Breakthrough: New Conservative or Neo-Progressive?

David Brooks wrote an oped today, "The Conservative Revival," that should serve as a wake-up call to American progressives. Brooks suggests that the recent victories of the British Conservative Party reflect a larger conservative shift happening in Europe due to some fundamental political retooling. The new conservative strategy, it seems, may be to focus on a post-material, new social contract:

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government... But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life... Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, "the whole way we live our lives."
That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: "Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric." David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: "The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival."

Brooks goes on to suggest that American conservatives will inevitably have to adopt this model. But American progressives should take some lessons of their own. With a good chance of reclaiming the White House and taking a commanding majority in Congress, progressives should caution against letting their hey-day moment blind them to some of these underlying trends. We would be wise to move beyond the econo-centric, materialist liberalism of the 1930s and advance our own postindustrial social contract that can make Americans more secure, address our post-material values, and pave the way for a new progressive era.

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