Let’s hope he doesn’t end up the same way:
“Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It’s surreal; it’s just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.
We have broken from reality–a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.
We’re now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars–spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth.
A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper. Yet, cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Detroit.
We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.
We assume that by keeping the already-known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.
The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good, and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding, and confidence in liberty. The status quo cannot be maintained, considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking.
We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering. The good news is the reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means and, fortunately, the number of those who care are growing exponentially.
Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I’m seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.”
Gordon Brown may be days from departure. Or – like the twitching body at the end of a hangman’s noose – his final spasms may be more drawn out. But there is an altogether more dramatic subplot being played out as the New Labour government reaches its last act. For the death throes of this government herald the end of something remarkable in British politics – the era of radicalism.
The immediate causes of Mr Brown’s demise may be mundane matters: the limitations of his personality and the cost of Jacqui Smith’s bath plug. He is also being subsumed by an economic tide.
But whatever the reasons for his looming downfall, it is set to mark a definite break with the recent past.
For nearly 30 years British politics has been dominated by radical figures with ideologies quite alien to the political parties that spawned them. First Margaret Thatcher affixed an iconoclastic, radical market ideology to a rather unideological, pragmatic and paternalistic Conservative party. Then in the mid-1990s Tony Blair did much the same thing to Labour.
Neither prime minister was ever of their party. Both frequently defined themselves against their party’s sacred cows and preached continuous revolution. Both evinced little sympathy for institutions and traditions. Both delivered a trio of electoral successes but were ultimately toppled by parliamentary parties that retained an instinctive – almost visceral – discomfort with them.
And after the fall, both saw the flame kept alive by a small but fanatical cadre of loyalists determined to keep the faith even at the expense of party unity and electoral prospects.
Mrs Thatcher was replaced by a man with a more consensual style but whom she and her followers mistakenly believed to be a disciple.
John Major’s government was ruined by events, sleaze scandals, exhaustion and its narrow majority. But it was also destroyed by ideological warfare once it emerged that he was no true heir to Thatcherism. Like Gordon Brown, he became a prisoner of his cabinet; unable to sack ministers he disliked and promote those he trusted. The embattled Tory leader tried reshuffles and relaunches. As Mr Brown this week faced an assault from James Purnell, the ultimate Blairite ultra, so Mr Major faced John Redwood, the purest of Thatcherites. Mr Redwood jumped alone and failed to bring down Mr Major; it remains to be seen how badly Mr Purnell has wounded his target.
One can argue about degree. It is probably true that the Thatcherites penetrated deeper into the Conservative party than the Blairites ever managed with Labour. It is nearly 20 years since Mrs Thatcher’s fall and it has taken almost that long for the Tories to play out their internecine conflict. But David Cameron has finally restored the party to something close to its roots. With his attachment to environmentalism, even at the expense of business concerns; with his avowed support for public services; with his departure from some of the harsher social policies of recent years; Mr Cameron has returned the Tories whence they came. Some – especially those watching from the European mainland – might argue that his euroscepticism is still highly ideological. But even this is tempered compared with his predecessors and, in any case, remains hugely popular within Britain.
Many complain that he lacks policies. This is wrong. What he lacks is ideological dogma. He still inclines towards the free market; he still veers towards nationalism. The old Etonian, Mr Cameron believes in things; but he believes in them in moderation. This puts him back in line with Conservative tradition.
Labour, too, is purging its Blairite appendage. Mr Brown was, of course, a New Labour man himself – Mr Blair’s most important partner in the refashioning of the party away from its hard-left policies – but for him the “Labour” was as important as the “New”. His elevation appeared to offer Labour the best of both worlds. Like Mr Major, he appeared more aligned to the traditional party while offering reassurance to the ultras that he would not destroy all they once believed in. While he shrank from the most free-market aspects of Blairism he never abandoned its economic orthodoxy.
One can never divorce events from all this. Had Mr Brown gone to the country early – as his allies urged before the financial crisis struck – he might well have been re-elected and escaped his current travails. But he didn’t and he hasn’t, and now Labour, like the Conservatives, looks set to return closer to its roots. It will start now, as a weaker premier finds it hard to resist his traditionalist MPs, and will continue after Mr Brown’s departure – whenever that comes.
The sudden enthusiasm in some quarters for the unproven Alan Johnson may, in part, reflect the new home secretary and former postman’s personable nature and inspiring backstory. But Mr Johnson is also a trade unionist who, in office, has backed the rights of public sector workers against economic expediency and the views of the true Blairites.
We cannot yet say how much longer Mr Brown has, but Labour is turning back in on itself and back to its roots. The next Labour leader – whenever he or she comes – is not likely to be an über-Blairite. This may be particularly problematic for Labour, as the country has shown a preference for smaller government and free markets, which the current financial crisis is unlikely to shake over the long term.
Mr Cameron has led the Conservatives back to their roots. Labour is heading down a similar path.
Britain’s 30-year experiment with radical politics is at its end. The new order is dead. Welcome to the past.
Robert Shrimsley is managing editor of FT.com and a former chief political correspondent
Gordon Brown’s Fall: The End of British Radicalism – Robert Shrimsley, FT
Obama’s Big Sellout
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.
How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.
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