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The Failure of “Centrism”

Now that Labour is returning to its class-warfare roots under Gordon Brown, it once again faces electoral defeat. ~John Fund This is possibly the silliest thing I have seen all month. Why does Labour face electoral defeat? For one, it has presided over a financial meltdown every bit as bad as ours that its own […]

Now that Labour is returning to its class-warfare roots under Gordon Brown, it once again faces electoral defeat. ~John Fund

This is possibly the silliest thing I have seen all month. Why does Labour face electoral defeat? For one, it has presided over a financial meltdown every bit as bad as ours that its own policies helped make possible, and it is still the governing party during a severe recession. Labour has been in government for almost thirteen years, which would inspire anti-incumbency sentiments in any electorate no matter what the ruling party did in office. Easy monetary policy inflating their own real estate bubble and collusion with the financial interests of the City, which were once considered some of the strengths of New Labour’s shift to the center, have come back to haunt Brown and have laid waste to his premiership. It is New Labour that has been in power for the last decade, and it is New Labour that has lost the British public’s trust.

Brown had once been viewed as the economic wizard of the Blair Government during the boom years, but like his counterparts on our side of the Atlantic his competence was rapidly exposed as a fraud. Add to this his own personal limitations as a politician and his poor skills as a political manager, neither of which hampered Blair, and throw in a revitalized, modestly well-organized Conservative Party and you may have a recipe for a general election defeat. Even now it is not a guarantee that the Tories will win the general election. Nonetheless, Fund is very confused if he thinks that Labour’s current woes come from an overindulgence of its left wing. That doesn’t mean that indulging the left wing of Labour would have avoided these problems, but it is simply an acknowledgment that the left wing of Labour has not been the driving force in Brown’s government.

Now it is possible to say that this has nothing to do with American politics. Britain and America have different electorates, so what may succeed there will not necessarily succeed here. Even so, it is becoming tiresome to keep seeing the constant repetition of what at this point can only be called a lie, namely that the current administration is some intensely left-liberal operation that has strayed from the true path of “centrism.” Evan Bayh would very much like people to believe that “centrism” is the cure for what ails Democrats, just as Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman before him wanted to insist that support for authoritarian security measures and aggressive foreign wars was at the core of what it meant to be a Democrat. They say this not because they have a better feel for the pulse of America, but because it matches up with their preferences. In fact, as Miller, Lieberman and Bayh have all come to feel increasingly alienated from their party, the country has been slowly but steadily moving towards their party. This is true whether we are talking about voting patterns or demographics. Fifteen or sixteen years ago, their arguments might have had some political relevance. Today they are the complaints of people who no longer have any significant constituency in their own party.

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