Old/New Labour and Us

Sometimes events in other countries provide a signal of where we may be headed ourselves. Britain’s Gordon Brown, the non-entity pulled in to preside over the exhaustion of New Labour (as John Major did for the decadent Thatcherite regime), has survived an apparent palace coup just in time to lead Labour to what is likely to be a crushing electoral defeat.

British politics are mysterious from a distance. Its parliamentary system turns jockeying for party leadership into a sort of non-stop primary season where being the top guy is no guarantee of permanence, and the end of a career there happens as frequently in the back rooms as at the ballot box.

Commentators in the British papers inform us that the attempt to push Brown out wasn’t very serious—why not let the old sod go down with the sinking ship? Its real import, some insist, was about where the party will take up residence during its imminent season in opposition: back on some leftish terrain or squarely within the neoliberal shrine, which Thatcher established and where Blair faithfully worshipped.
As Seumas Milne phrased it for The Guardian Wednesday, ‘Blairite and Treasury orthodoxy has been re-established, and the government's recent crab-like shift towards a more recognisably social democratic stance has come to a juddering halt’.

Given the relentless march toward the right of the Blair years, the criminal conspiracy with Bush to conquer Iraq and the decade-long repackaging of the main tenants of Thatcherism in Labor garb, one would think a cautious revisiting of social democratic rhetoric might be prudent politics for a party about to be swept away. On this side of the Atlantic, for example, our dear Republicans are pretty clear about branding themselves as something utterly different and distinguishable from the present government.

But the doyens of the British Labour Party seem less worried about losing the next election than weakening their ties with the country’s financial and business elites, whose favor they curry with promises of tough social service cuts, state deficit reduction, light taxation and continued favors for the rich. In short, the conservative program without need of the Tories.

Sound familiar? The description of progressive British voters casting aimlessly about for someone who might vaguely represent their views suggests our own destiny ten months and/or three years from now. The Democrats under Obama have shown repeatedly their eagerness to ignore their popular constituency by cozying up to Wall Street and pursuing Bush’s Afghanistan flop to the bitter end.

If so, the Democrats will hemorrhage voters and go into the 2010 and 2012 contests with a demoralized and deflated base, leaving them only the option of appealing to centrist voters with warmed-over imitations of the small-government/ big-army conservative mantras.

That’s what Clinton did consistently throughout his uninspired reign, and he managed to win re-election—at great cost to the rest of us. Clinton exemplified the Blue Dog Democrats who embraced corporate power and jettisoned traditional blue-collar demands while failing to defend liberal positions on things like abortion rights and gay servicemen and women. Clinton dutifully paid down the federal deficit whereupon W promptly recreated it to give rich people huge tax breaks.

Obama sounds like someone who believes in something more than himself, which is an important distinction. But his instincts so far are leading us in very similar directions.