Brace yourself for
this biting commentary which I hope is read with some knowledge of US military
and political changes in the past 20 years with the rise of the
neoconservatives in the Republican party and the gradual public reintroduction
to White Man’s Burden, a mission to be fulfilled. – KWC The
tragedy of this unequal partnership Blair's drawn face, with its
deepening gullies set in a near permanent hard frown, tells the story. This is
the internationalist who is aiding and abetting, however unintentionally, the
break-up of the UN system. The pro-European who is the trigger of the most
acute divisions in the European Union since its foundation. The wannabe
progressive whose closest allies are Washington's neo-conservatives and
conservative leaders in Italy and Spain. Worse, he is fighting a barely
legitimate war that is already a military and diplomatic quagmire, where even
eventual victory may not avert a political disaster. He knows his capacity to
survive the diplomatic humiliations piled on him by the Bush administration is
limited; you cannot long lead Britain's centre and centre-left from such a
compromised position, wounding not only the country's profoundest interests but
torching any linkage with the progressive project. For the first time his
premiership is genuinely at risk. It is a political tragedy,
Shakespearean in the cruelty of its denouement. 9/11 accelerated trends in
America that had been crystallising since the 1970s and which made the
political structures in which successive British Governments have managed
simultaneously to play both the American and European cards unsustainable. Blair was confronted with an invidious
choice that nobody in the British establishment has wanted to make: Europe or
America. Side with Europe to insist that
the price of collaboration in the fight against terrorism had to be that the US
observe genuinely multilateral international due process - and certainly say No
to some of Washington's wilder aims. Or side with America insisting from the
inside that it engaged in its wars multilaterally, and hope to bring Europe
along in your wake. Either choice was beset with risk,
but it's hard to believe that siding with Europe, for all its evident
difficulties, would have produced an outcome worse than the situation in which
we currently find ourselves: a protracted war with no second UN Resolution, no
commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace
settlement. But
Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American
body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life. The rise and rise of American conservatism
is neither well documented nor well understood in Britain - but it's one of the pillars on which I build my case for
Europe in The World We're In*. Ever since the pivotal Supreme Court judgement
in 1973 legalising abortion (the Roe v Wade case) which marked the high water
mark of American liberalism, it's been downhill all the way. American conservatism, an eccentric creed
even within the pantheon of the western conservative tradition, now rules
supreme. Domestically it offers
disproportionately aggressive tax cuts for the rich and for business, reforms
that shrink America's already threadbare social contract and a carte blanche
for the increasingly feral, unaccountable character of US capitalism. Internationally it is this
philosophy that lies behind pre-emptive unilateralism and the wilful disregard
of the UN. American conservatives are bravely willing to use force to advance
democracy and markets worldwide - the exemplars of a civilisation the rest of
the world must want to copy. No other legitimacy is needed, the reason for the
wrong-headed self-confidence that could launch war in Iraq expecting so little
resistance. Rumsfeld's exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew - a menace to the USA
and the world alike. The conservative movement has deep roots. It made its
first gains in the 1970s in reaction to economic problems at home that it wrongly claimed were wholly the fault of liberals,
helped by the reaction of white working class Americans to the application of
affirmative action: quotas of housing, university places and even jobs for
blacks to equalise centuries of discrimination. When President Lyndon Johnson
signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, outlawing the obstacles American blacks
had experienced in exercising their civil rights from voting to sitting on
juries, he famously joked that he had lost the Democrats the south. He could
not have been more prescient; the uneasy coalition between southern
conservative Democrats and the more liberal North was sundered - a political
opportunity that Ronald Reagan was brilliantly to seize. This laid the foundations for the
conservatisation of American politics, helped by the growing economic power of
the south and the west. The new sun-belt entrepreneurs, building fortunes on
defence contracts and Texan oil, naturally believed in the toxicity of federal
government and the god-given
right of employers to cheap labour with
as few rights as possible. Put
that together with the south's visceral dislike of welfare, well understood to
be transferring money from God-fearing, hard-working whites to black welfare
queens, and the need for crime - again
understood to be perpetrated by blacks against whites - to be met with ferocious penalties and you had the beginning of the new conservative
constituency. Include a dose of Christian fundamentalism, and the building
blocks of a new dominant coalition of Republican southerners and middle class,
suburban northerners were in place. What was needed to complete the picture
was intellectual coherence and money. America's
notoriously lax rules on political financing allowed the conservatives to
outspend the Democrats sometimes by as much four or five times. Yet what opened
the financial floodgates was intellectual conviction; a new generation of
intellectual conservatives took on the apparently effortless liberal dominance,
and beat it at its
own game - the realm of ideas. The great
right-wing thinktanks - the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise
Institute and the Hoover Institute - became the intellectual inspiration of the
conservative revival. The
rich were virtuous and moral because they worked hard; the poor worthless and
amoral because they had not boot-strapped themselves out of poverty. Welfare thus bred a dependency culture, they claimed, and
made poverty worse. Taxation was an act of coercion and an affront to liberty. Markets worked like magic; choice was
always better than public provision. Corporations spearheaded wealth creation.
Conservatism was transmuted into a moral crusade. The rich could back it aggressively both in their own self-interest and
America's. The capture of universities by the rich and the lack
of education for the poor has meant that social mobility in the US has
collapsed. American capitalism, in thrall
to the stock market and quick bucks it offers, has hollowed out its great
corporations in the name of the hallowed conservative conception of
share-holder value - the sole purpose of a company is to enrich its owners. Productivity and social mobility are now
higher in Old Europe than in the US - despite
a tidal wave of propaganda to the contrary. Ordinary Americans are beset by risks and lack of
opportunity in a land of extraordinary inequality. Yet it is internationally that the
rest of the world feels the consequences. Even before 9/11 the Bush
administration had signalled its intention to be unencumbered by - as it saw it
- vitality sapping, virility constraining, option closing international
treaties and alliances, whether membership of the International Criminal Court
or the Kyoto accords on climate change. It intended to assert American power as a matter of
ideological principle; 9/11 turned principle into an apparent imperative in order to guarantee the security of the 'homeland'. There are only two possible rival
power centres that champion a more rational approach to world order - in the US
a revived and self-confident Democratic party, and abroad an unified European
Union. Britain's national interest requires that we ally ourselves as
powerfully as we can with these forces - both of whom are only too ready to
make common cause. Blair has done neither. Either he is now a convinced conservative
or the author of a historic political misjudgment. Neither the Labour party nor
the country can indulge this ineptitude much longer. http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,925851,00.html |
- Re: [Futurework] Shakespearen Blair Karen Watters Cole
- Re: [Futurework] Shakespearen Blair Harry Pollard