The tragedy of this unequal partnership
By opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest
mistake of his political life
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,925856,00.html
Will Hutton
Sunday March 30, 2003
The Observer
Will Hutton argues that, by opting to join the American hard Right, Tony
Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political life, one from which he
cannot recover.
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.
7 Will Hutton's The World We're In, is now available as an Abacus paperback,
priced #9.99
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