The ever-brilliant and forgivably Canadian Mark Steyn makes a rather startling observation today: America's romance with the most left-wing candidate since McGovern (at least) — comes at a time when the rest of the Western world is tilting further to the right than they have in a generation:
If Obama is elected in November, at G7 meetings, for the first time since they began, America will have a more left-wing leader than any other member of the group - Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Britain (and that's before Gordon Brown loses to David Cameron). Right-of-center government throughout the western world — except Washington.Strange days.
3 comments:
Some of us used to say in Wisconsin that we were, on average, five years culturally behind the two coasts. It wasn't something we congratulated ourselves for, being Midwestern liberal snobs.
Those days are blessedly passed. There isn't a lot about the culture of the coasts I admire any more.
But here we find ourselves, five years politically behind Europe. It appears that the people of Europe may be getting their fill of Brussels-style international fascist politics, and are fighting back.
I suppose now that we are fully attached to the government teat, that the glow of free money will have to rise and fade and the warning signs of all those attached strings willhave to begin to make us uncomfortable. Let us hope so.
I don't know if that's really true that Obama would be even in the liberal half - Obama's proposed health care plan isn't even as ambitious as the very popular and politically untouchable socialized health care systems in many other countries. Same with other entitlement programs, when compared to Europe.
While I agree that the rest of the developed world is experiencing some backlash against its more liberal political parties, I still see it more as us meeting them somewhere in the middle.
We're talking about people, though, not policies. Obama's not going to be able to take America further to the left than the rest of the G7, nor will the center-right leaders of those countries take them to the right of America. You're right that those the other leaders would never have the political support to roll back their countries' liberal policies, just as Obama will (probably, hopefully) not have enough to take America to where they are now. But political pragmatism aside, just looking at each leader as an individual, I think Steyn's statement stands.
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