The return of ideology

That previous post on Aussie politics got me thinking about an aspect of political life since the financial crisis: ideology has returned, with a vengeance, but not everyone seems to realise this.

More specifically: ideology has returned, but only the political right seems to have noticed. Which is why they're making a lot of the political running at the moment.

It's hard to remember, but many of the issues that are so contentious now for parties of the centre-left were utterly mainstream before the financial crisis. Barack Obama's healthcare plot to destroy American freedom is basically Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare plan, on a national scale. The need to extend healthcare to America's uninsured wasn't a point of disagreement between the parties during the 2008 presidential campaign: since then, it's almost seen as some extremist socialist shibboleth.

Ditto carbon pricing in Australia. Even John Howard promised to introduce carbon trading, something he now dismisses, along with his party, as a big new tax on everything TM.

Meanwhile, to my mind the right has been making advances, ideologically. The idea that all taxation is immoral, previously a fringe notion, is increasingly embraced by mainstream elements of the American and even Australian right. The previously ringfenced NHS in the UK has been targeted for a shakeup of its spending powers that frankly only makes sense if you want to reduce its bargaining power in buying goods and services from the private sector.

I'm probably drawing a fairly long bow here. The left has ultimately had some notable successes in recent years: there is a federal healthcare bill in the US, new taxes on mining and carbon in Australia, and a Tory government in the UK which regards most aspects of the welfare state as sacrosanct.

Still, I think the left hasn't noticed what's happened. Politicians of the right tend to be quicker at picking up on shifting public moods (maybe not so much in the UK), and they've been much quicker in dumping the consensus-driven politics of the "great moderation" in the 1990s and 2000s, and switching to a policy of total war against the fairly centrist policies the left is still introducing.

It'll be interesting to see if this is a temporary trend, or the start of something bigger. Looking at the eurozone, I suspect the latter.