|
|
|
Millenarians are likely to mount a new palimpsest of salvation. The New Man of the
revolutionary pedigree is the loneliest of orphans in the market. His scripture
of instant nirvana is the least referred material in the archives of history. Not
that he has been reduced to a museum piece by the arrogant triumphalism of the
capitalist. Nor is it true that the spectral sorrow of Marx continues to magnify
the immortality of Adam Smith. For the wealth of nations does not ensure calm in
the shopping mall. It seems the heart banished by ideology has not taken refuge
in the supermarkets of capitalism. Ask the Pope, or listen to the wail of George
Soros. The autumnal anxiety of the twentieth century: what does it mean when the
benevolent capitalist wears the designer clothes of socialism? Or, what does it
mean when a Tony Blair redeems society from socialism? It's not the ideology,
stupid. But ideas - give me more.
The Labour landslide in Britain is of course a vindication of Blair's passion for
ideas. Coming as it does after 18 years of powerlessness, that too in a society
languishing in the cool of conservatism, Blairism Unbound is a celebration of
ideas - borrowed or stolen, no matter. If the textbook leader of the socialist age
is a study in programmed tyranny, the socialist of the virtual age is a
market-friendly evangelist who can disown his ancestry at the click of a camera.
For, today, the Labour is not only riding past the abandoned idealism of Clause
IV. It is, in its post-Utopian avatar as an earthly messiah, accumulating every
scrap of wisdom available in New Age sociology. From Michael Foot to Neil Kinnock
to even the late John Smith, the life of Labour has been a granite stretch of
class and tax, trade unionism and nationalisation - rather, Bolshevism with a dash
of British understatement. A giant leap: Blairism is Thatcherism with compassion.
Then what was wrong with John Major - the gentler, kinder progeny of the Lady?
Why did Britons endorse fake Tories when the real, blue-blooded ones were out
there? There lies a story of stagnation and regeneration, of adjectives and faded
archetypes. Thatcherism was shopkeepers 'revolution in which every monument of
social welfare fell to the individual spirit. The 'dependent society' was its
most visible target. Its abolition meant a war against every agent of individual
suppression. Her great virtue, as the poet Philip Larkin once said, was "saying
that two and two makes four which is as unpopular nowadays as it always has been".
Reviewing the Thatcher memoirs for the New Yorker, novelist Julian Barnes wrote:
"Politics, of course, is a matter of decimals, logarithms, and long division, but
Thatcher, by making parts of it appear simple, not only infuriated those who knew
it to be more complicated but also cemented her support among the two-plus-two
brigade. Thus, she loved to explain the nation's economic policy in terms of the
domestic shopping basket".
Remember, this shopping basket of Thatcherism was placed in the '80s of grand
gestures. While Maggie was slaying the dragons of the drab welfare state, across
the Atlantic, Ron was applying new colours to the American Dream. And both of them
battled against the pieties of consensus in a historical backdrop. The Evil Empire
and its rusted economy provided a new glow of cultural superiority to the
nationalist, home-first rhetoric of both Reagan and Thatcher. They embodied the
high noon of conservatism not because of the restoration of the feel-good factor
in market alone. They identified the primary enemy of the individual: the state.
And the grammar of their revolution was quiet and cool. They almost echoed the
British conservative pundit Michael Oakeshott: "To be conservative is to prefer
the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried... the convenient
to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss".
So the Conservatives have long ago won the economic as well as the moral war, that
too by remaining rather old-fashioned. But there is something called the lethargy
of success. John Major and George Bush have explained it with prosaic clarity.
Their passive march to doom was synonymous with the disappearing heroism of the
intellectually smug Right. In the absence of an enemy abroad, a true Conservative
should have realised that his creed is more than a rejoinder to Utopianism, that
Conservatism needs new impetus even after the death of ideology. His essential
playground, he should have known, is society. The Conservative of the Nineties,
despite having the inherited riches, has miserably failed to acknowledge this
simple truth. No surprise, gray Majorism in retrospect resembles the vacuous
familiarity of the Bush raj.
The only surprise is: the much-needed ethical push to conservatism has come from
the plastic left-of-the-centre parties. Tony Blair's New Labour has no quarrel
with the general virtues of globalisation. Rather, Blairism, with its commitment
to free market, not only endorses the capitalist spirit but rules out
re-nationalisation. Blair has only added a sense of community and security to the
market. As Thatcherism lay stagnant outside the boredom of Majorism, Blair
quietly abandoned the dead certainties of the Left and moved steathly to the
"vital centre" of British politics. The ease with which Bill Clinton outconned the
Gingrichian militia of the Republican party is perhaps an apt parallel. For the
Blair modernisation is nothing but a brave acceptance of the invincibility of
Thatcherism. Blair has made the Lady's legacy 'socialist' by disagreeing only on
peripheral points. He is a Thatcherite without a fox-hunter's heart. He is a
Conservative with the benevolence of a parish priest. He prefers the Jesus of
Nazareth to the Jehovah of Marxism. The New socialist is the community man with a
conservative undergarment.
It is this enhanced conservatism of the New Labour that makes its leader a man of
the zeitgeist. He knows that socialism is a word repudiated by history. He also
knows that the post-Wall triumph of the market is not a vindication of that famous
Thatcherite line "there is no such thing as society". There is one, and there
resides Clinton's "soccer mom" and her British equivalent. The vote for Blair's
Labour was not a vote for Europe or a vote against the Tory values. It was a vote
for a morally enlightened Thatcherism. Blair's was a revolution within the
orphaned but still intact walls of the Thatcherite revolution. There was nothing
original about it - but it echoes the economically happy individual's other
obligations the community obligations, courtesy the trendy patois of
communitarianism. Its most visible guru, Amitai Etzioni, argues: Downsize the
state to compassionate communities.
What is wrong with that? From Bill Clinton to Tony Blair, the question
reverberates. Stirring of a new radicalism? No. Heartbeats of triumphant
conservatism. Sad that the credit for this new resurgence does not go to the
blue-blooded Reaganites or the Tory Brahmins. The virtual socialist is running
away with the ideas of the Right. Shift the camera angle, please, before he
begins the next masquerade in the market.
 |
||
|
||
|
||
