Reihan Salam today:
One of my fixations is that while it is certainly possible for one society to learn from another, it’s really important for policymakers to think hard about the historical context and institutional environment of the particular societies in which they operate.
In the present US, marriage tends to correlate with center-right voting. A mush much larger of children in Greece are raised in households with two married parents. Greek politics is substantially to the left American politics. I don’t have the polling data handy, but I strongly suspect the Canadian Conservative Party has recently done pretty well among upper middle-class South Asian immigrants. The 2012 Republicans were a disaster with this group. There is probably something for Republicans to learn from Canada’s Conservatives, but borrowing tactics from Canada won’t help if Republicans don’t have a plausible set of policies for America. Republicans desperately need a better media strategy, but it cannot substitute for a policy agenda that can offer higher living standards. The reverse is also true. A better agenda won’t help them politically if the people Republicans need to win over never hear a sympathetic account of Republican policies.
