New Conservatism?

Really interesting article from David Brooks about Conservatism in Britain (or more correctly, "radical conservatism"). I particularly found this line interesting:

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations.

It seems more and more of what we do is dominated by relationships, exemplified by the boom in social networking. It's difficult to imagine what this looks like policy-wise in the U.S., but it's not uncommon for socio-cultural trends to make their way into politics. There seems to be more and more discontent, but as others have pointed out, it's disjointed. This may indicate that we're on the verge of a massive shift in governance philosophy.

In many ways it goes back to something that we discussed in my climate change mitigation class. People are having difficulty relating to complex problems with linear solutions. Our dominant paradigm has been to look for cause and effect, but as we're discovering (especially with climate change), that linear relationship does not always hold true (e.g. multiple causes and multiple effects). I tend to think that the shift will occur once we begin to think of issues/problems/policies as interconnected ecosystems. Healthcare is much more easily viewed as an ecosystem than a linear cause-effect relationship. The same with finance, climate change...the list goes on.

The current frustration seen in Tea Parties and other movements is that we're realizing we cannot operate on the old model any longer. There is no 'cause' for many of these issues, it's a complex series of events happening within a network of related issues. The frustration, then, is that we want to still be able to identify the 'cause' even though there isn't one. We don't have the conceptual and policy models to be able to deal with this, and it's a big problem, because it makes it impossible to improve the situation. We don't need different policy, what we need is a new way of thinking about our relationship to issues.

Now the question is what those new models look like...