Martin Brown wrote
When I was in London recently I saw a play called "Feel Good," a
ruthless
satire of Blair's Labor Party. Have you seen it?. Any thoughts.
=====
MK: Unfortunately no. I'd appreciate your review of it.
=====
If a similar play about the Clinton Administration had appeared on
Broadway it
would not have been obvious if it had been written by an lefty-ADA
democrat
or a member of Hillary's right wing conspiracy.
=====
MK: It's easier to distinguish ADA analogues like Roy Hattersley and the
right wing conspirators of the UK Conservative Party, if only because
the punk Thatcherites there are so obviously out of touch with reality.
Nevertheless your raising of ADA is instructive, in that, like
Hattersley, they look pretty left relative to what passes for the centre
today. But ADA began life as a ferociously anti-communist organisation
that tried to reconcile its cuddly socioeconomic policies with its full
support of the national security state and engagement in McCarthyite
red-baiting and blacklisting. More than a few veterans of the Wallace
campaign could relate stories of ADA activities during that period and
after. The contemporaneous publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s
"The Vital Center" gives the ideological flavour that most informed ADA.
Of course there were others but his was the most influential. Michael
Lind is the most representative of that tendency today, even feeling the
need to bash Wallace still, in his co-authored intro to a Schlesinger
celebration he and John Patrick Diggins edited for Princeton UP a few
years back. ADA and Hattersley are marginal precisely because of the
success of their policies, but neither can bring themselves to admit it,
at least yet. Thanks to the ADA's rampant anti-communism a door was
opened for the conservative resurgence of the 1960s and the Reagan
ascendancy, and the subsequent rise of the DLC, purveyors of the "new
realism" (as opposed to the cold war realism of ADA c.1948). The DLC is
New ADA, pandering to today's vital center (significantly to the right
of the old) while Old ADA proffers its comparatively more attractive
policies in relative oblivion, rather like Hattersley today. Just as
both tried to reconcile the irreconcilable -- capitalism with a human
socioeconomic face and capitalism with a ruthless political edge -- so
the DLC represents the continuation of that process with consequently
diminishing returns for the former as yet more ground is ceded to the
right. Pretty much sums up the Third Way worldwide.
Michael K.
