Leaders For A New Age

Instead, the new generation has been influenced by the end of the cold war, September 11 and the Iraq War. Just how these influences will play out in policymaking remains uncertain. But in general, there is a feeling among these new leaders that the West has something positive to offer the world. They support the continued spread of democracy and liberalism, particularly to Muslim nations. They are optimistic about the long-term prospects of reining in Islamic terrorism—perhaps because they saw that the struggle against communism, which many of their forebears once thought interminable, was ultimately winnable. Yet there is also a new realization that democracy and liberalism do not always go hand in hand.

There are varying degrees of skepticism about the ability of the West to control the pace of democratization, particularly through force. Obama opposed intervention in Iraq from the outset and has said he would seek talks with Iran and North Korea. Cameron has accused his Labour rivals of pursuing "liberal interventionist utopias about remaking the whole world" and entangling Britain in too many conflicts abroad. He would define Britain's national security more narrowly.

Both left and right are focused on climate change with an intensity that eluded their elders. And immigration and its challenges to cultural identity is a preoccupation of younger politicians in a way it wasn't for their parents. Denmark's Thorning-Schmidt, for instance, has spent much of her short political career groping for a middle ground between those who favor lenient asylum laws and further immigration to Denmark and those who would slam its doors shut. There is also general support for globalization, matched with heightened attention to providing support for those whose livelihoods are threatened when jobs are outsourced. On both the left and the right, there is widespread support for a state-provided social safety net, coupled with a realization, particularly in Europe, that current benefits and the tax systems that support them have become overly burdensome and must be reformed.

Many of these young politicos share a contempt for dogma—and an ability to find bridges between left and right. These are not veterans of the left-right battles that defined their parents' politics. Instead, part of their appeal lies in the sense that they have been able, and will continue, to upend the old order. Thorning-Schmidt took on the Social Democrats' old guard on immigration and welfare reform to gain the party's leadership. Dati, the French Justice minister, has disturbed the ancien régime. Judges and lawyers chained themselves to courthouses to protest her decision to shutter some 300 tribunals throughout the country. David Miliband has shaken up the tweedy corridors of King Charles Street, bringing a crusading style to the Foreign Office, including a greater focus on climate change and poverty eradication. Cameron, the British Conservative leader, has attempted to reposition a party that had been hopelessly outmaneuvered by Tony Blair's New Labour for the past decade by projecting a more youthful image and moving the party to the left on domestic issues, blurring the line between the Conservatives and Labour and risking the ire of his own backbenchers.

A break with the past also lies at the heart of Obama's appeal, particularly among independent voters. In his policy proposals, he differs little from his principal Democratic rivals. And yes, he is technically a baby boomer, just like Hillary Clinton. (Demographers consider all those born between 1946 and 1964 part of that group.) But his formative political experiences were markedly different than those of Clinton, who is 14 years his senior. While she was protesting the Vietnam War in college, he was just 7 years old and living in Indonesia. "Civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by," he told one interviewer. As such, he is the first truly post-'60s candidate to hit the presidential-campaign trail, and what he's peddling is an opportunity to escape the culture wars that have plagued American politics since that time. Indeed, for supporters of Barack Hussein Obama, it's about biography, not policy. What better way to restore America's standing in the world and heal the divisiveness over race and immigration, some argue, than to elect an immigrant's son and a biracial president, with a Muslim middle name?

Still, experience, or the lack of it, seems to be the Achilles' heel of this wave of leaders. An earlier generation of politicians achieved success in local government, business or the military before taking high national office. And many boomer politicos had their political baptism on the street—through the protest movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear arms and racial segregation. Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, joined the Green Party only after a decade spent as a militant left-wing activist, and even then the party he led was hardly establishment. The Greens in those years loved to mock the pretensions of the dominant Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, turning up to Parliament in jeans and sneakers and bringing the theatrical tactics of protest politics with them into the Bundestag. Fischer once marched to Parliament carrying a tree.