Embracing the Center-Right

Fire of Liberty

Michael Barone has written a wonderful piece over at RealClearPolitics that pretty much explains why the voters in the US, Canada, Mexico and other countries of Central and South America have drifted towards the center-right in their most recent elections. Here's a sample:

All three won thanks to huge margins in economically vibrant hinterlands--George W. Bush's Texas, Stephen Harper's Alberta, Vicente Fox's Guanajuato. Calderon carried the Mexican states north of metro Mexico City by 47 to 22 percent over Lopez Obrador. These are the states where you find giant new factories, glistening shopping malls, rising office buildings, new middle-class subdivisions, Wal-Marts, freshly paved highways. This is the Mexico that NAFTA has brought into being. Just as Bush carried most of our fastest-growing states and Harper's Conservatives carried Canada's fastest-growing province, so Mexico's northern states, which produced more than half the nation's population growth from 2000 to 2005, voted PAN.

These center-right parties all stand for change--change in the sense of allowing a vibrant private sector to grow and alter our ways of living and making a living. Their opponents tend to stand against change, for the vested interests of public-sector unions, for (in Canada and Mexico) the subsidy of anti-American metropolitan elites. Some years ago, I predicted that NAFTA would produce a Texafication of North America. NAFTA was in large part a Texas project, pushed forward by President George H. W. Bush and shepherded to ratification here by Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who grew up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and in Mexico by President Carlos Salinas, who grew up in nearby Monterrey. Since 1993, the United States, Canada, and Mexico have all become more like Texas, as people move away from high-tax and slow-growth places. Bush in 2000 and Harper and Calderon in 2006 would not have won on the demographics of the 1980s. But they won on the demographics of today--though, let's remember, by narrow margins.

Let's just hope that this turn to the right isn't just a brief interlude in history. As long as these conservative and center-right governnment's hewn to the policies that got them elected in the first place they'll enjoy a long tenure. So keep it up.