a ray of hope

David Brooks has been cheered up by the British election. All the world's major economies, he says, are facing the same near-insoluble dilemmas - how to cut spending and raise taxes at a time when nobody trusts politicians to do anything:

The chances that the world’s leaders are going to be able to do these things successfully are between slim and none. It’s hard enough to figure out the right mix of spending cuts and tax increases. It’s nearly impossible to build a political majority willing to enact them. Sometime over the next decade or so, the world will probably suffer from another series of crushing fiscal crises with significant economic pain and maximum political turmoil. But, occasionally, there’s a ray of hope. Occasionally, a country stumbles into a political arrangement that may help it avert a crisis. And that’s what’s happened in Britain.

Gosh, we're blushing. Or feeling nauseous, depending on where we're standing.

Brooksie's reading of British politics is a little eccentric (he seems to think the election demonstrated the strength of Britain's extreme parties, when the opposite was true) but he has a good grasp of the essentials. He has of course long been a fan of Cameron and it's in his interest to talk him up, because he wants him to be a model for the Republicans. Some hope. American conservatives, of course, are loudly interpreting Cameron's failure to win a governing majority as evidence of the perils of going soft.

Comments

[ejoch]

Maybe if/when the GOP get clobbered by nominating another Goldwater, Cameron will be their model.

[peter]

Before they were enlightened enough to try HM Cousin Dave as leader, even the British Conservatives had first to be led from the hard right by Michael Howard, and before that, by a William Hague pretending to be hard right.

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