the steady rise of parliamentary institutions and the expansion of the suffrage (today, generally universal adult suffrage).
Conservative parties have thus always been confronted by an internal cleavage that they have had to contain if they hoped to be successful electorally. The truly well-off in any state, even a wealthy state, are inevitably a minority of the population. Their economic interest has always been to hold the line on governmental redistributive spending and therefore on governmental taxation. They have always had the political problem of persuading a large group of others, less well-off, of the virtues of their legislative priorities. As early as the 1830's - in West European countries and in the United States - their leaders have tended to propound more "moderate" views in order to obtain legislative majorities. In the scholarly literature, this is referred to as "enlightened conservatism" - that is, a conservatism that is more "centrist," making timely concessions to popular demands in order to maintain the essential of what they want to preserve, especially in the economic arena.
But there has always been a second variety of conservatism, one far less interested in economic issues or only secondarily. This second variety of conservatism has focused on the social arena, and hence has been more "ideological," that is, more strident. For these social conservatives, the other "economic" variety has always been not pragmatic but spineless, not clever but virtually treacherous. Such conservatives too have always been a minority and have always also had the problem of how they could achieve their social program (including their legislative program). As suffrage became universal, such conservatives have sought to obtain their way not by timely concessions and centrism but by creating strong populist bases of intensive, highly committed followers. Such conservatives have often been tempted to go beyond the electoral processes to extra-parliamentary activities.
The dilemma for conservative parties is that, to be successful, conservative parties have historically needed to be under the control of the eocnomic conservative wing but stil retain the votes of the social conservative wing. If they tilted too much in the latter's direction, they tended to lose voters in the center of the spectrum and hence to lose elections. In a sense, balancing these forces has been the normal activity of conservative politicians. And as long as social conservatives are relatively calm and somewhat "apolitical," it has worked. Sometimes, however, the relations between the two wings of conservatism has become very strained. This is usually because the state in question seems threatened by major social changes, which agitates the social conservatives and makes them suddenly quite unwilling to compromise with the economic or enlightened conservatives. One of two things then can happen. The social conservative wing can move definitively to extra-parliamentary violence. This was the fascist solution of the 1920's and 1930's. Or the conservative coalition can fall apart and become, for a long time at least, an electoral minority.
The latter is what seems to be happening currently in a number of countries. Let us illustrate this by looking at three examples (out of many more possible ones) - France, Israel, and the United States. It is precisely because the details of the politics are so different in the three countries, as is the structure of governmental elections, that it is interesting to observe the similarities of the process. All three countries share one crucial feature: an elected chief executive, which forces a bipolarization at some point in the electoral process.
In France, virtually all elections are in two rounds. Thus one can have many parties competing in the first round, and then the formation of left and right coalitions in the second round. For various historical reasons, the French right has had three different main organizations since 1945 (one Gaullist, one Christian-Democratic and centrist, and one non-Gaullist economic conservative), who came together in the second round of elections. As France began to face economic difficulties in the 1970's, a small xenophobic right wing party, called the Front National (FN), began to gain strength. The FN has always made its opposition to "immigrants" the centerpiece of its political program. Because it was openly racist and flirted with being extra-parliamentary, it was kept outside the mainline conservative coalition. When this group began to win 15% of the vote, however, the conservative coalition began to lose elections. Thereupon, the conservative coalition was faced with the issue of whether or not to include the FN in their second round. The mainline conservatives split deeply on this issue between those who considered the FN as neo-fascists and unfrequentable and those who thought of them as simply the right of the right wing. Within the FN, there has now emerged a split as well, between those who essentially refuse to play the parliamentary game at all because the mainline conservatives are thought to be as bad as the left (the followers of Le Pen) and those who wish to make alliances with the mainline conservatives, hoping to take over eventually the coalition (the followers of Bruno Megret). The result in France as of 1999 is utter disarray on the right, both among the mainline conservatives and the FN. Intra-conservative angers have reached a high pitch, and centrist voters have become more inclined to vote for various segments of the left coalition.
Israel too has many parties, but the fact that the Prime Minister is now directly elected, separately from Parliament, forces coalition politics. In Israel, the groups equivalent to the FN have been both inside and outside the mainline conservative coalition. The key issues that divide economic conservatives from social conservatives in Israel is how to deal with the Palestinians and secondarily the institutionalization of religious orthodoxy. The range of difference among conservatives is not that large, going from those who are ready to make a very few concessions to the Palestinians and who are personally less involved in religious issues to those for whom no concessions whatsoever should be made either to the Palestinians or to the Jews who are less than fully orthodox. Of course, the issues in Israel are complicated by the element of outside pressures and by the fact that the Palestinians are about half the population now living in the area politically controlled by Israel. Here too, the result has been a disintegration of the conservative coalition, and the uncertainty that it can be recreated during and after the coming elections.
The crisis in the Republican Party in the U.S. is not too different, except that the social conservatives there went inside the conservative coalition and have come close to taking it over completely, which has created great discomfort for the economic conservatives and threatens to lose the coalition its centrist voters and place it in a long-term minority.
What is fascinating about these three situations is that the disarray in the conservative camp has led to a consolidation of
the opposing camp, despite the internal strains of the latter. Just ten years ago, the left in all three countries was in great
difficulty, but now it seems to be in the process of creating a new stable majority, largely due to the high pitch of the social
conservatives which has undermined the balance of the conservative coalition.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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