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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Cameron's Conservatism

By The Daily Dish
Apr 1 2009, 5:46 AM ET

Tim Montgomerie tries to translate for NRO:

In one year's time David Cameron is likely to be the world's most senior conservative leader. American conservatives can find much to admire in his social and fiscal conservatism. His "realism" on foreign policy and enthusiasm for the green lobby will be more problematic.

Yes, the pursuit of the national interest in foreign policy is indeed secondary at NRO to nation-building, and utopian scheme to turn Iraqi and Afghan culture into modern Western democracies by the use of armed force and massive amounts of US taxpayers' money. And for some reason, they're still peddling climate change denialism, rather than smart alternatives to cap and trade. As for fiscal conservatism, NRO fully supported a president whose spending made even Gordon Brown seem like a tightwad. And here's Cameron's social conservatism:

I stood up in front of a Conservative conference, my first one as leader, and said that marriage was important, and as far as I was concerned it didn’t matter whether it was between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman. No other Conservative leader has ever done that. I don’t think any Labour leader has done that. Even since then.

Cameron actually supports family life for all people, unlike NRO which opposes all rights for gay couples, on theological grounds, and has not even endorsed minimal civil unions. President Bush tried to amend the US constitution to prevent any gay couples from having any civil protections for ever. His view is that being gay and committed was so un-American it had to be forbidden in the constitution itself, a position NRO supported.

Apart from that, American and British conservatives really are in synch, aren't they?



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