THE LAST BEST HOPE OF BRITAIN:

A COMEDY OF ERRORS: TONY BLAIR AND AMERICA: Tony Blair wants to remake Britain in the image of the United States. Bad politics, worse history - and personal tragedy (GODFREY HODGSON, 4/08/04, OpenDemocracy)

Three and a half years after Blair’s election, in November 2000, George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton. Tony Blair, it is said with Clinton’s explicit encouragement, set out to achieve as close a relationship with the new president as he had with the old. Again, he and his team did not fully understand the context. They did not realise that the new president was largely in the hands of two extra-parliamentary, not to say extra-democratic, cliques: the intellectual neo-conservatives, and a caste of traditional economic conservatives from the corporate sector – especially from its energy sub-sector (Dick Cheney, Kenneth Lay).

So when the catastrophe of 11 September 2001 came along, Blair had no idea of the context. He sought, honourably enough, to influence George Bush, and calculated that to acquire influence he would have to commit himself to Bush’s war. He seems not to have understood the fierce ideological divide between his two friends, Clinton and Bush. He seems not to have seen that for the Bush circle, 9/11 was an opportunity to carry out a policy it had been planning for a decade – the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Now George Bush’s policy seems to be unravelling, and Tony Blair is entangled in Bush’s difficulties as well as several others of his own making.

There are many other examples of the dangers of borrowing what has not been understood. The Blairites were very impressed by the “reforms” of the Democratic party led by the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC’s ideas are said to have been in large part the model for Blair’s policy of moving the Labour party away from its traditional left-wing orientation and policies. But once again, the context of British and American politics is treacherously different.

In the United States, Al From and other leading strategists of the DLC sought to move the Democratic party to the right to counter a party crisis which had its roots in the racial conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. New Democrats argued that the efforts of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to attain a greater measure of racial equality had driven millions of southern whites and working-class Democrats in the north into the arms of the newly conservative Republican party that achieved power under Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democratic strategists, including Bill Clinton himself, argued to win election again the Democrats would have to win back the votes of white males, and especially southern white males.

Tony Blair, by contrast, wanted to move the Labour party to the right to escape, not from the unpopularity of racial change, but from the unpopularity of socialism. It may have seemed the same to him, but the implications are very different.

Mr. Hodgson wrote a not incompetent book about the rise of the conservative movement--this is an incompetent essay. He's got George Bush controlled equally by two cabals that pretty much hate each other and the DLC responding not to the complete collapse of New Deal/Great Society economics in the 70s but to racial issues. In fact, Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush seem both driven most by their shared religious faith as regards the Reform of Islam and the Third Way, New Democratism, and Compassionate Conservatism are similar attempts to harness free market mechanisms to more effectively fund and run the social safety net. It seems unlikely that Mr. Blair can succeed in re-Christianizing Britain or in effecting genuine reform, but it's his nation's only hope. The tragedy will lie in his failure, not his attempt.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2004 11:31 PM