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            Clinton and Blair: What's Left?

            America's next president has
much in common with Britain's next prime minister. Both Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair are comparatively young (and make a lot of it); suffused with energy and
conviction; and superbly effective on television, in front of a crowd, or face
to face. The likeness goes deeper. Clinton and Blair proclaim essentially the
same political philosophy, in essentially the same terms. They are champions of
a "new" left: reconciled to the central role of markets in the modern economy,
committed nonetheless to an active role for government, keen to foster new
forms of social cooperation. The closeness is no accident. Blair, much the most
effective of Labor's recent modernizers, has modeled his electoral strategy, in
substance and in style, on Clinton's.

            Something else they have in
common is a reluctance to admit what this strategy implies. Both seem unaware
of the price they have paid for their electoral strength--namely that, far from
reviving the left, they have realigned it out of any meaningful existence. For
modern anti-conservatives, the price of success has been moral and intellectual
evisceration. In both the United States and Britain, where there was once a
coherent (albeit often unpopular) alternative to conservatism, there is now
merely a tepid version of the same, with added self-righteousness.

            
Evidently, this is exactly what many voters want. A Clinton campaign button
puts it nicely: "At least he cares." In Britain, likewise, those who vote for
New Labor in the forthcoming election may expect little to change when Blair
and his team come to power. The party's program consists largely of assurances
to that effect. But to say this misses the point. What matters is that the
Tories seem a callous lot, and Tony Blair is a really nice chap.

            Clinton and Blair don't appear to be faking it. What makes
them such exceptionally effective politicians is that they really do care. It
would be wrong to say they have cynically repackaged what they affect to
deplore. They radiate genuine conviction. If Clinton and Blair seem
unaware of where their success leaves "liberalism" in the United States or
"socialism" in Britain, it is not because they are hiding something but because
they really are unaware. They are moderate conservatives deluding themselves
that they are something else.

            In 1992,
Clinton would have been harder to dismiss as a conservative in denial. In his
first presidential campaign he promised a lot, not the least of which was
radical reform of welfare and health care. Nothing came of it. The health-care
reform fell apart, and Clinton recently signed a welfare-reform law that,
measured against what he first hoped to do, was a step in the wrong direction.
Despite these failures, Clinton's presidency has been pretty successful. But
the main successes--curbing the budget deficit, presiding over steady growth
with low inflation, shrinking the government work force, passing the North
American Free-Trade Agreement--are achievements of which any moderate
conservative could be proud. Unlike his failures, there is nothing very liberal
about Clinton's successes.

            
Clinton has learned on the job. This time, his
campaign agenda is more modest, defined less by what he stands for than by what
he stands against (immoderate republicanism). Blair's strategy is the same,
only more so. New Labor defines itself in opposition to two enemies: old Labor
and the Tories. Given the Tory government's unpopularity, the attack on old
Labor matters more. Blair therefore renounces the policies that he and his
parliamentary colleagues supported until recently. New Labor will not increase
taxes, will not increase public spending, will not renationalize the companies
privatized by the Tories, will not restore trade-union power, and so on.

            Now that Labor's policies,
as far as one can tell, are all but identical to the Tories', Blair's attack on
the second enemy, the Tories themselves, has to be handled with care. There is
a strand of Gingrich extremism in British conservatism, but it is not yet
dominant, so assaulting it as Clinton has done in America would serve little
electoral purpose. (This may change once the Tories have lost the election.)
Blair cannot attack the substance of Tory policies without attacking his own,
so he must attack the government's rhetoric instead. New Labor deplores the
Tories' introduction of market forces within the National Health Service, for
instance. Judging by their various policy documents, however, Labor will not
reverse the Tory reforms. Instead, where the Tories talk of an "internal
market" (so conservative), Labor promises "proper accountability to patients"
(absolutely New Labor). On education, labor laws, and many other matters, Labor
seeks far-reaching reform of vocabulary, while leaving policies by and large
unchanged.

            It's
worth noting that the Tories' "market" reforms (successfully portrayed by
critics as capitalism-run-rampant) leave Britain's health-care system far more
nationalized than America's would have been under Clinton's plan (successfully
portrayed by critics as a "government takeover"). In other words, the political
spectrums of the two countries are, to some extent, different. But Clinton's
and Blair's political journeys remain similar. In particular, to make good the
lack of new left-of-center policies (which voters appear not to want), Clinton
and Blair have pumped up the consoling left-of-center symbolism (which is still
much in demand). In both cases, this comes in two main forms:

            First is the apologetic mode. As decent left-of-center
types, Clinton and Blair implicitly say, "We would love to do all the things
that left-of-center parties used to do--but we can't, because the world has
changed." Capital markets, globalization, information superhighways, and
whatnot compel us to modernize our policies, keep taxes and public spending
low, pay attention to the needs of business, and so on.

            Then comes
the bright, forward-looking, seizing-of-opportunities mode. Clinton's campaign
proclaims a new "Age of Possibility" for America. Blair has just published a
volume of speeches and articles titled New 
               Britain : My

               Vision 
               of a Young 
               Country . As men of the future, Clinton
and Blair say they transcend traditional left-right categories. Old labels and
the conflicts they represent have become hopelessly outmoded. The tensions
between, say, competition and compassion, or efficiency and equity, which
blighted politics for so long, are sterile quarrels of yesteryear.

            
There is little substance in any of this. Yes,
the world has changed. It keeps doing that. But only in small respects have
developments in technology and the global economy narrowed choices over policy.
What really has changed is that many voters in many countries have decided that
traditional left-of-center policies (e.g., higher taxes, more generous
provisions for the poor) are not what they want. Many also wish to be spared
any guilt that might arise on that account--which is why Clinton and Blair are
on to such a good thing with, "We'd love to do that, but it's no longer
feasible." What about new politics, transcended categories, and all that? In
the future, Clinton and Blair say, false oppositions between competition and
compassion, efficiency and equity, will be resolved. That would be good, but
how is it to be done? Simply by saying, again and again, "We must have
competition with compassion, efficiency with equity." If only this had been
understood before, we could all have become conservatives much sooner.

            The
clearest proof of the new left's poverty is what Clinton and Blair have to say
about the "middle class." In both Britain and America, the term covers nearly
everybody. In the age of possibility that beckons, one thing that apparently
will not be possible is a policy that imposes a fiscal burden on this group.
Not content to rule out policies (however worthy) that impose a cost on most
taxpayers, Clinton and Blair often go further, saying that their main fiscal
goal is to improve the position of the middle class. Since "the rich" are a
tiny proportion of taxpayers, the only thing this could mean in practice would
be an improvement relative to the position of the poor--an extraordinary idea
for supposedly left-of-center leaders, however modern or forward-looking, to
adopt.

            Any party expecting its program to be taken seriously as a
left-of-center alternative to conservatism must surely propose one of two
things: Either it must promise to increase in the aggregate the quantity and
quality of public services (and the taxes needed to pay for them), or else it
must promise, within an unchanged total of taxes and spending, to redirect the
flow of resources so that the less well-off get more. In either case, stripped
to its essentials, a left-of-center program seeks to help the less prosperous
at the expense of everybody else (i.e., at the expense of the middle
class).

            It may well be, as
conservatives would argue, that policies of this kind are a bad idea for one
reason or another. Perhaps they would fail. Conceivably, they would fail so
badly that they would even make the intended beneficiaries worse off. This is
exactly the argument that the left should be having with the right, just as in
the old days. For the moment, most strikingly in America and Britain, the left
has simply capitulated. In order to win power, it promises to make no
difference. Clinton and Blair won't do anything a conservative wouldn't. But at
least they care.