WHAT happens to conservatism as a country's racial balance changes? Jonathan Chait, reviewing the "emerging Democratic majority" thesis in New York magazine, argued that as America becomes a more racially diverse country, American conservatism is ultimately "doomed".

I believe this because the virulent opposition to the welfare state we see here is almost completely unique among major conservative parties across the world. In no other advanced country do leading figures of governing parties propose the denial of medical care to their citizens or take their ideological inspiration from crackpots like Ayn Rand. America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable (as I recently argued) from the legacy of slavery. Whatever form America’s polyglot majority ultimately takes, it is hard to see the basis for its attraction to an ideology sociologically rooted in white supremacy.

It is certainly true that American conservatism differs in many ways from the conservatism one encounters in other wealthy democracies. But that doesn't really suggest the conclusion Mr Chait draws. America is strikingly different from most other wealthy democracies in all sorts of ways: we are more religious, more violent and we believe more strongly in individual control over one's fate. It's not at all clear that these differences are converging. For that matter, conservative philosophies and parties in other countries are evolving radically, too, especially in the way they approach Mr Chait's key concerns here: ethnicity and the welfare state.

This is clear in various European countries in the run-up to European Parliamentary elections in May. For example, over the past month in the Netherlands, a series of important figures have quit the far-right anti-immigrant, anti-EU Party for Freedom (PVV), complaining that it has become too right-wing on race and too left-wing on economics. The immediate impulse for the split was a March post-election speech delivered by its leader, Geert Wilders, in which he called for "fewer Moroccans" in the Netherlands. But what makes the most recent departures interesting was that both defectors, a top MP and a key staffer, complained that the party had also shifted to a left-wing economic line over the past three years, denouncing cuts in welfare benefits and health-care spending.

Mr Wilders has taken this line for very good political reasons: benefit cuts are a huge issue of concern to his primarily older, white, working-class base. And because many recent cuts have been imposed to meet EU deficit limits, opposing austerity fits with his anti-Brussels slant. But before founding the PVV, Mr Wilders (like many of his supporters) originally belonged to the centre-right Liberal party, which charts a laissez-faire, low-taxes economic course. Some of those who left the Liberals to join the theoretically more "conservative" PVV are unhappy to find themselves in what has become a quite left-wing, pro-welfare party on economic issues. Meanwhile, at a deep level, the very reason why anti-immigrant politics are so potent in the Netherlands (one recent poll had 43% of Dutch agreeing with Mr Wilders's "fewer Moroccans" formulation) is that the country's generous social-welfare provisions make the insider-outsider problem especially acute. The same working-class whites who adamantly defend their health-care benefits are all the more incensed at the idea that Dutch taxes may be paying child subsidies for Moroccans whom they consider undeserving outsiders.

Now if you wanted to, you could look at the tensions in the PVV and say that in the long run, Dutch conservatism is doomed. In many ways, there is no other conservative party in the world that looks like the PVV. (Among other things, it's adamantly pro-gay-rights.) And it seems difficult to hold together the low-taxes, high-benefits and anti-immigrant strains in the party. But such tidings of doom would be quite wrong. The PVV is doing fine; it's riding high in the polls and will likely perform very well in the European Parliament elections.

French conservatism, too, is undergoing a radical transformation. The latest polls show the National Front placing first in the European Parliament contest, outpacing the more traditional centre-right UMP. The FN is, of course, benefiting from anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as anger at the EU. It has shed some of its old anti-Semitic stigma, and it has a much more attractive figurehead in Marine Le Pen. But in contrast to the pro-gay secular PVV, the FN is generally Catholic and adamantly anti-gay-rights, and has won a boost from the cultural-conservative wave that welled up in response to last year's move by the French government to legalise same-sex marriage. Most interestingly, the FN is intensely protectionist, especially on agricultural policy, which ties into the wonderful peculiarity of French food culture. Ms Le Pen's speeches are filled with talk of preserving the uniqueness of French farming's terroir against the ravages of multinational agribusiness and genetic engineering; listening to the leader of France's far-right party, one might sometimes think one had wandered into a foodie farmers' market in Brooklyn. If you wanted to say "French conservatism is doomed because it doesn't look like conservatism anywhere else"' you could easily find enough evidence for the claim.

But it seems to me that this just doesn't really scan. What we see across all of these cases is that in every country there are persistent tensions between social-welfare provisions and issues of immigration or ethnic division. Conservative movements are generally well positioned to take advantage of those tensions for political gain, but they end up looking very different depending on the local political culture and other features of the landscape. And they have to keep shifting their stance as political realities change. I would expect that American conservatism will always feature a strong element of ideological anti-statism, just as Dutch conservatism will always feature a strong element of secular libertarianism and sexual freedom, and French conservatism will always feature a profound dedication to protectionist regulation and cheese labelling. Plus ça change.

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