McCain is in for a terrible shock if he wins

Reihan Salam says that most Republicans have no idea how much the American social landscape has changed. They should learn from Obama’s Google-like appeal

Britain’s Conservatives might be plotting a triumphant return to power but America’s Republicans are in a state of utter collapse. And it’s not just because the tide is turning after two terms of George W. Bush. For better or for worse, the Cameron Conservatives have adapted to a more culturally liberal, urban, diverse society. They have reconciled themselves to the welfare state in a way that Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher never did. Republicans, in contrast, are labouring under the illusion that America remains the yeoman democracy of yesteryear, full of plucky individualists. Slowly but surely, American politics is catching up with the country’s demographic transformation. American exceptionalism — the many quirks of geography and culture that conspire to make US society something of an anomaly among advanced market democracies — is all but dead.

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Douglas Murray

Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

Consider that few of America’s 300 million people live in wide-open spaces. Most are, like Europeans, crowded into vast conurbations that slink up and down the coasts and along a handful of interstate highways. Thanks to robust population growth, this urban America is getting denser all the time. It’s true that America is multiracial. But then again, so is Europe. And America’s minorities tend to see government as a benevolent force, which is why they tilt towards the social democratic Left. The explosive growth of higher education and the concomitant emergence of a mass upper middle class has given America a large and growing constituency of ‘postmaterialist’ voters who care less about taxes and more about expressing their liberal values.

But isn’t the American welfare state smaller? Not if you factor in the invisible welfare state of tax subsidies.