After these false starts, it seemed that this week would mark the beginning of a new compassionate conservative era, at least in the UK. The Conservatives gather for their final pre-election conference enjoying huge poll leads over the ruling Labour Party. Like Bush, David Cameron has dragged his reluctant party towards the center. He has focused on education, welfare, and the role that charities and voluntary groups can play in the provision of public services. He has assiduously courted minority voters. And, just as Bush exposed the lack of moral purpose to Clinton’s impressive economic record, Cameron took the prosperity of the Blair years as a given – arguing for less talk of GDP and more consideration of “GWB” (General Well-Being).

Which is precisely why compassion might not be so evident at the Tory conference after all. The financial crisis has forced Cameron, often caricatured as a chameleon by his opponents, to adapt and shift emphasis once more. If it was difficult for Bush to govern with compassion while waging war on terrorists, it’s equally problematic for the Tory leader to continue to recite vacuous slogans about sunshine in the present economic climate.

Although nobody has ever changed the Conservative Party as quickly and radically as Cameron, the terrible irony is that he will be leading it into the next election on a sober platform of austerity, extreme fiscal discipline, and public sector cuts. To add insult to modernizing injury, Ireland’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty will put the EU firmly back on the political agenda. Having struggled for years to unhook his party from damaging perceptions of the Thatcher years, Cameron will have no choice but to adopt positions on the economy and the EU with which the Lady would be satisfied.

However, it is important to recognize that, contrary to some traditionalist critiques, this sudden inversion of priorities does not discredit the compassionate approach, nor expose it as a fad to be abandoned at the first sign of a crisis. Without the long and painful process of reinvention, nobody would turn to the Conservatives, even if the party offered constructive policies. Recall that Iain Duncan Smith’s robust response to the 9/11 attacks reflected popular opinion without remotely increasing the party’s approval ratings. Cameron has successfully demonstrated that he shares people’s concerns and is therefore suitable to rebuild the economy.

In any event, it’s far from clear that the financial crash has substantially altered Cameron’s core themes. If anything, recent events have increased their salience. Previously, he lamented Britain’s broken society (by which he means rising crime and inequality, family breakdown, and child poverty) and Britain’s broken politics (by which he means the undemocratic nature of the country’s political institutions and the recent scandal over MPs’ expenses). He is now able to add “broken economy” to the list, advocating policies (such as more oversight and regulation of the financial system and banking pay structures) that reflect his wider messages of responsibility, stability, and fairness.

Cameron now talks openly about an “age of austerity.” But he insists that this will not derail his pursuit of the “good society” with improved education, health care, and environment: “Does the age of austerity force us to abandon our ambitions? No. We are not here just to balance the books…I think people know by now that I want us to stand up for the poorest in Britain and to show that fiscal responsibility can go hand in hand with a social conscience.”

He argues that the crisis will be resolved not just through traditional methods of strict public spending controls and a culture of thrift in government, but by addressing what might be described as modernizing concerns, including Britain’s social problems and the use of technology to improve the delivery of public services. Of particular relevance to the GOP’s opposition to Obama’s healthcare plans, the Tories are therefore vigorously criticizing the government, but in the context of a coherent and optimistic platform aimed at serious long-term solutions.

It may have taken a decade, but the Tories have learned from the GOP. They’ve painstakingly and thoughtfully implemented compassionate conservative ideas. It is to be hoped that they win big and write a new chapter in conservative politics. It is also to be hoped that Republicans see in this chapter what might have been and what could still be.

In particular, he apologized for an infamous (and now repealed) Thatcher-era piece of legislation, known as Section 28, which banned local councils from promoting homosexuality as anything other than abnormal. He acknowledged the obvious truth that it had poisoned relations between the Conservatives and gay people: “I’m sorry for Section 28. We got it wrong. It was an emotional issue. We have got to move on and we have moved on.”

Contrary to the claims of some right-wing critics, Cameron is staying true to his party’s history. Just as the GOP has formed new coalitions, crafted new policies and modified its identity to reflect changing times, the Conservative Party has always been concerned with gaining and holding power. It has not sought to represent an immutable set of conservative principles or to memorialize Churchill or Thatcher, any more than the Republican Party exists solely to preserve Reagan’s legacy.

In the broad sweep of history, Cameron’s outreach to same-sex couples isn’t particularly shocking. Reinvention is a long-standing Tory tradition. Consider, for instance, Disraeli’s extension of the franchise to working-class men in the 19th Century. For introducing such a reform that nobody would find objectionable now, this great Tory statesman was attacked by his party’s right-wing for, in the words of the Marquess of Salisbury, a “political betrayal which has no parallel in our Parliamentary annals.” And, as Cameron pointed out at the gay pride event, “The Conservatives had the first woman prime minister and we are bound to have the first black prime minister and the first gay prime minister.”

Unlike today’s GOP, whose leaders seem uncomfortable with the concept of evolution, Cameron knows that defeated parties must adapt or die. When he became leader in December 2005, the Tories were flatlining in the polls, in third place among under 35s, and out of favor with women, minorities, urbanites, educated voters, and just about the whole of the north of the country. An infamous piece of polling revealed that otherwise popular policies would suddenly lose their appeal if presented as Conservative proposals! Do any Republicans recognize this scenario?

Cameron understood that it was his duty to change this, if only because democratic politics requires two sane and functioning parties capable of engaging with each other and the electorate. He knew that his party had to demonstrate, unambiguously and unceasingly, that it had changed its attitude, tone and priorities. This meant less focus on “core issues” like tax cuts and immigration, and more disquisitions on social responsibility, climate change, health care, education, inequality, and, yes, gay rights.

Politically, it’s worked. Almost immediately after embarking on this traditionalist agenda of ruthlessly pursuing power, the Tories rose in the polls, and now enjoy massive leads over the government. Indeed, their resurgence has sent shockwaves through the other parties. Labour fumes impotently while the social consensus it helped create is completely co-opted by the Conservatives. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who had serious aspirations of becoming the second-largest party, have been wonderfully destabilized by Cameron’s moderate social agenda, environmentalism, and defense of civil liberties.

The poll showing Tory support among gays is no aberration, either. In his first conference speech as party leader, Cameron argued that all marriages are special, including same-sex unions. He promoted two openly gay MPs to his Shadow Cabinet, has pushed for talented gay candidates to run for office next year, and argues for tax breaks for gay couples in civil partnerships. This makes sense in a country that, like America, has become more accepting of gay equality, and will continue to move in such a direction.

But it’s not just a case of cynical vote-grabbing. Cameron’s sympathetic approach to gay people is consistent with his idea of a connected society, in which social beings find meaning and identity through relationships. This leads to the flourishing of institutions that stand between individuals and the state, of which the most important is marriage. So instead of stigmatizing a group on the basis of its sexuality, he is reinforcing his vision of a British society that no longer centralizes power, but recognizes institutions as the engines of diversity, belonging, expression, and shared knowledge and history.

More broadly, and paradoxically, shifting the public’s traditional perception of the Tories allows the party to articulate traditional conservative policies. It is a subtlety that eludes many on the right. It’s easy to forget that the party is officially committed to cutting taxes and welfare, restricting immigration, building more prisons, taking back power from the EU, dumping Labour’s flagship human rights legislation, abandoning multiculturalism, and giving local communities more control over schools and policing. Only now that the public are convinced of the Tories’ moderation and decency are they willing to give a fair hearing to these ideas.

Cameron’s successful courting of the “pink” vote illustrates that social change represents an opportunity for political leadership, rather than an excuse for nostalgia, resentment, and alienation. Far from being a radical modernizer, he is more properly seen as a traditionalist who knows that his party’s objective is not to flatter its base, but to broaden its appeal and advance a center-right agenda. His very first challenge to the Tories during his leadership campaign should reverberate in the minds of every Republican in the next election cycle: “Some say that we should move to the right. I say that will turn us into a fringe party, never able to challenge for government again. I don’t want to let that happen to this party – do you?”

As the internet exploded into the mainstream over a decade ago, it was widely assumed that it would accelerate the fragmentation of society. Instead of watching the same television shows, attending the same movies, and patronizing the same stores, tech-savvy and self-reliant consumers would retreat into their own online spaces and express their individuality. Libertarianism would flourish.

In reality, Web 2.0 has had the opposite effect. Social networking sites, online chat and discussion forums, blogs, and peer-to-peer sharing have strengthened social bonds, not dissolved them. As never before, interconnectedness and interdependence are central facts in the lives of young people. Friends in Tokyo and Texas can share photos and thoughts instantly. Protesters in Tehran can tweet the crimes of their regime to the world. Technology is therefore merely reinforcing what an avalanche of recent social psychology confirms: that we are profoundly shaped by our surroundings and interactions with others.

In this context, excessive rhetoric about individualism and personal freedom is not just inappropriate; it’s insane. It’s no coincidence that Republicans are getting slaughtered in densely populated urban and suburban areas, filled with students and young professionals who are intimately involved in their communities, offline and online. They are repelled by swaggering calls to go it alone, to sink or swim, to believe that they alone determine their own destiny.

What is true in spacious America is doubly true in crowded Britain. This is why British Conservative leader David Cameron endlessly repeats that “we’re all in this together” and “there is such a thing as society.” After the economic revolution of the Thatcher era, Tories were viewed as the wrecking crew, as uprooters of communities and enemies of social cohesion. In truth, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are still trying to reconcile economic liberalism with respect for tradition and continuity. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Cameron’s modernization agenda has been the enormous effort to recast his party as champions of social responsibility.

Behind the new language, there is a coherent philosophy. In his first main speech as party leader, Cameron stressed the importance of corporate, professional and civic responsibility. He pledged to trust and support local leaders and public sector employees, to harness new technology to make public services more responsive, and to encourage businesses to create solutions to social and environmental challenges.

In other words, he adapted conservative principles of localism, decentralization and free enterprise to the complex world as it is today. He did this while addressing counter-intuitive issues, contrasting his approach with a bossy, interventionist, liberal government, and managing to sound original and optimistic. Republicans please note.

Cameron’s understanding of technological progress is consistent with this approach. In a 2007 speech at Google, he elaborated on what he calls “the post-bureaucratic era… where true freedom of information makes possible a new world of responsibility, citizenship, choice and local control.”

First, he observed how technology facilitates transparency of information, so that government spending details can be published online. But he added that such accountability is “just the first step” toward promoting greater responsibility “so citizens take on a more active role.” He applied this notion of individuals taking on more responsibility within a highly connected framework to the area of international aid: “In the post-bureaucratic era, we should tell the public in the countries that receive our aid exactly how, when and where the money’s being spent – so they can hold their local politicians to account.”

Second, he emphasized the way in which technology increases the availability of information. He wants to see neighborhoods coming together to commission local services, social entrepreneurs competing with government departments, and citizens making responsible choices based on freely available information. In this way, he is elegantly leveraging new social and technological advancements to pursue more traditional conservative goals of choice and competition.

Globalization and technology are reshaping our world in exciting and empowering ways. But they are also contributing to the kind of massive uncertainty and disruption experienced by working-class, temperamentally conservative voters that Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat described in Grand New Party. By foolishly mocking Obama’s time as a community organizer, Republicans were reminding these people that he understands their concerns, and is aware of the importance of social groups, of communities, of families, of stability. He will continue to present himself as a solidly dependable moderate with a keen sense of social responsibility, while also exploiting his awesome online presence to mobilize voters and advance his agenda.

Jean Paul Sartre used to say that hell is other people. In the era of social networking, it would be amusing indeed if the Republican Party was capsized by clinging to the ideology of a communist French philosopher.

Socialists used to talk about the redistribution of wealth. Cameron correctly perceives that politics in the 21st century, driven by globalization and technology, will be about the redistribution of power. This is what he means by “progressive conservatism.” It’s the kind of reform conservative politics, skeptical of big government but committed to non-state collective action, that McCain and Palin abjectly failed to articulate in last year’s campaign.
 
Republicans still seem strangely passive, unable to counter the Obama administration’s hyperactivity. Meanwhile, Cameron impresses the British public with equal energy in the service of a different, decentralizing philosophy. But instead of mindless attacks on “elites”, he has taken the time to accurately diagnose his country’s social problems and to suggest credible solutions, which continue to resonate as the crisis in British politics deepens.
 

By now, the story of Cameron’s green rebranding is familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. He dumped the Conservative’s famous blue torch logo, replacing it with a tree, and routinely ensures that party conventions are bathed in green lighting and imagery. He installed a wind turbine on the roof of his London home, embarked on a widely publicized dog-sled trip to a shrinking glacier in the Arctic, and cycles into work at Parliament. While Republicans were sinking to mid-term disaster in 2006, he led his party to victory in municipal elections that year by urging voters to “Vote Blue, Go Green.”

Some old-line British Conservatives have mocked Cameron for (in the words of Norman Tebbit) “clever marketing.” Caroline Jackson, Conservative Member of the European Parliament, has condemned green rebranding as “cosmetic.”  One internal party pressure group, The Taxpayers’ Alliance, has published a warning to American conservatives arguing that the attempt to reposition Thatcher’s tax-cutters into Dave’s tree-huggers had “enormously backfired.”

Has it? Really? Conservatives hold a double-digit poll advantage over Labour, with a 7-point lead on the crucial issue of economic management.

Cameron’s green policies are not the reason for this lead. But with 75% of Britons agreeing that climate change was an important issue, Cameron’s green policies were crucial to his project of “decontaminating” Conservatism after three back-to-back election disasters.

If the Republican Party hopes to attract segments of the electorate from which it has become dangerously disconnected, it needs to present itself as similarly concerned with the environment. A recent Gallup poll revealed that attitudes in this area are highly partisan, with Democrats overwhelmingly more likely to hold a pessimistic view of environmental conditions and to be more receptive to green messages. Crucially for Republicans, it also found that women are “more likely to worry about the environment, to take a dim view of environmental conditions, to be active in or sympathetic to the environmental movement, and to give precedence to the environment over economic and energy concerns.”

David Cameron’s greening of the Tories should not simply be seen as a triumph of style over substance. In this case, the style is actually continuous with the substance, which is a blueprint for an environmental and energy revolution that is at once radical in its ambition and conservative in its conception.

Last month, this plan to “decarbonize” Britain was outlined in a policy paper in which the central idea is to create the conditions for a new “electricity internet,” based on smart grid and smart meter technology. Consumers would be able to use the latter in their homes to interact with the former so that supply and demand can be managed efficiently. For instance, they could enter their electricity needs for a certain appliance (or even an electric car) into the smart meter. The supplier would use this information to offer the cheapest possible rates, which would in turn allow for greater use of renewable energy due to more predictable demand. Just as Web 2.0 technology empowers users to generate content, the electricity internet would offer people the opportunity to make money from their own small-scale low carbon energy production. So power companies could reward anyone who generated energy through wind turbines or solar panels.

In an economic downturn, perhaps it is unwise to dwell on green concerns. On the other hand, it is not as if US Republicans got very far with their 2008 election message, “drill, baby, drill.” Cameron has taken the time to establish his credibility on green issues, to position his party at the forefront of the debate rather than denying its significance, to base his vision of a low carbon Britain on principles of decentralization, localism, private initiative and choice that animate his entire platform, and to understand and act on the insight that the environment, while ostensibly a latent concern, speaks to fundamental issues on immigration, energy independence, quality of life and the safety and security of voters’ families.

The GOP must also speak to those issues in a constructive manner, or discover that time in opposition is one resource that has a habit of renewing itself.

Perhaps these developments are unrelated.  More likely, they illustrate the importance of translating compassionate conservatism into serious policy initiatives, instead of viewing the term simply as an electorally expedient slogan to be discarded once in office.

Just as Bush sought to empathize with juvenile offenders on the presidential campaign trail in 2000, Cameron has placed youth criminality in the wider context of social breakdown.  Critics on the left view this as a superficial exercise in rebranding; critics on the right sneeringly claim that he wants to “hug a hoodie.”

In reality, Cameron’s devotion to social responsibility and his consciously un-Thatcherite focus on the importance of society (as opposed to the state or the individual) are grounded in a coherent philosophy, recognizably conservative yet responsive to the concerns of an affluent but anxious and over-centralized 21st century Britain.

Thus Jesse Norman, Senior Fellow at the Cameron-friendly Policy Exchange think-tank, stresses the importance of “connected society,” a delicately evolving network of trust and reciprocity which cannot be controlled from above by the state, nor reduced to a collection of purely self-interested economic actors.

In this context, compassion describes the sphere of belonging, of neighborhood, voluntary association, faith, and social enterprise.  It drives us to support and extend institutions that carry on distinct traditions and give meaning to our lives.

It’s not difficult to see how this understanding of a compassionate society, governed by principles of freedom, decentralization and accountability, can be applied to Britain’s crumbling, overcrowded and violent jails.

If stifling central and local bureaucracies are locking out what Bush once referred to as “members of the armies of compassion,” then conservatives will create the conditions for a decentralized system in which prison governors are freed from state control to commission voluntary groups and charities to provide rehabilitation services.

To balance this new freedom, prison governors will be given responsibility – and therefore accountability – for the entire process of offender management.  Their work will be incentivized by a new payment-by-results scheme, whereby extra money (that would otherwise be spent on convicting and accommodating repeat offenders) will be awarded for reduced levels of recidivism.  Locally elected crime commissioners could ultimately be given control of reformed and independent police and prison systems.

The possibility for this “rehabilitation revolution” will be created by selling off old Victorian jails to expand and rejuvenate the prison system.  This should result in a network of smaller, local prisons tailored to the specific needs of their communities.  Research suggests that prisoners who live closer to home and maintain family ties are far less likely to re-offend.

In a move that Conservative writer Tim Montgomerie has called the “And” theory of compassionate conservatism, this emphasis on rehabilitation and localism is counterbalanced by more traditional Tory messages on crime.  Inmates will receive improved treatment and be made to compensate victims of their crimes through contributions to a Victims’ Fund, paid through hard work in prison.  Prisons will become more humane places of restoration and foreign criminals will be deported at a faster rate.

Paradoxically, the stated aim of Cameron’s (conservative) determination to expand prison capacity is the (liberal) goal of reducing the prison population.  By fundamental reform along the principles of decentralization, clear accountability, greater use of the voluntary and private sectors, and introducing performance-based financial incentives, it is hoped that recidivism rates hovering around American levels of 65% will be significantly reduced.  In the long-term, this will mean fewer criminals committing fewer crimes.  The result: a safer society with a smaller prison population.  This logic reflects Conservative policy chief Oliver Letwin’s aspiration to achieve so-called progressive ends with conservative means.

Of course, the task of prison reform in America will require different solutions.  But with the notable exception of Sam Brownback, the Republican Party’s silence on the issue is not just morally problematic, but electorally catastrophic.  If you pass tough-on-crime laws which disproportionately incarcerate the very constituencies you are already badly losing, and then refuse to ensure basic decency in prisons, don’t be surprised to lose elections again and again.  And no, the belated signing into law of the Second Chance Act, which lavishes more federal money on failing prisons, will not be sufficient.

By contrast, Cameron’s prison reform plans are suggestive of the contours of a broad, thoughtful compassionate conservatism.  In diverse policy areas from education to welfare to criminal justice to energy, such a program aims to reform institutions of the state into entities that more accurately reflect the nature and needs of the neighborhoods they serve.  It will support and foster the growth of what Edmund Burke called society’s “little platoons.”  It will emphasize the interrelationship between social wellbeing, the family and economic success.  Above all, it will connect with the aspirations and concerns of poor and working-class people.

While this agenda has been derided on both sides of the Atlantic as an abandonment of core conservative principles, it is more properly seen as the deepening of a transatlantic conversation that has yielded great success in the past.  With a bloated, ineffectual prison system that imprisons 1 American out of every 100, penal reform is a good place for Republicans to rejoin the debate.