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I had this on Labour Uncut during August.
At the start of May I argued that President Obama was as vulnerable to a challenger emerging as the seemingly ascendant George W H Bush was at the same time in 1991. This view was then out of kilter with the beltway view of Obama as a two term president. Subsequently the US has suffered an unprecedented credit downgrade, its economy has continued to struggle and grumbles about Obama, most recently due to his holidaying at a “millionaires’ playground”, have got louder.
Republicans are increasingly confident that Obama is Jimmy Carter. But the election will be a choice, not a referendum on Obama. They need a more convincing choice to win. As the early Republican pacesetters have not convinced, the stage remains set for a Republican Bill Clinton.
To date, tea party favourite Michelle Bachmann has probably done the best job of appealing to Republicans with misgivings, such as Romneycare and Mormonism, about the frontrunner, Mitt Romney. There may be enough such conservative voters for Romney to be defeated in January’s Iowa caucuses. The former Baptist pastor Mike Huckerbee won in this first state to vote in 2008.
God isn’t calling Huckerbee to run this time. However, God is said to have called Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, as well as Bachmann. Either they are suffering crossed wires or God’s mind is yet to be made up. God wouldn’t be the only one. The Republican race is fluid.
While Rick Perry’s backing for the three-time married Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and rumours about his own marriage are concerns for some religious voters, his leading of vast prayer meetings enables him to pitch to the religious right. That 40 percent of new US jobs since June 2009 have been created in Texas, where Perry is governor, also creates the basis – though other aspects of Texas’ economy undermine this – for appeal to those (i.e. everyone) with economic worries. A candidate able to challenge Romney for his strongest card, economic competence, and rival Bachmann for the religious right vote has a shout of being the Republican candidate.
There are various ways that this could play out.
First, Perry could crash. Karl Rove, widely seen as George W Bush’s puppet master, considers Perry beyond the pale. Perry has recently accused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, of being “almost treasonous”, damned global warming “a hoax” and belittled evolution as “a theory that’s out there”. Perry could yet follow the likes of Donald Trump in sending shockwaves through the Republican contest only to fade away.
Second, Perry could, without actually winning it, have a more sustained impact on the race. While Romney’s already backed away from many positions that he held as governor of the traditionally Democratic state of Massachusetts, he would have to tack even further to the right under this scenario and so reduce his appeal to independents.
Third, Perry could take enough of Bachmann’s support from the right and make a sufficient dent in Romney’s claim to unrivalled economic competency to be the Republican candidate. The votes of independents are likely to determine the presidential election and Perry may be even less able to secure their support than a Romney who, as per my second scenario, has been forced to run to the right. This is probably why the White House is thought to favour a contest against Perry.
If Perry’s capacity to appeal to independents really is this limited, then the Republicans are right to look elsewhere – and they continue to encourage Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressmen, to enter the race. Perry may be a “good-looking rascal”, according to Clinton himself, but he might demonstrate the impossibility of being a candidate able to take Republican votes off both Bachmann and Romney and also appeal to independents. This impossibility means that the Republicans either cannot have a candidate attractive to all their diverse wings or they cannot win in 2012.
All presidential elections come down to who offers the most compelling personification of the latest stage of the American dream and, given the resilience of American cultural and political conservatism, Perry could win by embodying something quite different from Obama. Undoubtedly, an Obama-Perry head-to-head would make epic political struggle of America’s long-running culture wars. It would be spectacular and vitriolic; re-energising Obama’s supporters after the sometimes stodgy prose of his time in office.
Those of us on the left in Europe will largely hope that the man who was our dream president in 2008 retains enough support amongst independents to remain in office. But we should also reflect that the real lesson of his time in office, for our continent, is that we must do more to build the world we want. Not rely on someone who may nominally be the most powerful person in the world and who may appear to share European values, but who, in neither respect, is so without significant constraints.
I’m not the first person to compare David Cameron with Ted Heath. Iain Martin has made this parallel. Martin asked last year whether Philip Ziegler’s biography of Heath had been read in Downing Street.
“It should be. Ted Heath was a relentlessly pragmatic Tory leader who had poor relations with his party in Parliament and in the country. He began in government seemingly fixed on a clear course of reform and modernisation. But then he hit stormy waters and, lacking an ideological compass that might have helped guide him through, was blown over. Having failed to build good relations with his colleagues, he had no reservoir of loyalty on which to draw. When Margaret Thatcher emerged he was sunk.”
Heath, though, did have an objective for his government. He wanted to pacify the trade unions and draw them into a corporatist national project that would make us less like the US and more like France, not simply through being part of the common market, but also in terms of industrial policy and organisation. While one might have misgivings about this, it seems a more substantial project than whatever the defining purpose of Cameron’s government is.
A crisis reveals. The financial meltdown of 2008 revealed Gordon Brown to be a leader of global standing. (Have we seen much of this lately)? The crisis on our streets last week revealed the big society to be something that people just do. As the dust settled the little platoons came out with their brushes.
Something that people already do, seems an odd kind of project for a government. The argument might be made that the government’s point is to nurture and grow such behaviour. But the £2.8 billion of government spending that the voluntary and community sector will lose over the current spending review period is inconsistent with this goal.
While Cameron has even less of an ideological compass than Heath, in many other respects he seems remarkably like the prime minister described by Martin. Cameron, like Heath, has been too aloof to bother working on relations with backbench colleagues. This is most likely to catch up with a prime minister in difficult times. At the height of hackgate James Forsyth reported that a minister had told him that “Number 10 was having trouble getting people to go on TV to bat for the PM”.
Cameron has fair weather friends on the backbenches and growing tension at the top. Internal opponents have recently been briefing against Steve Hilton and leaking his zanier ideas. It is not clear who exactly these opponents are and what they seek to achieve. But this targeting of Hilton, synonymous with the big society, indicates a lack of confidence in high places in Cameron’s big idea and its guru. If Heath was blown over for lack of an ideological compass, Cameron must be at least as vulnerable to such a fate.
His operation has seemed less steady in the absence of Andy Coulson. But Coulson’s past means Cameron must now regret not following through with his initial plan to appoint Guto Harri. Rebekah Brooks intervened and insisted that the then opposition leader go with Coulson. So when aspiring to run the country Cameron considered his judgment subordinate to News International.
His relations with News International are one sense in which the question that came to define Heath hangs over Cameron: who runs the country?
The country has recently insisted that News International do not. Cameron’s deference to Brooks suggests he thought otherwise.
Max Weber defined a state in terms of a monopoly upon violence. So what was the UK when Cameron was sunning himself in Tuscany?
Ministers and police could then not agree on which of them prised the looters monopolisation from them. Now they can’t agree on the utility of the US policing advisor drafted in by Cameron.
The prime minister has also failed to come to an effective agreement with the bankers on their lending. They continue to enjoy backing from the taxpayer but won’t bend to the will of the government.
The extent to which the looters, the police and the bankers run the country isn’t clear. But it’s less obvious than it should be that the prime minister is in charge. Heath got his answer at the ballot box, “not you, mate”. If Cameron were mad enough to now trigger a general election on the same terms, his only saving grace may be the strength of his narrative on the deficit.
This story is of Labour recklessness and Cameron riding to the rescue with tough medicine. The robust return to economic health that we were told this medicine would deliver seems as distant as ever. But Cameron has succeeded in embedding a perception that Labour will tax punitively to spend wastefully.
If Labour can defeat this perception, what is keeping a second rate Ted Heath in Downing Street beyond the next election?
I had this on Labour Uncut soon after the riots in England.
The world has looked perplexed upon the UK this week. Not standing up for justice, but reduced to”violent consumerism“. Clapham Junction isn’t Tahrir Square. We don’t need the international media to tell us something is profoundly wrong after such a debilitating implosion.
We did it to ourselves and that’s what really hurts. Whatever we call this – a Jacquerie (Gabriel Milland), an intifada of the underclass (Andrew Neil/Danny Kruger) – it’s a self-inflicted wound that must rank as one of our country’s darkest episodes in my 31 years. We don’t need to weigh the grief against the miners’ strike (a civil war in which both sides, at least as far as they were represented by Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, were wrong), Hillsborough (a football match where 96 people died) and 7/7 (mass murder of Britons by Britons) to know this is a bleak and pitiful watershed.
Over a longer horizon than my lifetime, however, the past week might seem less exceptional. Many times in the past, such as in 1780, 1816 and 1936, London saw riots arguably more violent and sometimes just as ostensibly inexplicable as now. The persistence and power of our capacity to descend to disorder and glory in anarchy should be taken as a lesson from this week.
This sits ill, though, with the vaguely whiggish sense of history defaulted to by much of the left. We like to think we’ve progressed since 1780. And, of course, in lots of ways we have. Many people have blackberries now, for one thing. 1780 was no less bloody for want of blackberries. The importance of the state’s capacity to uphold law and order is as fundamental now as in 1780 or in 1651 when Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan.
But to imagine that the Leviathan of the state can be brought low simply by social media is as much of a misreading as to contend that someone loots a plasma TV because they lost their EMA. To respond to a national calamity with such pure category errors is hardly what the occasion demands. Nor are we meeting these demands by rushing to explanations heavily infused by pre-held ideologies.
For the right, this means a lack of authority in general and from fathers in particular and the destructive impacts of welfare dependency. For the left, resentments fostered by inequalities, a pervasive culture that not only tolerates but actively encourages, at many levels and countless ways, the doctrine that greed is good and that responsibilities to others are simply hindrances to be got around, not the very stuff of humanity.
Neither right or left is wholly wrong in these claims; but can we really only look deep enough into our hearts as to bleat about the same old hobby horses?
The perversity and inadequacy of this is underlined by the failure of anyone to argue in these terms beforehand. No one on the right, to the best of my knowledge, warned that absent fathers risk riots. No one on the left seriously thought the shoplifters of the world would actually unite and try to take over (although, Morrissey took that song title from a Marxist magazine, as I recall).
The plain fact is that, at least for the vast majority of us, events have blindsided us. Out of nowhere we have been exposed to primal urges and a cultural underbelly that are at once both completely alien and utterly human and of our society. The kids in Lord of the Flies were all too human and so are our looters. The difference, of course, is that those that have behaved so irresponsibly this week are, sadly, not fictional. They are our fellow citizens.
Legally and morally they must face the full consequences of their rejection of even the most basic responsibilities. It is as crass to suggest otherwise as to attempt to make cheap political hay out of events. This goes well beyond party politics. It’s about what we are as a country, as a people, as human beings. And it is an immense failure in all of these respects to have amongst us so many so detached from even the most fundamental responsibilities. We should recognise our collective failure and be open to any means, from right or left, which will best correct it.
Picasso said that destruction is the first act of creation. We’ve had the destruction. If we all now really look into our consciences, and draw the right lessons, the creation can yet follow. If we recognise the immense dignity of Tariq Jahan, and have any pride in our country and its people, we would do nothing less.
I had this on Labour Uncut in August.
People make their own history, as Karl Marx knew and Angela Merkel and Barack Obama cannot deny, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Over hundreds of years America has evolved to a fiercely divided, uncompromising polis wedded to a system demanding compromise. Over decades Europe has achieved monetary union. Thousands of years of history hang over its fiscal consummation, which is required to avoid collapse and further calamity. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
One of the ironies of Marx is that communism was supposedly inevitable, but his tombstone declares that the point is to change the world, not interpret it. What’s to change if history’s terminus is already determined? What was the point of agitating publications like the Communist Manifesto if we were all, in spite of ourselves, destined for communism?
Such publications imply that Marx himself may not have seen communism as quite the iron certainty that rigid interpretations of his writing suggest. But one of the divisions between Marxism and much of the rest of the left concerns the extent to which we are prisoners of history. Parties such Labour predicate themselves on an assumption that the institutions of advanced capitalist democracies can be moulded to serve socially just ends. Ed Miliband’s father, of course, like other Marxists, thought this naive.
Recent economic events seem to vindicate Ralph Miliband. Political leadership seems oxymoronic when our nominal leaders appear only witnesses to events that they can barely fathom, let alone command. (In the non-economic sphere, our Tuscan prime minister is similarly bemused by the revenge of the lumpenproletariat). Nothing has happened to undermine James Carville’s famous wish to come back as the bond market and intimidate everybody. It’s these markets that are in the box seat and our political leaders that are cowered.
What they demand are credible plans from governments to repay their creditors. This isn’t unreasonable. I expect you’d want to see credible repayment plans before you leant non-trivial amounts of money. The governments of the third and fourth largest economies in the eurozone, Italy and Spain, seem increasingly unable to produce such plans. The downgrade of the USA, though unjustified, speaks to a similar lack of confidence in America’s ability to manage its debts.
While events seem to lead towards the largest country in the world that still professes to be communist, China, being an ever more dominant geo-political force, the Marxists should not be too triumphant. The markets are, of course, as powerful as James Carville’s wildest dream and Ralph Miliband’s bleakest nightmare. But they do not remain beyond the capacity of political leaders to have them becalmed. That is if political leaders do what it says on their tin; lead.
This doesn’t mean interpreting opinion polls as immovable. Germany, for example, could swing behind the full steps required to save the euro if Merkel articulated them well enough. It means seeing your electorate as intelligent beings capable of being won over by the force of your argument and your actions. Merkel and Obama can still do this. But only if they stop being intimidated not only by the bond markets but also by opinion polls, their political opponents and their own inevitable failure to hold in their minds every relevant fact and figure.
As the Irish leader, Enda Kenny, has said the answer from Merkel, whether the question is bailouts or debt restructuring, is always no – until it is yes. We all know the big question hanging over all of this: will the single currency underwrite the debts of all of its members? These debts would be eminently manageable under such an arrangement; so long as the political will to enact such an arrangement can be found. It is for Merkel to find this will. If she cannot, then she should say so speedily. The longer she delays the worse the fallout when she confirms her inability to rise to her historic purpose.
In spite of the tea party and the fractious nature of US politics, things are more straight-forward for Obama. He has no unprecedented, continent-wide institution building project to contemplate as a matter of existential necessity. His outlook would suddenly look much rosier if he could only say yes, we did achieve growth rates in 2011 equal to the hardly spectacular rates of 2010.
Can the US really not grow at 2.8 per cent this year? Can unemployment really not be significantly reduced from the historic high of 9.2 per cent? While markets fret over the ability of governments to manage their debts, they are also increasingly worried that the US cannot do better on growth and unemployment. Surely if the social democratic faith in the power of government is justified then Obama can prove them wrong?
Merkel and Obama can rise to their challenges or we succumb to capitalism’s latest crisis. These crises will not, however, give way to something as pleasant as Marx envisaged communism to be. It will be something with much more of a Chinese flavour.
I had this on Labour Uncut at the start of August.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone about anything right now,” she exploded. With tears in her eyes, she retreated to a back room.
This was how the Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan, an eloquent contributor to the committee that voted to impeach President Nixon, reacted to a request for comment immediately after the vote. This request came from Michael Sandel, later a distinguished philosopher, then a newspaper intern.
Sandel recalled this encounter when the House began impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in 1998. While Barbara Jordan’s explosion demonstrated that even Democrats opposed to Nixon recognised the magnitude of impeachment, partisan passions against Clinton overrode any such recognition on the part of many Republicans 24 years later. 13 years hence, and the trends evidenced by the contrasting attitudes of Democrats to Nixon and Republicans to Clinton have hardly dissipated.
Many Republicans today would throw a tea party on the White House lawn, rather than discretely sob, if president Obama were impeached. This is in spite of the fact that impeachment should only properly occur when the constitutional system is seriously threatened. No matter that such a threat is inherently a matter of national tribulation; glee could be expected from those who seem consumed only by tribalism. The “Nazi Socialist Communist Muslim” would have got his comeuppance.
Watergate wrenched the scales from America’s eyes. But not so long prior to this, president Kennedy had private morals loose enough to make a French politician blush. These foibles weren’t widely known and he was revered, if for nothing else, simply for being the holder of the office that he held. Now these indiscretions are dramatised like an episode of keeping up with the Kardashians. The age of deference is gone and politicians are swept along on a tell-all celebrity tide.
While Obama retains a scholarly air, there is something rather tell-all about arriving in office with two autobiographies behind you. More significant than Obama’s willingness to tell-all, is the number of Americans for whom no matter how much he tells, his truths will never be accepted. And no matter how much he compromises, these compromises will never be reciprocated. He is someone they refuse to try to understand and who they are incapable of dealing with in good faith.
Lots of Tories felt the same way about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The difference is that these prime ministers never had to win a proportion of their opponents over to get their way. They had a majority in the Commons, and the Lords only ever resisted for so long. In contrast, Obama’s party has no majority in the House or filibuster majority in the Senate.
The political pendulum swings more violently in majoritarian systems such as ours. The checks and balances restrain it in the US. Part of the reason that I support a second chamber elected by PR in the UK is because a somewhat more democratic restraint on the executive would be to the benefit of our system. The US now appears, however, a case study in what can go wrong when this restraint is too sharp. With Republicans so trenchantly refusing to play ball with Obama, the pendulum rests not on a radical centre, a cross-dressed mix of the best of Democrat and Republican ideas, but upon dysfunction.
The checks and balances hardwire the necessity of reaching across the aisle into the American system. Yet Washington DC has become increasingly dominated by politicians as dogmatic as the hardest edged British whips. It’s not just a matter of not compromising with the enemy for many, but not compromising with reality either.
In reality managing US debt requires tax rises. In reality immigration reform must include pathways to citizenship for the 11m illegal immigrants slogging away in the US economy. In reality Obama’s health care reform looks remarkably like the proposals with which Republicans countered Hilary Clinton’s plans in the 1990s, not the road to serfdom. In reality prices have risen at the pumps but remain a fraction of European levels, environmentally unsustainable and only likely to continue to rise given finite supply. In reality Obama is a prisoner of the Republican refusal to accept reality. The debt ceiling fiasco isn’t an exception, but indicative of a deeper malaise.
The genius of the founding fathers was that in less partisan times radical centres could be found and that checks and balances restrained government before it did too much damage to the extraordinary entrepreneurial, industrious and proud American people. Powerful though these qualities remain on the part of the people, America faces new challenges that it won’t meet without improved public policy. Its checks and balances will prevent this so long as the civic decency and ability to see the national interest of Barbara Jordan is in so short a supply.
This is a conundrum that only those confident of the capacity of Europe and China to extend freedom globally can be sanguine about. In other words, it would be foolhardy not to be concerned.
