Edward Docx
On 6th December, 30 years ago, on a dark and miserable night in south London, a few streets from where I am writing this, a young Peter Mandelson was elected as a Labour borough councillor to the world’s most insane local council—Lambeth. Representing Stockwell, the 26-year-old Mandelson found himself sitting on a Labour council led by a man called “Red Ted,” who was backed by a grim cast of Trotskyites and Bennites. Though few pause to consider it now, this was Mandelson’s first experience of real politics. It was winter 1979 and the Labour party was just about to forget about the British people altogether in favour of a long and enthusiastic tour of the hinterlands of lunacy and irrelevance. Mandelson was living in a tiny flat in Kennington. His bed—in the living room—folded into the wall.
On 17th February this year, Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool was attending a drinks reception at the Manhattan penthouse that is the official residence of the British consul-general in New York. The secretary of state for business, enterprise and reform was in America to talk up the British economy. The centrepiece was a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. But, as he waited at the studios of CNBC during a busy day of interviews, Mandelson overheard the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, claiming that Britain was in “a downward spiral.” On screen Mandelson reacted robustly; later on though—at the party and in the presence of journalists—he let fly: “Why should I have this guy running down the country? Who the fuck is he?” he was overheard to say. Thus a mini-media storm was set in motion. And yet there was a further, more private, layer to the evening’s events. At some point, Mandelson took a moment to send a text to the young daughter of a close friend who was also in New York and with whom he had been in touch throughout his visit—a text to the effect that the evening was deeply tedious and that he wished they had gone to the Armani party instead as they had discussed. It was New York fashion week and he would much rather have been with David and Victoria.
The two dates are illustrative. The first, in 1979, because many people forget the political landscape into which Mandelson first ventured and from which he has spent the last 30 years in flight—both individually and, with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, as one of the triumvirate who created new Labour in the mid-1990s. Imagine that you are in your mid-twenties and that, for the next three years, your diary is full of meetings at which you will discuss lamp-posts and dog mess with people who have no interest in the practical necessities of government (or even lamp-posts and dog mess) and who believe that Trotsky is humanity’s best chance of salvation and denounce you as “an enemy of the people” if you demur. Of course, Mandelson is famously the grandson of Herbert Morrison (Labour home and foreign secretary, deputy prime minister), but it is on Lambeth council where Peter had his first real experience of the actual workings of the Labour party. And it is important to remember that he was not a media-fixer there but an elected representative; that he had to fight these people hand to hand through every policy decision, and that these experiences, as much as his ancestry, are what will have shaped his future thinking. A man’s life is set on its course and his opinions begin to ossify in the years between leaving home and his early thirties; and for Mandelson this period coincided with the far-left frenzy in the Labour party. It must have been dismal, and it is why the SDP was formed in 1981 and why Mandelson left politics for television the following year.
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MG Zimeta
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These are dark times to be a politician or a banker. Hedge fund managers, newly relegated to the social wilderness reserved for sex offenders and arms dealers, may or may not be pleased to now be joined by their MPs. The recent national anger at our political and financial elite has been unprecedented: but are we right in our rage? “Anybody can become angry,” warns Aristotle, “that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose – that is not in everybody’s power, that is not easy.” In the furore about the failed morals of our political and financial institutions, are we in danger of compromising our own moral standing, or missing a valuable opportunity to fix what went wrong?
The easiest response to wrongdoing is retribution. Several of our expense-fiddling MPs and senior failed bankers have been subject to humiliating public scrutiny of their finances and lifestyles. Such vengeance can feel good, but it plays to the lowest parts of our own character. And establishing guilt, unfortunately, does not always mean establishing remorse: “I pleaded guilty, a secular plea,” says JM Coetzee’s fallen academic David Lurie in his novel Disgrace. “That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there.” “I accept responsibility for that which I was responsible,” wrote Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of RBS defending his £16m pension after the treasury used £20bn to bail out the crippled bank. “[T]o voluntarily accept a reduction… is not warranted.”
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Andrew Adonis
Charles Darwin’s bicentenary has overshadowed that of William Gladstone, which also falls this year. Yet, especially in these turbulent times, the four-times Liberal prime minister stands out as one of the great evolutionary pioneers of modern progressive politics—less celebrated than Abraham Lincoln and FDR because he was not a wartime leader, yet equally as important.
From his budgets as chancellor in the early 1850s until his retirement from the premiership in 1894, Gladstone was Victorian Britain’s leading progressive politician. As the dominant change-maker in eight governments, he radically extended political rights and pioneered constant, iterative reform. His legacy was a world-class economy and a set of institutions dedicated to the service of a cohesive public interest, rising above the sectional claims of class.
This was in stark contrast to the Britain of his youth. Gladstone entered parliament in the early 1830s amid a deep economic crisis and semi-revolutionary struggle for parliamentary reform. The trouble was rooted in the social dislocation of the industrial revolution and two decades of war with France, exacerbated by a narrow, inflexible political elite. The Great Reform Act of 1832 quelled the immediate threat, giving a political opening to the middle class. Yet social conflict was still endemic, as reflected by the Chartist and the anti-Corn Law League protests in the 1830s and 1840s.
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Anatol Lieven
By ancestry, John McCain is a Scots-Irishman. That is to say, he comes from one of the oldest, most admirable and most worrying ethno-cultural traditions in the US. To a remarkable extent, that tradition is reflected in McCain’s character traits: his obstinancy; his tendency towards unshakeable friendship and implacable hatred; his hair-trigger temper; his deep patriotism; his obsession with American honour; and his furious response to any criticism of the US. These are not just the products of his military upbringing and experiences as a prisoner in North Vietnam, but also the result of his being the proud descendant of Indian-fighters and Confederate soldiers.
Non-Americans are not used to thinking of white Americans in terms of old ethno-cultural traditions, except when it comes to imported immigrants such as Italian-Americans. Yet the Scots-Irish cultural traits live on everywhere, from evangelical religion to country music. They have been examined by several great American scholars, including David Hackett Fischer and Kevin Phillips, as well as more popular authors like Walter Russell Mead.
Both sides of McCain’s family come from the old Confederate southwest: his father’s side from Missouri, his mother’s from Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma. McCain’s great-great-grandfather, Will-iam Alexander “Fighting Bill” McCain, was a Confederate soldier. His paternal family took the classic Scots-Irish route in the 18th century, from Scotland, down from Virginia through the Carolinas to the old frontier in the Appalachians and beyond. McCain’s mother was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the setting for Merle Haggard’s iconic anthem of patriotic, conservative small-town America, “Okie From Muskogee,” where: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don’t take our trips on LSD/We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street/We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.”
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Tom De Castella
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Dinner with Mugabe by Heidi Holland (Penguin, £17.99)
The aim of Heidi Holland’s biography of Robert Mugabe is to humanise the monster so that we can understand the “three-dimensional Mugabe instead of a cartoon villain.” That doesn’t look like such a bright idea in the context of another brutal election campaign in which the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been murdered, raped and tortured into submission.
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Robin Leanse
I don’t go to many north London dinner parties these days. So I forgot the things that I thought they were: the collective agonising about the state of the family, town, country, the world, the universe; the booze that turned the occasional sow’s ear into a silk purse, from which a thank-you letter could be truly made; the aspiration to real conversation that was collective, honest, brisk, sometimes witty, wearing its authority lightly and never patronising.
It was good for me to go to one again. A tidy drawing room was a holiday, and not having to be a cook was as good as a rest. But it was only when we sat down to eat, and converse, that I realised how the party had changed while my back was turned. It was climate change, become social. True, there was a bit of softening up of the old sort, some wine, some chat about Angers castle’s battlements and the huge tapestries within. Someone speculated on the similarity between Taoism and Judaism.
But then it happened—I am still trying to remember what exactly triggered it. I think it was when one of our number said, “One person can change the world. All you need is love.” Then I did something I can’t think I ever did in the old dinner party days. I realised what I really felt not just about climate change, not just diminishing resources, or al Qaeda, but about the whole menacing mass—and blurted it out. I still find it hard to confess. I have too many 20th-century resistances to the word. But what I said was, “I want a leader.”
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William Gill
Argentina’s recently elected president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was due to visit London this week for the Progressive Governance conference. She was forced to cancel her trip owing to a national strike by Argentinian farmers, who are outraged by a series of new taxes. This has led to food shortages, road blockages and anti-government demonstrations—not the kind of image Kirchner wanted to project abroad.
Argentina has been a constitutional democracy ever since the fall of the last military junta in 1983. The experience has not been successful. Ever since becoming a republic in 1853, the country has had a fraught relationship with the notion of a constitution, guaranteed rights, separation of powers, press freedom and the role of the opposition. Democracy in Argentina, unlike its neighbours Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, grows weaker with every president because, as with the western diet adopted by suddenly wealthy Asian nations, the body politic is not suited to it. Other than the populist Peronist movement, no political party has an effective national presence. The country has for all intents and purposes become a one-party state, with the inevitable financial corruption and authoritarianism.
When Cristina’s husband Néstor was inaugurated as Argentina’s president in 2003, nobody imagined that his wife would succeed him. But then many people thought there would be no successor. The economic collapse of 2001 had brought the country close to disintegration. Néstor Kirchner became president only because none of the bigger figures in the Peronist party wanted the job, which was seen as a political tombstone. As governor of Santa Cruz (a Patagonian province larger than Britain but with only 200,000 inhabitants) between 1991 and 2003, Kirchner was an effective administrator and an authoritarian leader. As president of Argentina, he applied the same tactics to a country of 40m. Arguing that the fallout from the financial crisis demanded strong leadership, Kirchner asked congress to extend the extraordinary powers that were granted to his predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, after Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. Two years ago, he asked for those powers to be made permanent, and this was granted. They removed most of the levers the legislature had over the executive, including approval of the national budget and control of provincial funds.
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Robert Reich
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Almost 40 years ago, Bill Clinton and I sailed across the Atlantic to take up residence as students at Oxford University. I recall only two things from that voyage. The first was becoming seasick and retiring to my small cabin. This was followed a few hours later by a knock on my door and the appearance of a lanky southerner bearing chicken soup. Bill Clinton didn’t say, “I feel your pain”—that phrase came years later on the campaign trail—but I was nonetheless touched by his empathy and generosity. Despite my queasy stomach, we talked long into the night, mostly about what had happened to America.
Both of us had been politically active, but now looked forward to putting an ocean between us and the disappointments that marked America in 1968. Two months earlier, Chicago had been the scene of a riotous Democratic convention, during which numbers of young people who had been lured into politics by Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar campaign and then Robert Kennedy’s rousing call for social change were beaten by the police. By the time of our voyage, Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, McCarthy’s bid had flopped, the Democrats were in the process of nominating Hubert Humphrey and the Republicans Richard Nixon. The Vietnam war continued unabated. Several American cities were in flames.
My other recollection from that crossing was finding Bobby Baker on board. His decision to travel to England at this time, on this particular ship, seemed a cruel joke—suggesting there was no real escape. (Baker had been a crony of Lyndon Johnson until Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, had exposed his alleged deals with organised crime, forcing him to resign.)
Why do I trouble you with these reminiscences? Because the upheavals of 1968 splintered the Democratic party and marked the beginning of the rise of a new Republican majority—and the subsequent rise of the neocons on foreign policy, supply-side tax cutters on the economy and evangelical Christians on social policy. The Democratic establishment drifted into the comforting somnolence of a seemingly solid majority in congress, losing touch with the white working class that had been at the core of the New Deal coalition. The left all but abandoned politics—some vanishing into the hills to find spiritual enlightenment; the more academic disappearing into hermeneutics and deconstructionism; blacks, gays and women losing themselves in “identity” politics; and the few who remained (including Bill and me) supporting George McGovern in his disastrous run for president in 1972. Since then, it’s been basically right-wing politics—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and the two Bushes. And, oh yes, my old friend’s administration, of which I am proud to have been a member (as labour secretary). But Bill did not move the Democrats or the nation left. He moved the Democrats to the right and kept the nation essentially where it was.
Are we approaching another turning point, like 1968—but one that reverses the great pendulum of American politics and moves the nation left? The George W Bush presidency has been such an abject failure—only 30 per cent of Americans approve of the job he has done—that the country may be ready. The economy is heading towards a recession, or worse. Inequality of income and wealth are wider than they’ve been in a century.
Add to this the fact that Americans are not—perhaps never were—as right-wing as their Republican leaders claim. According to polls, most Americans now believe the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to be unfair; most think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that America should pull out; most say they are willing to pay more taxes to improve inner-city schools; most support more regulation of business in order to improve the environment; a majority thinks homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal and that abortion should be left up to women and their doctors; the vast majority believe large corporations have too much power in Washington; and most support restrictions on lobbying and financing political campaigns.
But is all this enough to augur a move to the left in American politics? Don’t count on it. John McCain, the presumptive Republican standard-bearer, has a fair shot. Although he is not a part of the Republican establishment—he supports reform of the immigration laws, initially opposed Bush’s tax cuts and doesn’t kowtow to the evangelical right—make no mistake: McCain is a right-winger.
What of the Democrats? John Edwards, the most left-leaning of the three major candidates, and the only one who consistently emphasised the widening income gap and the worsening plight of America’s poor, has been forced out. Of the two who remain, Hillary Clinton is no leftist. As a senator, she voted in favour of Bush’s Iraq war resolution in 2002, and, more recently, in favour of certifying Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation. She wants universal healthcare, but won’t support a “single-payer” plan like Britain’s NHS, which is the best way to control medical costs. She won’t commit to raising taxes on the rich to finance social programmes, except for rolling back the Bush tax cuts. She won’t even pay the large, looming cost of the baby boomers’ social security by raising the portion of income subject to social security taxes.
Obama at least has the courage to demand that the rich pay more for social security, but his health plan is no more radical than Clinton’s. He talks more openly than she does about the need to reduce inequality, but has not been specific about whether or to what extent he’d raise taxes on the very wealthy to pay for social programmes, beyond reversing Bush’s tax cuts. He was against Iraq from the start, but so far has avoided much detail about how and when he’d extract US troops.
Yet “Obamania” has almost nothing to do with specific policies. It is rather Obama’s almost pitch-perfect echo of the John F Kennedy we heard in 1960 and the Robert Kennedy last heard in 1968. It is a call for national unity and sacrifice—not in the interest of military prowess but in the cause of social justice, both in the nation and around the world. His appeal is for more civic engagement, not necessarily more government. He has the voice and wields the techniques of the community organiser he once was in Chicago, asking people to join together. Not since 1968 has America been so starkly summoned to its ideals.
It is easy to write off Obamania as another bout of that naive enthralment that occasionally claims US voters. Perhaps it is. This is what Hillary Clinton and my friend from 40 years ago are counting on. But if the Clintons could stop to think back to what they felt and understood then, they might come to a different conclusion, as have I.
To see the enthusiasm for Obama as a potential turn to the “left” does not describe what is occurring. He is not promising and will not deliver European levels of welfare and tax. But the US does seem ready to start a new political chapter. The nation wants to be inspired again, as it was 40 years ago. Recall that neither JFK nor his brother were leftists. They were realists, but also idealists. They understood that nothing good happens in Washington unless the public is mobilised to make it happen. For purposes of practical electoral strategy as well as high-minded moral aspiration, they never tired of reminding the nation of its founding principles—above all, that all men are created equal.
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Andreas Umland
Most Russian and western observers see the man who has just been elected Russia’s new president as at best a relatively liberal figure, if not a faceless opportunist. Some think Dmitri Medvedev will be merely a second Putin, whose election just means more of what we have seen during the last eight years. But Medvedev’s early political biography, as well as more recent statements of his on such issues as multi-party competition, freedom of the press and Russia’s relations to the west, point in a different direction. Should the Russian presidential administration come under the lasting and full control of Medvedev, the Kremlin will become a focal point of pro-democratic tendencies in Moscow. This development could lead to something not dissimilar to a second perestroika.
Medvedev’s CV differs in important respects from Putin’s. Both the outgoing and new Russian presidents were law students who grew up and studied in St Petersburg. Yet Medvedev, 13 years younger than his predecessor, has no known KGB background, and had already started to be active in politics during the heyday of Gorbachev’s glasnost, while Putin was still serving the KGB in Dresden. In early 1989, studying for an advanced law degree at Leningrad State University, Medvedev worked as an election campaigner for his professor Anatoly Sobchak—then a prominent leader of Russia’s emerging democratic movement running for a seat in the USSR parliament. This was, to be sure, only a brief episode in Medvedev’s biography. His subsequent political career followed a relatively straightforward trajectory: posts within St Petersburg city council and then inside Russian presidential administrations, and later chairman of the huge gas monopoly Gazprom, before his appointment by Putin as deputy prime minister. Yet Medvedev’s brief involvement in the Russian democratic movement is still significant. Back in 1989, it was not clear whether the Soviet system was coming to an end, and becoming an anti-communist activist still held a real risk.
Moreover, this rarely noted aspect of Medvedev’s biography correlates with those political announcements that have been shaping his public profile for the last years. The phrase the Kremlin usually deploys in defence of anti-western foreign and illiberal domestic policies—”sovereign democracy”—was rejected by Medvedev in an interview for the popular journal Ekspert in July 2006 as “a far from ideal term… when qualifying additions are made to the word ‘democracy,’ this leaves one with a strange aftertaste.” In an earlier interview, Medvedev had stated that, “I certainly do not see Russia’s role as that of an opponent of America,” and that, “it is obvious for me that Russia should position herself as a part of Europe.” Other quotes show that Medvedev seems to believe sincerely that Russia would benefit from competition among large parties, a strong civil society, active civic disobedience, an articulate opposition, multiple channels of information, an independent judiciary and a transfer of power by democratic means. While defending Putin’s strengthening of the state, Medvedev, in an interview for Moskovskii Komsomolets in September 2006, also said that this process should “in no way make… basic human rights and freedoms a victim of an increase of order.” He made clear that “to think that Russia has a special path and faces a specific set of challenges is absolutely naive.” Contrast this positioning with that of Putin in the last days of the Yeltsin regime in 1999: he created an image of himself as a non-nonsense security service officer: a tough leader not afraid to use force in order to bring “stability” to the north Caucasus and to fight Chechen terrorism.
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Phil Zabriskie
In the weeks leading up to Suharto’s death on 27th January, a parade of Indonesian leaders, including President Susilo Yudhoyono, visited his bedside, showing that the man who ruled Indonesia for 32 years maintained a spectral power over the nation until the end. People wept openly when he died, and Yudhoyono declared a week of national mourning. There was adulation, perhaps some forgiveness. There will never be, however, a reckoning. Suharto will be judged in the hearts and minds of men and women, and in history books, but he will never face accusers in a court of law. His successors dared not demand he be held to account during his lifetime. Instead, they and the Indonesian people tried to grapple with a legacy that hangs over the whole of the archipelago.
Suharto said he ruled “based on the principle that the interest of the nation and… the greater group will be given priority over the individual or single group interest.” The statement reads like mockery, for he is one of the ultimate examples of a personality shaping a nation’s fate. Born in 1921 in Kemusuk, a small village in south-central Java, as a child Suharto was passed from one impoverished relative to the next. His schooling was heavily informed by a mix of the Javanese mysticism prevalent in the area and military training. He served in the Dutch army, then, during the second world war, Japanese-sponsored militias, which he left in 1945 to fight for Indonesia’s independence. He was a good soldier, described as “tough as hell” by one western military officer. While Sukarno—Indonesia’s first president, who ruled the country from independence in 1945 to 1967—was the handsome nationalist hero, the father of the country, Suharto did grunt work, eliminating threats, keeping order. He was demoted, however, when he was discovered running a sugar trading racket.
In September 1965, with Sukarno’s popularity flagging, assassins killed six generals in what was painted as an attempted communist coup. With the CIA providing names of suspected communists, Suharto’s soldiers killed between 500,000 and 1m people, according to most estimates. Simultaneously, he covertly organised anti-Sukarno protests which eventually convinced the president to step down. Suharto dragged the transfer of power out over two years, though, during which the catastrophic cost of instability was impressed on the Indonesian people. For many, the trauma of this era overshadows all that happened after. “Compared to the slaughter of those years, all the lies, corruption and nepotism of Suharto’s regime are a small, trivial manner,” said novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was imprisoned for much of the 1960s and 1970s (and died in 2006). For those years alone, he judged, Suharto deserved to be called “a criminal against humanity.”
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