Western World Tilts Left, Leaving Conservative Cycle

It’s time for Americans who have been monitoring Britain, Japan and West Germany in the financial pages to start watching these countries’ elections and opinion polls. Modern Western politics is arguably in its first megacycle; trends in London, Toronto and Tokyo--places increasingly disenchanted with conservatism--may also signal the political future of the United States.

Surprising parallels have developed in recent years in the politics of the Group of Seven industrial nations--the United States, Britain, Japan, West Germany, France, Canada and Italy. The result so far has been the West’s first international political cycle: an unprecedented conservative coloration on the last 10 years of politics and policy-making in the world’s principal economies. But the next cycle--possibly already visible in 1989 elections and surveys--could easily move more to the center-left as a reaction to the conservative excesses of the ‘80s.

The evidence is intriguing. The fashion of the late 1980s has been to emphasize the growing international sway of market economics. Yet at the grass roots of G-7 nations a different politics is catching hold. From Canada to Japan, from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Edinburg, Texas, emerging economic and environmental issues tilt mildly left instead of right.

The logic of yet another new political tide in the 1990s depends on what’s still too little understood about the 1980s--its unique success as the great conservative governmental and philosophic heyday of the late 20th Century. Other conservative periods of the postwar era were brief. The late-1950s convergence of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle in France, Konrad Adenauer in West Germany and Harold MacMillan in Britain--a World War II memory lane--was quickly overwhelmed by the youthful liberal thrust of the early ‘60s.

The 1980s, by contrast, were an ideological cavalry charge. Conservative governments held power in most G-7 countries. In contrast to the placid Eisenhower era, conservatism has been aggressive enough to exert ideological gravity even on nominally leftist regimes such as the French presidency of Francois Mitterand and the current Labor Party governments of Australia and New Zealand.

Cooperation between the conservative political parties and governments dominating the G-7 has been unprecedented. In some cases, cross-fertilization of strategies and policies extended to assistance at election time. President George Bush’s May visit to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the most recent example, but Ronald Reagan helped British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1982 Falklands crisis and did everything but campaign for the Canadian conservatives just before the 1988 election. The Japanese government provided important 1988 election-year help to the Bush campaign by supporting the dollar. Chicago economist David Hale even suggested, tongue in cheek, that the Bank of Japan should have had to register as a GOP political-action committee. Indeed, between 1985 and 1989, cooperative management of the world economy was what the G-7 became known for.

Without the participants’ common conservative politics, it probably wouldn’t have worked. But leaders of G-7 countries shared similar national constituencies in business and finance, as well as commitments to tax reduction and deregulation. The wide success of this agenda, coupled with the longevity and sweep of conservative political control in most of the G-7, supports the thesis of the modern West’s first political megacycle.

But the fuller test of developing transnational political patterns may be whether the G-7 can dance a two-step--first one way, then another. For the moment, at least, the evidence drifting in from 1989 elections and opinion surveys does suggest a countertrend: G-7 countries, having moved to the right together during the 1980s, are now moving together back to the center--and possibly beyond.

This reaction is most vivid in the nations with the world’s leading stock markets--the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan--where rousing economic successes of the 1980s have concentrated benefits among a fifth or a tenth of the population and left others grumbling about declining “quality of life” measurements and rising tax burdens. While top income tax brackets have been reduced, regressive taxes have been imposed on the general public--new national consumer taxes in Japan and Canada, Britain’s resented “poll tax” (a new head tax to replace local property taxes) and rising U.S. Social Security taxes.

This is the dark side of conservative politics, and signs of a voter revolt have been multiplying. France swung back to the Socialists in 1988, who promptly reimposed a controversial wealth tax. Meanwhile, in spring, 1989, flashing electoral red lights appeared for Thatcher and her Conservative Party, largely as a result of public anger over such measures as the poll tax and proposed privatization of water and electricity, coupled with reforms that voters believed might cripple the popular National Health Service. In June, an increasingly revitalized Labor Party beat the Conservatives in Britain’s European Parliament elections by a stunning 40.1% to 34.7%. Since then, summer polls have shown Labor leading the Tories by up to 15 points. Large majorities say the Conservatives favor the rich, and there’s growing belief that Labor may just have a chance to win the next general election--expected in 1991.

By late 1988, polls in Japan were also charting a potential revolution--an increasing belief that middle-class society was coming unglued. In one government-sponsored poll, 74% called the system unfair while more than half complained of a widening income gap between ordinary people and those making huge profits in soaring stock and real estate markets. When the conservative-run Liberal Democratic Party government cut income tax brackets and imposed a 3% consumption tax, voters began rebelling.

Scandals also diminished LDP popularity. In late July, just before the Japan Socialist Party won its stunning victory in elections for half the nation’s upper legislative house, the weekly Economist described the Socialist policy as “pledged to scrap the 3% consumption tax, raising the cash instead by soaking the rich, probably through taxes on capital gains.” Full legislative elections are expected this year, and LDP control of the government is likely to give way to a coalition.

North of the border in Canada, Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is in trouble over plans to bolster revenue with a new 9% value-added tax. Polls show 70% voter disapproval. Some Conservative members of Parliament threaten opposition, and the latest Canadian Gallup polls, released in mid-August, show the Liberal Party opening up a big 43%-to-27% lead over the Conservatives, with the left-tilting New Democratic Party pulling 27%. No new elections are required until 1993, however.

West Germany’s governing Christian Democrats are also shaky, and if these various national trends don’t reverse, some observers project that only two or three of the G-7 governments will still be in conservative hands by 1992. Of course, even many Americans who acknowledge the political shifts elsewhere doubt they have relevance for this country--the other big question. Stipulating that the United States was the principal engine of the global conservative trend of the 1980s, can the process work in reverse? Can countertrends visible in Europe and Japan jump the oceans to Long Island and the San Fernando Valley?

Maybe. Bush’s Administration is far more popular than the other conservative governments in the G-7, while the Democrats have so far been a less aggressive and articulate counterforce than some of the other opposition parties. However, even in the United States, Bush Administration high ratings come largely from success in international affairs, with the President drawing much lower ratings for handling the economy or domestic policy. Democratic House Speaker Thomas S. Foley has just begun expressing concern about “the alienation and separation of economic classes in this country.” As a new Democratic theme this would follow the emerging G-7 model for successful opposition parties in a world of increasing political interdependence.