"Tradition is the next big idea in politics"

So says the Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daily. Excerpt:

Mr Brown has also indicated that he would like to see a corresponding revival of old-fashioned virtues such as prudence and personal responsibility among ordinary borrowers. (In Margaret Thatcher's day, these were known as "thrift" and "duty", and much derided by the Left as "petit bourgeois" obsessions.)

Perhaps if he had the political nerve, he would go the whole hog and openly express the wistful longing that many people are now beginning to feel for the days in which young couples "saved up to get married" and started a family only when they had "a good living coming in": when "prudence" wasn't a Budget day totem but a way of life for all but the shameless.

The concentration on the economic structures that have contributed to our present crisis - deregulation, low interest rates, easy credit - has distracted attention from the great cultural shift which New Labour embodied: the celebration of personal fulfilment and self-realisation at any cost.

The idea that liberation of the individual meant instant gratification of one's every desire - that it was positively immoral and psychologically harmful to deny oneself a possible route to happiness, even if that involved breaking up a marriage or having a child outside a stable family - has had as much to do with the decline in the sense of financial responsibility as bank policies.

Indeed, it is possible to argue that the disastrous change in the attitudes of banks and lending agencies could only have come about in a society in which it was thought wrong to deny anyone anything that might make him happy - however transitory that happiness might prove to be.

Maybe Mr Brown is thinking, as you might be too, that some of that stuff we were so anxious to chuck out - the proprieties, the respect for "traditional" values, the ability to deny oneself a life choice that cannot be afforded or which would hurt some innocent party - ought to be reconsidered. Memo to David Cameron: the first political leader to express this fearlessly will first have the roof fall in on him, and then discover that he is riding the most extraordinary wave of popular support.

Hear, hear! Your Working Boy has been saying this for a few years now, as readers of this blog and my book know. I think Daley's final line there also applies to US politicians. I think there's no chance the Democrats will say it, because it will offend too many of their constituencies. But the Republicans might say it -- but only if they will make this culture-based critique apply equally as strongly to economic practices as to social ones. And that would be something truly fresh from the GOP, for a change. I can't prove this, but like Daley, I think people would really be energized by a vigorous message of returning to common-sense values and traditions that served us well before we foolishly thought we had no need for the limits they imposed. That would be a Main Street populism that could sell. But I tell you what, this current bunch of Republicans can't sell it. How could they, given what they presided over this decade? Maybe Mike Huckabee can. Jindal? I wonder. You are simply not going to have an ounce of credibility if the only thing you have to say is warmed-over Reaganism topped with Anti-Obama boilerplate.

Nor do I think social liberalism is likely to be a big sell as we go deeper into the valley with this recession/depression. Read the Roubini piece -- he clearly sees things getting much worse. Everything I read says the same thing. People will simply not be able to afford the kind of laissez-faire moral arrangements that our prosperity has made seem normal.

Who knows? We could well be heading toward a neo-traditionalist "crunchy con" moment in our politics, as the reality of limits is thrust upon us good and hard.