The Republic of Dissent

La dame de fer

Chris Dillow on Margaret Thatcher who died today:

When Thatcher became Tory leader, she faced both gender and class snobbery; she was seen as a shrill lower middle-class housewife. Her success reduced class and gender prejudice amongst the rich. I suspect that my job prospects (as someone with an accent similar to her natural one) improved because of her. I fear, though, that this increased equality of opportunity was only temporary. I don't say all this to sing her praises. I suspect her legacy is mostly a malign one and that she was more of a class warrior than a genuine libertarian. I do so merely to suggest that she was not wholly the devil the left pretends.

I was never able to dislike Margaret Thatcher because she had balls even though she rarely used them correctly.

'Breeding' women who can't win

Awesome stuff from Hilary Mantel:

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners.

Beauty is always unproblematic and uncontroversial when it is/appears to be empty and yes, David Cameron can't read.

Détruire n'est pas créer

I agree with Tim Black on this:

Under Cameron’s gaze, the problems in Mali are simply collapsed into a grand narrative in which good people fight bad people, just as Blair, alongside President George W Bush, proceeded to view world affairs through the prism of the ‘war on terror’.

The narcissism of this essentially Blairite approach to foreign policy is as incredible as it is reckless. In each case, they really do think this conflict is about them. Arbitrarily chosen, far-flung trouble spots act as ad hoc stages on which a Western leader can show the people back at home just what a good person he is. For Cameron, it was Libya and now neighbouring African states. For Blair, it was the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq.

It was a grisly irony, then, that while Blair spoke of the necessity of intervention in north Africa, of trying to do the right thing, the stage of his most infamous display of doing the right thing – Iraq – appeared once more on the fringes of the world’s news bulletins: a suicide bomber, aided by several others, had attacked a police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed and 105 were injured.

At some point, there has to be the recognition that as Camus would say détruire n'est pas créer and that destroying monsters ( which is more often than not about seeking them desperately) isn't the same as fixing problems that are so complex that they require something more than the use of force.

That said power, faith and money have pierced Blair's eyes and ears, which explains why he isn't just irrelevant, but the epitome of what political success can do to the people who are more ambitious and self-righteous than anything else.

It isn't your penis stupid!

From Rod Liddle:

I have lost count of the times my own penis — a harmless enough creature, really — has been invoked, most usually by women, during an attempted refutation of some point I have made in an article. It is, I have been assured, minuscule, or inoperative, or unwashed, or diseased, or nonexistent. Sometimes all of these things at once. And as with Mary [Beard], the remainder of my physical being is not left unremarked: fat, hideous, stinking, vile, ugly… oh, lordy, we could be here for weeks. It is nothing to do with misogyny; it is just what people reach for when they, perhaps temporarily, hate someone. I remember a short while ago a complaint that Muslims in the public eye were subjected to the most horrid nastiness — the journalist Mehdi Hasan was one of the loudest complainants. Again, no, Mehdi; it’s not your religion, or the colour of your skin — it’s you. It’s just you.

Aahh, the only answer to Liddle is it isn't your penis, it's you. That said, Rod Liddle is a dick!

Slaves to passion

This sentence from Andrew O'Hogan on the BBC's child abuse scandal bothers me :

A man can’t help whom he fancies, but [Gilbert] Harding seems to have differed from the other BBC paedophiles only inasmuch as he kept it mainly to himself.

I have a hard time with the idea that man/people are just slaves of their passions, victims of their urges, their obsessions and never really choose the objects of their affection. Furthermore, fancying kids isn't about sex and taste.

Sin and crime

From Duleep Allirajah over at Spiked on the fight against racism in English football:

Racist speech is, in other words, a modern taboo. It is no longer seen as the expression of a political ideology but as something more akin to a sin. Anti-racism, by the same token, is no longer a political project but an inquisition against racial name-calling.

Hum, something is rotten in the State of Denmark...I suspect that it is the fact that modern societies are too eager to abdicate the responsibility that they have in educating their members rather than to criminalize all of their shortcomings whether or not they become criminal acts. 

Racism as a thought crirme

Words to munch this weekend from Duleep Allirajah over at Spiked :

Anti-racism during the 1970s and 80s in Britain was primarily a political struggle aimed at powerful institutions – the police, the government and the immigration authorities. The problems faced by immigrants in Britain – deportations, passport checks, police harassment, employment discrimination - required social and political change. But, over the course of the past three decades, the definitions of racism and anti-racism have been altered beyond all recognition. The first big shift was the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s. The multiculturalist policies of the ‘municipal socialists’ in local authorities turned a political issue into a cultural problem. Instead of demanding integration, as the US civil-right movement had done in the Sixties, multiculturalists demanded respect for different cultural identities. It was here, in the multiculturalist obsession with language and cultural sensitivity, that today’s tyranny of racial etiquette was born.

The second key shift was the 1999 Macpherson Report on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson introduced the concept of ‘unwitting racism’, which recast racism as a psychological problem. Racism was now effectively a thought crime. As a consequence, anti-racism today is predominantly about gagging, censoring and punishing. It’s a policing issue, not a demand for equality.

My 'shot from the hip' reaction is that  Allirajah is at least partly right, but even that means that there is something wrong with societies that persecute people for what the are thinking. The question that I keep asking myself is whether racism is racism is racism.

Assange's superfluousness

I agree with Julian Ku on this, however I reserve the right to change my mind after reading what Glenn Greenwald had to say about the whole Assange show:

Assange is acting like a paranoid lunatic and it is astonishing to me that so many folks who should know better instinctively side with an accused rapist whose main argument is that the Swedish (Swedish!) justice system is being controlled by the CIA and US government. (...)n the end, (...) Ecuador will quickly tire of Assange after a few months and kick him out, especially after the global media start forgetting about him.

Empire and Viagra

Pankaj Mishra on everlasting imperial fantasies in the 'West':

Even before 9/11, Tony Blair was ready to tend, with military means if necessary, to, as he put it, "the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant" around the world. His apparently more intellectual rival Gordon Brown urged his compatriots to be "proud" of their imperial past. Sensing a sharper rightward shift after 9/11, many pith-helmet-and-jodhpurs fetishists boisterously outed themselves, exhorting politicians to recreate a new western imperium through old-style military conquest and occupation of native lands.Embracing such fantasies of "full-spectrum dominance", American and European policymakers failed to ask themselves a simple question: whether, as Jonathan Schell put it, "the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st"? After two unwinnable wars and horribly botched nation-building efforts, and many unconscionable human losses (between 600,000 and one million in Iraq alone), the "neo-imperialists" offering seductive fantasies of the west's potency look as reliable as the peddlers of fake Viagra. Yet, armour-plated against actuality by think tanks, academic sinecures and TV gigs, they continue to find eager customers.

I agree with Mishra with some reservations for I wonder whether Empire is just a 'western' fantasy; in short I feel increasingly uneasy as I get older about the separation of the world between the West and the rest and I hate with a passion the term 'postcolony.' Oh well, I am a marginal eccentric.

The racism of lower expectation

Sugary excerpt of the day from Anjad Khan:

Essentially, Islamists have been successful in the UK where they have failed elsewhere. They have duped the establishment into thinking that they represent Muslims and Islam, all the while using that as a guise to promote divisive and potentially explosive identity politics. Their job has, of course, been made easier by soft deluded “liberal” multiculturalists who are in fact guilty of  the racism of lower expectation and who don’t apply universal norms to the ‘exotic’ others who we can’t expect to behave like us.

The illusory 'we'

Problematic words from Lindsay Johns to defend a worthy cause:

Parts of the black community, however, continue to rail against the whiteness of the canon and try to promote second or third tier black writers such as novelist
E Lynn Harris or poet James Weldon Johnson. They are abetted by trendy educationalists in the establishment who feel acute post-colonial guilt and wish to show their anti-racist credentials by stressing the “diversity” of works taught in schools.

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it. It is western history that has indelibly shaped our consciousness. We live in Britain, not Timbuktu. We might hail from Africa or the Caribbean, but our lives, for better or for worse, are lived in the modern western world, and shaped by the traditions that have moulded it. If we acquaint ourselves with the grammars of the west, it will indubitably help us to understand it and then duly succeed here.

Hum, there isn't such a thing as a black people for experience. history, and the present show that race is only an artificial and  unifying force in societies where the message, because of the past or inculture, is that people's identities are shaped by the color of their skin and not by the reactions that people have to it thus conditioning or rather 'blackening' their experience. Blackness as whiteness is a blank slate where people put everything that they want not to have to justify their choices and to avoid the eternal burden that all human beings must bear the responsibility for their essence. It might be harsh to say it so bluntly but a writer who put  'race' before her/his art isn't a write for literature when it is about solely about color is denatured and is as artistic and sublime as junk food..

Love means never having to say you're sorry

Via Gideon Rachman, the funniest thing I've read on Ed Milliband's fratricide on his climb to the top of the Labour Party:

I wish Ed Miliband, the new Labour leader, would stop emphasising how much he “loves” the brother whose career he has just destroyed. It’s all very schmalzy and unBritish.

On the other hand, if Ed insists on taking this line, he should really go for it in tomorrow’s leader’s speech. Here is a suggested line - “I love David. I adore him. (Dramatic pause). But that is why I had to destroy him. (Thumps lectern, tear trickles down his cheek). I hope you understand.”Meanwhile if Ed really is getting a taste for putting family ties under maximum political strain, the obvious next move is to offer the shadow chancellor job to Yvette Cooper, who is married to the much more obviously-qualified Ed Balls. That should make for some lively breakfasts in the Balls-Cooper household.

In our times, we sentimentalize politics or whatever else to avoid explaining the unexplainable or the unpalatable. Let's hope that all of this brotherly love stuff doesn't hide a lack of substance or isn't a camouflage for Obama-like feel good, but misleading and irrelevant fluff.

Political identities and crisis of leadership

I disagree strongly with Yascha Monk on this:

In America, the rise of neoconservatism, in both its cultural and foreign policy guises, has masked this crisis of the traditional Right. But in Europe, neoconservatism never won much traction. Neoconservatives, whether their branding is Tory or Labour, have been able to land a few punches in British debates about foreign policy. (The Guardian recently described Tony Blair’s appearance at the latest inquiry into the Iraq War as “a seminar on neoconservatism for slow learners.”) But when it comes to other issues that arouse the passions of their American brethren—like religious education, the (un)truth of evolution, homosexuality, and abortion—the tiny set of true British neocons couldn’t be more out of step with their compatriots. The same holds true all over Western Europe. No major right-wing party is inclined to declare the European version of the culture wars. If it did, the Left would surely be overjoyed. On the contrary, Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy got elected because under their leadership the Right has fully endorsed left-liberal views on family, lifestyle, and procreation.

It is easier in Europe or in America to get elected in the Right because the Left doesn't know what it is, but solely what it despises. Moreover, when Mounk asserts that Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy have endorsed left-liberal views on family, lifestyle and procreation, I wonder if he knows anything about French politics. The culture wars are well and alive in France. This summer has shown that Sarkozy knows full well that in France you get elected by going right on certain issues and by making them a matter of identity and culture. In short, the Right in Europe is well alive politically and no so much disoriented as it is led by figures who have great frailties.The fact that they found themselves in power in spite of those frailties is in fact a proof of the good health of the Right or rather that it is the Left that is disoriented.

An obsession with sleaze

Mick Hume over at Spiked! sums up perfectly the Laws scandal (about Britain's Chief Secretary to the Secretary David Laws resigning for paying the rent of his secret gay lover):

This is the end point of the process that some of us have warned about from the start, when the elite obsession with sleaze becomes a substitute for political debate.

British politics suffers from the same disease that is inflecting American politics ( which has contaminated the rest of the world) and paralyzing essential debates due to an incessant focus on the trivial and the titillating, but insignificant.

The intolerable notion of sin in politics

Disturbing quote from Yasmin Albhai-Brown:

In international politics, too, memories roam and fuel conduct. Take the very moving film about a white farming family in Zimbabwe this week. What was the back-story, the historical decisions and power grabs that created the civil enmities? We Ugandan Asians were cruelly dispossessed by Idi Amin in Uganda, but we too must ask why so many Africans ended up hating us – our racism and economic greed consumed them and they then behaved abominably. And the British need to acknowledge their role in the making of leviathans like Mugabe and Amin.

According to Alibhai-Brown's logic,  the original sin is always more important than anything else that follows and the real culprits are never doers who fit a particular profile or share a certain history but rather those who should have stopped them or who enabled them or had the power over them once upon a time. In short, Mugabe and Amin were creatures of the Brits who don't have the right to judge them because they are the original sinners.

Scary and distressing logic, which divides the world between the powerful who are always guilty of something because the sinful past and the weak who always have an excuse for doing the unconscionable. In short, the notion of sin in politics is a limited, destructive and misguided one which just facilitates intellectual masturbation and other self-indulgences.

Taking Cameron-Clegg seriously

Funny bit from Iain Martin:

It’s been troubling me ever since they got married, I mean ever since they forged a coalition in the national interest. Who or what does the Cameron-Clegg partnership remind me of?
But then it hit me. It’s as though Hugh Grant and Colin Firth have gotten together to make a romantic comedy about the life of a new government - a sequel to Love Actually. As though the young PM Hugh Grant has no overall majority and has to partner with Firth (leader of a small third party in this film rather than the dejected writer in Love Actually). The plot unfolds with “hilarious” results.

Is it just me, but do most people expect the marriage partnership between Nick Clegg and David Cameron to fail? I wonder if the expectations would have been the same if Clegg has expected to wed labor. My guess is it wouldn't be and that there wouldn't be this uneasiness and tendency to find mock the situation rather than to entertain the idea that it has a chance to work. In politics as in real life, people, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, are incredible conservative and believe that one ought to marry, to partner with one that shares the same 'identity' to avoid conflicts or even discussions that may left to productive change or to needed growth and maturation.

Nick Clegg and David Cameron had a "mixed" marriage and people are troubled by it because it opens them to new and possibly unsettling possibilities, which they many not be prepared to face.

To resist feminist guilt

The sugary quote of the morning is from Libby Purves on the complaint that there aren't enough women in the new British government

The phone rang: another periodical’s editor wanting a why-oh-why rant about the dearth of women in the new Cabinet. Four out of 23 gives us a female percentage one-third that of Spain, half that of France and the Netherlands; in the EU only the Portuguese Cabinet has a smaller proportion of women.
Well, a girl likes to oblige and I come of a liberated generation, fists poised to smash the glass ceiling in the conservatory of life. But after a few seconds’ thought I sadly replied: “Sorry. Just realised: I don’t care.” Feminist guilt flared and swiftly receded. There have been women in Cabinet and the great offices of state, there will be others. No law bars the door, there is no quota against us. Tokenism is anathema.

I've just realized that having women in government is less important than enacting policies that not treat them as sheep. In short, the power of symbols is always limited if their goal is to stop the conversation on real issues, by making people feel good about their own 'tolerance' and superiority.

Cleggmania had some changing value

Interesting point from Ian Leslie:

The lasting value of Cleggmania is that it raised the profile of the Liberal Democrat leader to the extent that it became much easier for Cameron to invite him into government. Had the Lib Dem leader been anonymous after the election, or worse, actually unpopular, such a full-blooded partnership wouldn't have been possible. The debates - and Clegg's seizing of the moment - facilitated this coalition.

 I have had to wonder whether Cleggmania wasn't mainly about dissatisfaction with Labour and distrust of the unmarketable, unconvincing, and soft Thatcherism of David Cameron. In short, I'm doubting that Cleggmania was really about Nick Clegg rather than about the Brit psyche.

The union of David Cameron and Nick Clegg as a Las Vegas wedding

Nick Robinson on the Cameron and Clegg partnership:

The question that kept coming up in my mind though, reminded as I was of the couple who got married the day after meeting in Las Vegas, was whether on the morning after the night before they would wake up and wonder how they got hooked up for five years with someone they barely knew, and if their families would ever forgive them.

Robinson is as he almost always is on point, except tat Las Vegas weddings rarely involve parties who have everything to lose by getting a divorce or a quick annulment.

Lib-Dems = Tories

Pic of the morning is about the political state of Britain (via). I disagree with its message for I think that Nick Clegg had no other alternative since Labour had the arrogance to believe that it was better off in the opposition to give the Brits the opportunity to realize that they are the best. Not choosing Cameron would meant choosing the political wilderness for Nick Clegg in the sake of purity, which is what political fundamentalists do usually when they are not willing to shoulder the responsibilities that come with power .There is no question that Nick Clegg's choice is risky and not the best so is politics and he took a chance to give his party the chance to become something other than the serf of  disdainful masters and his country the one to move on from Blairism (it is about time). The culprits here are Labour, the Blairites and Gordon Brown for governing and campaigning without imagination and something other than marketable and flashy humility.

I'm happy that Nick Clegg isn't François Bayrou.

Prime Minister Cameron

My take on the end of the British spectacle is that Labour is as gutless as the Democrats (they still are) were in 2000 when because they were tired of Gore and centrism, they let Bush come to power without putting of much of fact. Their calculation was that he would never last and that four year out of the White house with a bad American president would be beneficial to their party. My point isn't that David Cameron is George Bush, but rather that Labour had been in power for so long that it assumes that it will get back on top fast when it has burned all of its witches and Cameron has proved to be as bad a prime minister as he is a campaigner.

For different take on the election, read Massie, Sagar, and Hagley Road to Ladywood. Boy, I hope that David Cameron becomes a decent prime minister in spite of his views and makes Labour regret the day that they dismiss too casually the opportunity, one,which they didn't deserve to change history and Nick Clegg finds a way to last.

Nick Clegg as Salome

Alex Massie on Nick Clegg and his attempts to find a partner to governing dance:

And so, playing Salome, Clegg has got Gordon's head on a platter and we now have the extraordinary sight of the Lib Dems negotiating with both parties at the same time. This is madness and invites the public to view the Lib Dems as a party of political hoors prepared to sell their services to the highest-bidder for nothing more than self-evidently narrow, selfish interests.

I think that in a way, Nick Clegg can't win unless he joins a government coalition that lasts for if it doesn't, the Lib Dems are over for the public will blame them for making the wrong choice.  I'm wondering how long will it take for the Tores to get rid of David Cameron if he doesn't become the next PM.

New Labour is just undead

Quote of the day from Lenin's Tomb arguing that Labour will not turn left even though it lost the elections:

(...) don't believe the hype - New Labour is not so much dead as undead. Like the zombie banks, it will roll ahead on life support for the foreseeable future, even as it further hacks away at its base, the very support system that keeps it animated. It is not about to emerge from a period of chrysalis as a beautiful, vibrant new life form. The secular trend remains for Labour to increasingly erode its position in the working class, for party identifications to decrease, for exclusively parliamentary politics to become less and less relevant.

I agree with those assertions. Labour kike the American Democratic party never doesn't have any incentive to turn left for the simply reason that the left doesn't have any alternative since the backbone of its politics has become its strong distaste for Republicans and what they stand for or rather who they believe that they are ("American idiots"). It is easier for the American left to focus, for example, on how much it dislikes Sarah Palin rather than on Obama and the Democrats' policies which are against its values, which are less and less sacred for what matters is fluff, appearance, and belonging to the right group.  To put things simply, New Labour is the future of The Brtish Labour party just like timid Centrism remains the one of the Democratic party.

Three losers

I agree with Gideon Rachman's take on the results of the British election:

But, one of the strange aspects of this election, is that - in a way - all three leaders have lost.

After all, how can one conclude that there are any winners when it is the Lib-Dem, who had less than 60 MPs, who get to make to decide who will the next prime minister, a choice that the Brits didn't/couldn't/wouldn't make. What a pitiful circus!

Neoliberalism, unclear political identities, and the Brit hung parliament

Astute observation over at Potlatch on Britain political 'quagmire':

What Britain is witnessing right now is this paradox imploding. For the past thirty years, British political parties have gradually converged on the perfect neo-liberal model. Their policies have moved gradually closer to the prescriptions of The World Economic Forum, starting with guaranteeing adequate security and policing, then stabilising the macro-economy, then turning to market competition and regulation, and finally nurturing the right sorts of social 'externalities' and 'public goods' in the areas of education, infrastructure and culture. The problem is that this neutering of political difference ultimately leads to the very ambivalence that the markets so hate. They want someone to be in control, they just don't want that someone to have any clear political identity.

This observation would apply to the United Sates where it seems that political identity has nothing to do with politics, but everything do with constructed identities to avoid resolving political issues. Case in point: I still don't know what is Obama's political identity ( I would say the same for Sarkozy). I know that he is an excellent politician, but I just don't what it is that he wouldn't do to get himself elected and to beat down his opposition.

Hung and dud

I have to say that the outcome of the British elections bugs me. It's like a great movie having the most disastrous, frustrating, and ugliest ending thus undermining the pleasure that you felt while watching and making you feel cheap for going along for the ride for the plot was always unrealistic to begin with. I don't know what is going to happen, but I have a feeling that there will be another election fairly soon. At least, I got the answer to one of my big questions: the Brits are not as excitable as Americans, which explains in part in my opinion why Cleggstasy was solely an entertaining fantasy, which they liked because it gave them the illusion that they could be daring with their politics to, at the end, when they were alone in the voting booth realize that they are not comfortable with unknown unknowns (a hung parliament is a known unknown). I'm just wondering how good/bad a prime minister David Cameron will be. The good news for Britain is that sometimes bad campaigners make good leaders. 

The unexcitable Brits

Funny assertion from Jasmine Birtles:

Unlike Americans, we Britons tend not to get too excitable about the whole election process. Even political rallies usually elicit no more than an extra-strong cup of tea and maybe a ripple of applause if things get really heated.

I guess it means that Nick Clegg has no shot to win tomorrow and to become the new prime minister of Britain.

A reason to vote Labour

Norman Geras offers a good (though not convincing) reason to vote for 'Labour' in tomorrow UK elections:

I think there are unjustified inequalities in our society, and that Labour has a better record of addressing these than the Conservative Party does, and is more likely than are either the Tories or the Lib-Dems to look to the needs of working people and the less well off.

I'm just wondering whether the past in politics must always conditioned present's and future's political choices especially when the results are mixed to say the least.

The political ability to inspire

I disagree with Paul Sagar on this:

What gives the successful political leader his or her appeal, and thereby power, is precisely what Weber identified: the ability to inspire unquestioning belief. That neither Cameron, Clegg nor Brown presently possesses an outright lead is a testament to how little belief they inspire, and hence what poor political leaders they really are – even if Brown showed yesterday that he could have been something more.

Our times are ones where the electorate and the political and social context aren't the same as it was when Max Weber wrote  and that makes all the difference. Elections have become about glitz, television, and the ability to look and to sound good. The point isn't that Cameron, Clegg, and Brown are the best candidates to ever run for the British prime ministership; it is rather that the British electorate, as any electorate in a liberal and modern society, given the context and the times it evolves in, is looking for style that can masquerade as substance and make them feel good about who they are without requiring them to sacrifice and to make life-altering changes to their way of life.

The end of Gordon Brown

I feel probably the same as this young Brit about Gordon Brown except that it has nothing with him, but everything to do with the fact that he reminds me, and I suppose too many Brits, of the worst of Tony Blair without been able to bring something new to the table or even to remind people of why they trusted Blair for so long. Politics is unfair (via, h/t)

David Cameron as the new Charles de Gaulle

Bruce Anderson is comparing to Charles de Gaulle:

As any Tory should be, he is also rooted in Britain. De Gaulle said that throughout his life, he always had a certain idea of France. That is not how we British talk, which is both fortunate and unfortunate. Unfortunate, in that it could produce magnificent prose; fortunate, in that in France, the grandiloquence is the product of embattlement, invasion and the consequent soul-searching, which we complacent Brits have been lucky enough to avoid, thanks to the Channel. But in a reticent English way, Mr Cameron could echo de Gaulle.
In a few days, he, like de Gaulle, may have the chance to turn his ideas into a programme for national recovery. Success is far from certain. The next government will not only have to cut spending and raise taxes. If grim, endless austerity is to be averted, it will have to rely on renewed economic growth, yet the components of that growth are hard to identify. It would be absurd to dismiss Mervyn King's doubts.

I have to say that I find Anderson's comparison as funny as it is ridiculous for it is indicative of his ignorance of French history and about Charles de Gaulle who was a war hero who came to politics late in life after fighting the Nazis and taking some time to find his voice in politics. David Cameron knows nothing about war (it isn't a bad thing in my book) and has been in politics all of his adult life. In short, comparing David Cameron to Charles de Gaulle is as imaginative and accurate as asserting that Scott Brown, the newly elected senator of Massachusetts is the new Churchill.

Keeping the Tories out and voting for the lesser of two evils

This argument from Paulinlancs arguing that people should vote for 'Labour' just to keep the Tories out shws that Labour has already lost the election:

Labour may have done bad things, but a next Labour government will not be ANYWHERE NEAR AS REMOTELY DAMAGING to us all, and especially to the working class, as a Tory government.
You don’t have to support Labour’s track record to support Labour at this election.  It’s enough to want to keep the Tories out, and the way to do that is generally to vote Labour (I accept there is a tactical voting issue in some places).  Voting for TUSC, or RESPECT, or the Greens, will not keep the Tories out.  It’s not rocket science.

The argument isn't wrong, but it is paternalistic, disrespectful to voters, and not very convincing. It argues that Gordon Brown , his record and the one of his party in power don't matter because the Tories will always be worst. It is a little bit like a student been close to failing an important exam who stops to argue to the judges that the test doesn't matter because they know who is the smarter, and exemplary student and that therefore they don't have to pay attention to anything else. The bigger point is that Gordon Brown let this election become one about change and cannot argue that change doesn't matter because it is worst than the present when he has failed to convince the Brits that he is change.  Voters don't like to hear that they don't have any choice and that they are stuck between choosing the plague and the cholera, that is between an illness that hurts them, but gives them a chance to survive and one which will kill them.

The last debate

I haven't yet had the chance to watch the last debate of the British Election for I've been back from Chicago for less than two hours. Yet, I'm not surprised to read that most analysts including Alex Massie, Jonathan Freedland, Nick Robinson and Iain Martin believe that David Cameron won for Brown has already lost, Nick Clegg is no longer looking fresh, and Cameron has been at this for too long not to know how to win a post-debate debate in the media. In any case, to the contrary of most, I don't wonder whether Cameron can't close the deal, but whether Nick Clegg will fade. I have the strong suspicion that Clegg's fate is intertwined to Brown's ability to convince traditional Labor voters not to punish his party for his inadequacies given the fact that he won't be the next prime minister and that voting for Labor therefore just means saving the furniture now that the house is gone

Cameron, Clegg, Blair, and political brands

Interesting  take on the two front runners of the British elections David Cameron and Nick Glegg from the Virtual Stoa  (via):

I’ve never had much time for Cameron and Clegg, with Cameron modelling himself on Blair, and Clegg on Cameron. But what the election campaign is bringing out is the extent to which Cameron was only ever offering the most fraudulent impersonation of Blair, and that it’s because of this that the Clegg-as-Cameron strategy is working out so very nicely for the Liberal Democrats.
The reason Blair was far more successful as a centrist politician than Cameron is managing to be is that he went out of his way to humiliate the Left of his party in public as a part of his move to the right. He chose to pick fights that he really didn’t have to fight, with the result that it made it all much easier for former Conservative voters to think that it was safe to vote Labour after all.
Cameron, by contrast, has made a lot of centrist noises, and he’s done various things that the Tory headbanger tendency doesn’t much like (stuff on the website about tackling homophobic bullying in schools, running more women candidates or candidates from ethnic minorities in winnable seats, banging on about the environment, usw), but he’s never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right, to lure them out into the open, and to slap them down in public.

David Cameron is trying to impersonate Blair because he can't impersonate Thatcher without scaring everyone or rather reminding them of John Major. I believe that he has trouble taking on the right of his party because it doesn't like humiliation or even confrontation as the left of the left does because it reassures it of its intellectual superiority. As to Nick Clegg, his choice given that Labor has been governing for more than 13 years can't be to look at the left, but to rather look as David Cameron would be looking if he was sure to be the future prime minister. The goal is to make himself look not as a unsettling novelty or a risky change candidate, but as a bold, but reasonable one that would give the Brits change without taking their country back to the Eighties or to even the Blair years. In short, the point is that people like toxins in politics if they make them feel good and politicians tend to go back to what has worked before.

Nick Clegg, fils du peuple

Worth digesting point from Jonathan Raban on Nick Clegg:

Though, like Cameron, he comes from a rich family and was privately educated, Clegg’s accent is mongrel-London and his pleasant face looks more fils du peuple than to-the-manor-born. His great strength is that he comes off as entirely inoffensive; decent, knowledgeable, articulate without being dangerously eloquent or witty, bright but not brilliant, telegenic but not a natural star. Eight days of national fame have led to a rash of silly comparisons with Obama, which, I think, miss the whole point of Nick Clegg, one of whose chief merits, to the skeptical British eye, is that he is no Obama. Clegg and the Lib Dems give the electorate the chance to teach the British parliament a lesson that it won’t forget.

Nick Clegg is able to play the role of le fils du peuple because again, he is neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown and because his party has always been on the outside, which gives it the possibility to pretend to be on the side of the people who feel misrepresented by Labor and the Tories. I have to admit that the UK election fascinates me and that I'm wondering how much like Americans the Brits are. I have the suspicion that David Cameron is the next prime minister and that Nick Clegg might just have to become his number two.  I hope that I'm wrong.

Bad people politics

The quote of the day is from Nick Cohen:

(...)with the possible exception of the BNP, the Lib Dems are indeed the most unscrupulous campaigners in politics, the only party to my knowledge that has taken stolen money from criminals and then refused to return it to its rightful owners. Meanwhile, you do not have to be a deranged militarist to look at the Liberal Democrat front bench and suspect that they would, if they could, leave Afghan women to the mercy of the Taliban and feel very pleased with themselves as they did it.

Another Change election

I'm disgusted by the empty and flashy word that is 'change' during political campaigns. Change i used as a way to avoid talking about substance and to camouflage troubling policies, but Jonathan Freedland is right when he reaches the following conclusion:

(...)with Nick Clegg repeating the accomplished performance of the week before – means the two largest parties now have to accept that they are in a new kind of contest from now till polling day. Any hope that normal service would be resumed has gone.
For Labour, that should prompt a radical conclusion. A government in power for 13 years cannot hope to win an election that is now all about change. Instead its best hope surely has to be to maximise its core vote to prevent a collapse into the low 20s on percentage points, a defeat even more absolute than that of 1983.

I don't see how Gordon Brown can defeat both Clegg and Cameron in an election when change is the buzz word because  everything that he does looks old and just reminds people that Labor has been in power for a long time

Britain, Europe, Brown, Cameron and Clegg

Gavin Hewitt summarizes the positions of the three main candidates to be the next prime minister of Britain

The debate came down to this: the Conservatives will resist any new powers going to Brussels. The differences between Labour and the Liberal Democrats over Europe are slight. They believe the EU delivers a string of benefits in dealing with common problems.

Something tells me that the European policy of the next prime minister will be lukewarm and careful not mater who wins because the result of his election will be too tight for the winner to ignore the fact that the Brits don't feel that warm towards Europe.The form might be different, but the substance will be the same meaning that the tone will be Thatcherian and the meat not very much different from the one of the policies of the Blair-Brown governments.

A reason to resist Nick Clegg

Chris Dillow offers reasons not to vote the Liberal Democrats and thus for Nick Clegg. The most convincing of Dillow's reasons is the following:

I have many more arguments with Labour policy, and yet I feel an instinctive fondness for the party that I don’t towards the Lib Dems.
One reason for this is that I’ve never been sure what their core principles are. At best, this reflects the tension between Orange Bookers and tofu-munching eccentrics. At worst, it’s manifested itself in a mere search for a gap in the market between the two main parties, and the tendency to tell voters on the doorstep whatever they want to hear.

It is in that sense that Nick Clegg reminds me most of Obama, you hear what you want to hear and you have to wonder what he really believes and whether there is more beef to the change candidate than cheese and air. The fact that the campaign is really short compared to the one in America helps and hurts Clegg because he has to rely solely  on image to seduce on voters by providing them with just enough substance so not as to turn them off and to convince them he is not a lightweight while offering them enough sweeties with charm to get to them to marry him even though they don't know him very well. Thus, Clegg is hoping for a coup de foudre, but the trouble with love at first sight is that the awakening can be rough and lead to a brutal separation.

Scripted politics

Entertaining story from Charlemagne:

A Labour MP I know tells a story about the young Tony Blair, campaigning in a tough council housing estate years before he was famous and powerful. At the time, Labour was still promoting a platform of more cordial relations with the Soviet Union, and nuclear disarmament. According to this (supposedly true) story, the young Mr Blair began explaining to an elderly woman that only Labour could avert nuclear armageddon. "Can Labour stop the yobs peeing in the lift?" she replied. Mr Blair waffled, sticking to his lines about disarmament. "Young man," said the voter severely. "If Labour can't stop them peeing in the lifts, how are they going to stop a nuclear war?"

Cleggmania and the state of the British Democracy

Brendan O'Neill on Cleggmania, the popularity of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat candidate to be Britain's next prime minister:

Cleggmania, as the media (who else?) have dubbed it, is an extraordinary phenomenon. Not because recent opinion polls seem to indicate that the Lib Dems are benefiting from Labour’s and the Tories’ disarray – the Lib Dems have long been a dustbin-style repository for the electorate’s disgruntlement with the two main parties. And not because some newspapers are getting overexcited about a young(ish) and allegedly handsome politician – from Blair to Cameron, hacks have always had a soft spot for soundbites combined with cheesy grins. No, Cleggmania is extraordinary because it indicates that the media are now becoming more and more politically influential, to the extent that they can almost singlehandedly frame the way that politics is understood and even how the political leaders conceive of themselves and their campaigns.

Humm, I wonder if O'Neill thought the same thing about Obamania. In any case, he isn't wrong, the trouble is that the Brits and their journalists have been infected by the Obama syndrome, which is the willingness to believe that it is enough to vote for somebody who epitomizes, symbolizes and looks like change to get it. It's easy anyway and gives the impression that one special and providential man can change a nation without asking it to make some sacrifices and to change itself like Lionel Messi can win a soccer football game. If Nick Clegg were someone other than a good 'clean' white man, he would be unbeatable. That said, I like Nick Clegg, I just don't know what he really stands for and I'm sure for a lot of Brits what matter is that he isn't the other two and that he represents a difference alternative, a chaotic and potentially dangerous one, but a different one nevertheless.

UK Debate II: Gordon Brown can't win

My take on the second Britain election debate is that Gordon Brown cannot win because Nick Clegg's presence hurts him. David Cameron looked good, but I don't think he has sealed the deal but I thin that he helped by Clegg in he same way that John Edwards helped Obama during the Democratic primaries debates by reminding voters that how much they want change and that Brown is the status quo. Alex Massie has an interesting take on the debate. His conclusion is that Gordon Brown won narrowly. Massie is too close to the trees to realize that for Brown to win, he has to be better than both Cameron and Brown, Cameron only has to be better than Brown, and Clegg is the wild card for he is trying to convince the Brits to go against their history by trusting him enough to vote for him, which means remaing both fresh and steady. 

Out of touch

I'm not a Brit, but I am still appalled by how out of touch Lord Pearson, of the United Kingdom Independence Party, is.(via) What is he doing on TV?  That's the kind of people, smart operatives keep in the background especially when there is an election going on.

Philosophy and politics

Julian Baggini on philosophy and politics:

In many ways, the disconnect between politics and philosophy is neither surprising nor unhealthy. Real politics is a messy business of compromise and coalition; political philosophy the scrupulously tidy task of conceptual clarification and justification. Nevertheless, there should be some interplay between the two: the pragmatics of the real can be guided by visions of the ideal, and vice-versa.

I' less comfortable than Baggini with the idea that politics and philosophy are disconnected because it makes the former being about everything but thought and substance

New Europe as a self-satisfying delusion

Another proof that Mary Dejevsky lives in another world:

New Europe was the neat formula coined by Donald Rumsfeld in aid of the Bush administration's war effort. The "old Europeans" disliked and derided it, as it suggested that Europe was more divided over the Iraq invasion than it actually was. But they could never deny its grain of truth. There was indeed a split between those who signed up to the Bush crusade for democracy in foreign parts – not least because of their recent history – and those who saw the same campaign as a misuse of military might.
But that was then. Now that Poland and Russia are making up, East and Central Europe have lost their appetite for fighting US wars, and the Obama administration is eschewing the whole idea of special relationships, it could be time to lay this irritating concept to rest. Six years after the European Union completed its greatest single expansion, the divisions are neither as sharp nor as resentful as they were.
Even as "new" Europe blends with the old, however, could it be that a new breed of rather different "new" Europeans may be arising in that least likely of places, here in Britain? There are reasons to doubt, but suddenly, too – for us pro-European dinosaurs – to hope.

My reaction this paragraph and to Dejevsky's article is that pro-Europeans like too much the politics of hope instead of dealing with the reality, the fact that inadequate institutions and the lack of ambition, of pragmatism, of political courage and the refusal to acknowledge that countries have different interests is crippling the European Union. The point is that Eurocrats like Dejevksy like fantasies, grand ideas because they make them what I'm started to believe they like to be: optimistic dreamers instead of being builders and leaders. It seems clear to me that Dejevsky is enamored with the idea of "new Europeans"  who will do what their elders couldn't  because it is an empty dream that doesn't cost her anything or rather require nothing more than hopefulness. Ah, if life were that easy, I would have already capitulated to Obamania!

Europe hearts Nick Clegg

Pertinent assertion from Tony Barber:

(...) as Clegg rides high in the polls, Europe has a big beaming smile on its face - but it is doing its best to hide it, for fear that British voters spot it and punish Clegg accordingly.

I wonder if all this focus on Nick Clegg isn't going to halt his improbable march to Downing Street.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg as Children of privilege

Interesting, but not surprising point from Sholto Byrnes for media coverage and biases depends on likability and other fluffy criteria such as as attractiveness and friendliness to the press:

Two of the three party leaders are the sons of financiers, attended major public schools and then went to Oxbridge. Both have aristocratic connections and high-powered, high-earning wives. Yet only one, David Cameron, is portrayed as the child of privilege, while none of the "revelations" about Nick Clegg – that Louis Theroux was his fag at school, that his grandmother was a Russian baroness, or that his family owns a chateau in France – stop many, including even a Daily Telegraph columnist, from depicting him as an "ordinary bloke".

Media coverage in political elections is always unfair and even often outrageously bias when what is important and even critical is the personality of the candidates. One only has to be reminded of the press coverage that Al Gore got in the 2000 American presidential election (Bush got favorable coverage because he was friendly to journalists and even had pet names for them) and the one of Hillary Clinton who was considered to be unsympathetic to the press got while Obama was glorified.

Nick Clegg as the new Princess Di

Interesting stuff from Iain Martin on the new hysteria around Nick Clegg:

But similarly to Diana, hailing from the English aristocracy, Clegg is a creation of the political class he wants to shake up. Remember, Clegg is a professional politician who, after Westminster and Cambridge, was schooled by the Brussels elite. He then became an MEP and an MP. He is a rebel only in that he wants to smash the system and rebuild it so that it operates in his favor, but he has much in common with the opponents he attacks.
Like Diana in death, Clegg is now also beyond criticism — which entrenches his new popularity. The two leaders of the main parties are petrified of being seen as being unfair to “Nick.” They fear looking mean and out of step with these dramatic shifts in public opinion. If they attack him directly, they vindicate his claim that the two big parties are scared of their duopoly being challenged and are getting desperate. If they treat him with more respect, he continues to grow in stature.
In a sense, however, it’s not really about Nick Clegg — charming bloke though he is. He got himself, brilliantly, in the right place at the right time. But he’s just the vehicle.

For some reasons, the more I read articles comparing Clegg to Princess Di to make the point that he is a lightweight or no worthy to be prime minister, the more I hope that he win because it is transforming the British election into a pop event since politics, substance seem to be overlook by the fluff and he anxiety of he many over why might happened if Nick Clegg happened.

The British media and Cleggophilia

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, responding to the fact that Nick Clegg has become a media darling and that some polls put him ahead of the Tories and Labor:

I am certain that the Tories will win, and that the current fantasy of a Liberal Democrat resurgence is the biggest load of media-driven nonsense since the funeral of Diana.

Johnson might be right. I'm wondering if the Brits are risk-takers and therefore willing to take a chance on Nick Clegg. I know that neither Americans nor the French would even if they were convinced that a third party candidate of the presidency was the best for the job. They would find a way convince themselves that their country couldn't deal with political uncertainty, that their system of government was the best in spite of its imperfections and that therefore they shouldn't break it by trying something/someone new.

Liking Nick Clegg

I've just finished watching the UK election debates; as most pundits, I ended up liking Nick Clegg. Nick Robinson shares my views on this manner and expresses them better than I could:

Politically it is the emergence of Nick Clegg as a serious player in this election which will prove to be most significant. The Liberal Democrat leader was given a great opportunity to introduce himself to the millions of voters who scarcely knew him and he took it with gusto.
The question is whether instant polls suggesting that he "won" the debate can be converted into increased support for his party. If so, what matters is where will that support come from.
With a hung parliament a very real possibility and with many voters saying that they like the idea of parties working together the Lib Dems are certain to find themselves wooed, attacked and scrutinised with renewed vigour.

I feel uneasy about the fact that I liked Nick Clegg because I don't know much about the Liberal Democrats (his party) and don't trust his shtick about the other guys been bad and him being fresh, new, and thus, the only one capable of bringing change to the Brits and Britain, it reminds me too much of Obama. In any case, the reason why I need more from Clegg is that I'm aware that my attraction to him as a candidate is also a product for the fact that I don't trust Brown and disagree with Cameron. Having Clegg would be a way to escape a untenable dilemma, which I'm sure many Brits feel which was to do when you don't like two main parties candidates and that the political history of your country tells you that voting Clegg may just bring unnecessary chaos to a nation that doesn't need it. 

I'm happy that I don't to vote.