Europe’s centre-left suffers in the squeezed middle
By John Lloyd
Financial Times
October 3, 2009
September was the cruellest month for Europe’s centre-left. The greatest bloodbath came a week ago, when the Social Democratic party – Germany’s oldest, the foundation stone of social democracy across the continent – garnered less than a quarter of votes cast. Britain’s Labour party, whose polls are little better than the SPD’s result, put on a creditable show at its annual conference. But Gordon Brown’s generally well-received speech was instantly undercut by The Sun newspaper, which ended a 12-year policy of New Labour support with a front page proclaiming: “Labour’s lost it.”
In Italy, the continuing weakness of the left was exacerbated by a book published this past week – La Svolta (the turning point) – in which Francesco Rutelli, a former leader of the left in the 2001 parliamentary elections and co-founder of the Democratic party, the main left group, flatly states that “if the party turns to the left, it’s finished”. In a talk in Rome last week, Mr Rutelli told me he thought such a turn was overwhelmingly likely.
In France, the Socialist party remains transfixed by the feud between its former leader, Ségolène Royal, and the woman who narrowly secured a fiercely disputed succession, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille. The latter has sought a working truce with her rival; but, as the commentator Michel Noblecourt wrote in Le Monde, this “will be tainted with distrust, each doubting the legitimacy of the other and staying on guard”.
The irony – that the left fails together with the banks – has been much noted, but may be less of a contradiction than is apparent. In different ways, European social democracy was pro-market and pro-globalisation – especially New Labour, which in Tony Blair’s early years in power was both leader and exemplar. Liberal social reforms, a lesser role for trade unions and, above all, mass immigration were all part of centre-left politics and were broadly acceptable to the mass of the people so long as living standards rose and public services improved. Now, that implicit deal is threatened.
In this situation, it is not only the right that exults. The left, within these mainstream parties and outside, now sees a chance. The times are propitious: those charged with writing a manifesto for a party such as Die Linke (The Left, founded by Oskar Lafontaine, the renegade former SPD finance minister whose vote increased last week) would have a pleasant task. The widely mooted collapse of capitalism; rapidly rising unemployment; the determined resumption of the habits of greed by bankers and others able to skim off fresh supplies of cream; the present or coming cuts in public services and pay; the continuing human cost and fiscal drain of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – these are a rich menu on which to make a meal of a centre-left that did well out of a successful capitalism’s surplus and now struggles in its decline. John Harris, the left-Labour commentator, encapsulated his position’s scorn for New Labour in the current issue of Prospect magazine, describing its policies as “a mishmash of beliefs that only entrenched the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher”.
It will be no balm to centre-left leaders to observe that they are victims of the success of many of their central projects – in particular, the maintenance of generous welfare states. No governing party of the right in Europe, from Sweden to Italy, has sought radically to reduce taxes or make cuts to big social programmes; and though the latter may increasingly be the order of the day as the cost of anti-recessionary measures must be paid, the centre-left governments of Britain and Spain are as much implicated in this as the right.
Further, the right steals leftist clothes: an anti-elitist populism in Italy; a co-option of admired figures of the left into government in France; and in Britain, a resurgent Conservative party rails against Labour’s “top down” and “bureaucratic” reforms and talks of helping communities to help themselves. In ground long scorched for Conservatives – the constituency of Glasgow Central – the Tory candidate John Bradley brought in young Conservative students to work with local residents to clean up the Strathbungo area of the constituency. Mr Bradley claimed, on the website Conservative Home, that “bringing in local communities, and seeing their delight at what all of us have achieved at the end of a day’s work, is simply magnificent.”
The great causes – race, women’s and homosexual equality, community involvement, the spread of democratic practice – which had been significantly dominated by the left, are now largely uncontroversial on the western European right, except on its fringes and in parts of Italy’s governing coalition. The very success of decades of struggle render archaic the feminist rhetoric of Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, and has caused a debilitating split in Britain’s Equality Commission between those who, like Ms Harman, believe the struggle must continue and those who seek a targeted, post-equality agenda.
Neither success nor failure are permanent in politics; and in the gross inequalities of contemporary market societies, the centre-left may – as Mr Brown sought to do with his appeal to the “squeezed middle” of British society – recover a cause. But a remedy will be harder. For now, their party is over.
PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.
Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.
German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.
Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.
Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.
Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of theleft: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.
Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.”
When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.
It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics.
In Portugal, the governing Socialists won re-election on Sunday, but lost an absolute parliamentary majority. In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war. In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis, must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.
Part of the problem is the “wall in the head” between East and West Germans. While the Christian Democrats moved smoothly eastward, the Social Democrats of the West never joined with the Communists. “The two Germanys, one Socialist, one Communist — two souls — never really merged,” said Giovanni Sartori, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It explains why the S.P.D., which was always the major Socialist party in Europe, cannot really coalesce.”
The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.
The Socialist Party, with a long revolutionary tradition and weakening ties to a diminishing working class, is riven by personal rivalries. The party last won the presidency in 1988, and in 2007, Ségolène Royal lost the presidency to Mr. Sarkozy by 6.1 percent, a large margin.
With a reputation for flakiness, Ms. Royal narrowly lost the party leadership election last year to a more doctrinaire Socialist, Martine Aubry, by 102 votes out of 135,000. The ensuing allegations of fraud further chilled their relations.
While Ms. Royal would like to move the Socialists to the center and explore a more formal coalition with the Greens and the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou, Ms. Aubry fears diluting the party. She is both famous and infamous for achieving the 35-hour workweek in the last Socialist government.
The French Socialist Party “is trapped in a hopeless contradiction,” said Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left that can take as much as 15 percent of the vote. The party, at its summer retreat last month at La Rochelle, a coastal resort, still talked of “comrades” and “party militants.” Its seminars included “Internationalism at Globalized Capitalism’s Hour of Crisis.”
But its infighting has drawn ridicule. Mr. Sarkozy told his party this month that he sent “a big thank-you” to Ms. Royal, “who is helping me a lot,” and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a prominent European Green politician, said “everyone has cheated” in the Socialist Party and accused Ms. Royal of acting like “an outraged young girl.”
The internecine squabbling in France and elsewhere has done little to position Socialist parties to answer the question of the moment: how to preserve the welfare state amid slower growth and rising deficits. The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.
“The Socialists can’t adapt to the loss of their basic electorate, and with globalism, the welfare state can no longer exist in the same way,” Professor Sartori said.
Enrico Letta, 43, is one of the hopes of Italy’s left, currently in disarray in the face of Silvio Berlusconi’s nationalist populism. “We have to understand that Socialism is an answer of the last century,” Mr. Letta said. “We need to build a center-left that is pragmatic, that provides an attractive alternative, and not just an opposition.”
Mr. Letta argues that Socialist policies will have to be transmuted into a more fluid form to allow an alliance with center, liberal and green parties that won’t be called “Socialist.”
Mr. Winock, the historian, said, “I think the left and Socialism in Europe still have work to do; they have a raison d’être, and they will have to rely more on environment issues.” Combined with continuing efforts to reduce income disparity, he said, “going green” may give the left more life.
Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”
EuropeanSocialistsneed “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can’t do in the 21st century,” he said.
Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”
Hillary Clinton shouldn't blame the U.S. for climate concerns.
In a year that has not lacked for absurd moments, one of the most bizarre just passed almost unnoticed. That would be the spectacle of the U.S. secretary of state apologizing to India for the climate of the planet.
Hillary Clinton was speaking in Mumbai, making remarks last Saturday at the Taj Mahal hotel--which was one of the sites hit last November by Islamic radicals from Pakistan. During a three-day rampage, wielding AK-47s, pistols and grenades, they terrorized the city, killing more than 160 people and wounding more than 300, at locations including another hotel, the train station, a hospital and a Jewish community center.
For Clinton to speak at the Taj was a potent reminder of the very real and urgent concerns of our time, which Clinton talked about under the label of "violent extremism." This formulation has become standard American diplo-speak, in which there are no specific actors, just generic forces of "extremism" and "violence."
But at the same press conference, when asked about "climate change," Clinton in assigning blame for the woes of mankind did not hesitate to name names--or at least one name: the United States. She said: "Our point is very simple: that we acknowledge, now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes--the United States--and we, along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change."
Such U.S. breast-beating, of which there has been plenty in recent times, may start to sound like mere ritual; a sort of diplomatic throat-clearing. In the six months since taking office, Barack Obama has made a habit of offering apologies abroad--in places such as Istanbul, Cairo and Moscow--for the "mistakes" and "flaws" of the United States.
Even speaking from the American Cemetery in Normandy, at commemorations last month of the 65th anniversary of the World War II Allied campaign to liberate [OLD] Europe, Obama threw in a note about the "mistakes" of the liberators.
But there are real consequences and vast costs riding on some of this self-blame, not least the idea that America now owes apologies and compensation to the rest of the world for changes in the weather. [???] At the crux of this is a fixation on limiting carbon emissions. America is a big per-capita emitter. And low emission has become a new measure of virtue, propagated for years now by the ever-expanding climate bureaucracy of the United Nations and currently embraced by much of official Washington.
In a recent editorial headlined "King Canute at the G-8," TheWall Street Journal ridiculed, with good reason, the declaration from a recent meeting of the world's major industrialized nations that they would not permit the global average temperature of the earth to rise more than two degrees Celsius. (The colossal costs of this ambition would be imposed in rising scale over the next four decades on many folks who are now not yet old enough to vote.)
At the U.N., in locations from Bali to Rio de Janeiro to New York, slews of conferences in recent years have been honing demands that high carbon emitters, such as the U.S., both limit their activities and pay compensation to low carbon emitters, such as Bangladesh, Bolivia or Tanzania. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has most recently led the charge, decrying "global warming," or now, as global cooling has begun inconveniently manifesting itself, "climate change." Ban is now campaigning for countries such as the U.S. to "seal the deal" at a United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen this December, which aims to produce a global protocol of rules and wealth transfers. These would constrain and penalize Americans in service of U.N. dreams of controlling the climate and--yes, a la King Canute--the tides.
The problem with all this is not simply that despite U.N. claims of "consensus" on "climate change," there is actually plenty of dissent from well-qualified scientists over what causes the climate to change, and whether carbon, or mankind, is responsible at all. That is, in itself, a big glitch, and I find the skeptics persuasive. But even if we assume for purposes of argument that the U.N. version is correct, and global temperature and sea level can be fine-tuned to the decimal point by a vast political web of carbon regulation, there is yet another aspect to all this--which U.S. apologies utterly fail to take into account.
That would be the myriad ways in which human beings have been at work for millennia, and especially over the past century or two, inventing, creating, building and adapting to cope with climate and the broad forces of nature.
A prime contributor to the success of those efforts has been the United States. During those same two recent centuries, in which--not so coincidentally --America's free enterprise system has prospered, the world has benefited in leaps and bounds.Out of America have come such inventions as the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the telephone and medical progress on many fronts. American ingenuity, motivated by free markets, took the technology of computers from vacuum tubes to laptops. And though Al Gore did not invent the Internet, America did.
In many faraway places that most Americans rarely hear about and many will never visit, such U.S.-born bounty has helped illuminate the night, connect people with the world, raise productivity and living standards, and enhance health and extend lives. Nor has it been entirely inconsequential to human progress that America--with its mighty productive powers and dedication to democracy, as well as its carbon output--played a vital part in winning World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. is now on the front line of the Overseas Contingency Operation, until recently known as the Global War on Terror.
If you believe that for the welfare and future of mankind, nothing matters but carbon emissions, then Ban Ki-Moon is right; and Hillary Clinton was right to apologize on behalf of America for the world's weather.
Of course, that would actually make Clinton, and every other member of Obama's cabinet, a de facto Secretary of Combustion, because--remember--in this scheme, nothing matters but carbon emissions. From there, policy prescriptions unroll more naturally than apologies out of Obama's Cabinet. The U.S. can easily become the most virtuous country in the world simply by banning all human activity. There'd be no one left to apologize, but that's OK, because there'd also be nothing to apologize for.
In such a world, genocide would be a virtue, and poverty would be a good thing; all tending toward lower carbon emissions. Judged strictly by low carbon count, some ofthe admirable countries today, according to World Bank statistics, are Afghanistan, Albania, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea and Zimbabwe. Not coincidentally, the full roster of low emitters includes a large number of brutal dictatorships, or countries recovering from horrible misrule. In these countries, people are poor, and carbon emissions are low because individuals have (or had) no freedom to choose, to create or to pursue their dreams.
Obviously, however, Clinton and Obama do not think poverty is a good thing. Also while in India, Clinton pointed out that the G-8, of which the U.S. is a member, has just pledged another $20 billion to fight global poverty. The State Department and White House are flush with projects and programs aimed at fighting poverty.
It seems that even in today's Washington, carbon is not the sole determinant of goodness and human well-being on earth. Trade-offs matter. And just in case mankind, via U.N. protocols and Washington edicts, cannot succeed in transforming the planet into one vast, serene, unchanging and pleasantly cool Club Med, those trade-offs will matter a lot.
It may well be that whatever the climate brings, for whatever reasons, the most valuable resource will be the creativity of mankind--which, carbon emissions and all, flourishes best with minimal constraints from government. America, at least until now, has been an excellent example of this, and that is a point an American secretary of State, or president, can be proud of. Political leaders could much better serve their country by repeating it clearly and often, in place of this parade of apologies for America's "mistakes."
On her recent trip to India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned yet another lesson about how much international goodwill President Obama has earned with his incessant apologies and submissive attitude in international affairs. Clinton delivered to the Indians a ridiculous soliloquy apologizing for America's Industrial Revolution and our world-shaping technological achievements (which so often feed the hungry, cure the sick, and house the poor around the world).“We acknowl edge now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes – the United States – and we, along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change,” she said. “We are hoping that a great country like India will not make the same mistakes.”
The groveling was in line with Obama’s foreign policy, both in its embarrassing nature and in its ineffectiveness. For no amount of groveling could move Indian Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh to sacrifice his people's well-being in order to bolster the Obama administration’s self-defeating domestic program to curb global warming. “I would like to make it clear and categorical,” Ramesh declared, “India's position is that we are simply not in a position to take on legally binding emission reduction targets.”
India's importance here cannot be overstated. If the United States follows Obama's plan to cap carbon dioxide emissions, the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs it will lose as a result will migrate to India and other developing nations. That will insure growing economies for p laces like India and China, even as they emit the carbon that Americans choose to forego. Thus, without India and other developing nations joining us in the economic self-immolation of Obama’s cap-and-trade program, there will be no net reduction in carbon emissions.
Just in the last month, Obama has kept mostly quiet as Iranians sought freedom from the despotic mullahs who oppress them, and he has offered to trade our missile defense capabilities in return for meaningless arms reductions by the thugs running the Kremlin. And the Indian incident -- in which Obama’s Secretary of State sought India's cooperation on an economic policy certain to inflict great harm on America's economy -- appears to epitomize Obama's apparent lack of regard for legitimate U.S. security and economic interests around the world. As Obama begs for goodwill, leaders like Ramesh stand firm for their nations’ best interests. Shouldn’t Americans have a president who does the same?
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) roundly condemned the approach PresidentObama has taken to redefining America to the world, describing it as a "tour of apology" in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation today.
"This is the time for strength and confidence, not for apologizing to America's critics," said Romney at one point; at another, he said that "arrogant, delusional tyrants can not be stopped by earnest words and furrowed brows."
Romney's speech is part of a stepped-up effort by the former Massachusetts governor to draw contrasts with Obama in expectation of challenging him for the presidency in 2012.
Less than 24 hours before hitting Obama on defense and national security, Romney was on "Fox News Sunday" taking issue with the administration's plan to put General Motors into bankruptcy to restructure the company.
"We don't want a president and a head of the [United Auto Workers] running General Motors," Romney said at the time. "The American public ought to own that enterprise."
Romney's increasing willingness to speak out against Obama is an indication that he sees himself as far better suited than former vice president Dick Cheney or even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) to fill the leadership void in which the GOP currently finds itself.
Romney, while derided by many Democrats, is one of the most popular figures among the party faithful, many of who believe his decision to step aside for Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and subsequent work on behalf of the GOP presidential nominee last year proved his mettle.
Republicans also regard Romney as their most effective economic messenger, able to draw on his successes in the private sector to combat the bully pulpit afforded to Obama.
Seeking to move into that leadership vacuum also has obvious benefits for Romney who is making little secret of his interest in running for national office again in 2012. The more he can emerge as Obama's foil, the more he will solidify his place as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in three years time.
Romney is also working tirelessly behind the scenes to line up support for such a bid, campaigning all over the country -- most recently in Virginia -- on behalf of Republican candidates.
“I will never apologise for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” President George H.W. Bush’s statement in 1988 was more than just a “Bushism”, of the sort that his son later made famous. It was also a pithy summary of a whole school of thought in the US.
For many conservative Americans, one of the besetting sins of their liberal rivals is a tendency to go around apologising for their country. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative, memorably excoriated liberals as the “blame America first” crowd.
Now conservatives are complaining loudly that one of those namby-pamby, self-flagellating liberals is sitting in the Oval Office – abasing himself and the country before foreigners. President Barack Obama, they complain, has turned himself into “global apologiser-in-chief”. Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of conservative talk radio, rages that “everywhere he goes, he’s just apologising for the United States”.
In the Los Angeles Times, the political commentator James Kirchik lambasted Mr Obama for his “grand, global apology tour this spring”. It all started, according to Mr Kirchik, when the president gave an interview to Al Arabiya television and called for “mutual respect” between the US and the Muslim world. Mr Obama repeated the sin when, in a speech calling for nuclear disarmament, he said: “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” Then in Turkey, the president “apologised some more” by talking of “strained trust” between the US and the Muslim world. And to compound his sins, at the Summit of the Americas, Mr Obama “calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua ... and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez”.
The alert reader will have noticed that none of the examples cited by the outraged Mr Kirchik actually contains the word “sorry”. Nor is it clear what Mr Obama was expected to do with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua – deck him? Even when Mr Obama has been unambiguously apologetic, his opponents often quote him out of context. So Mr Kirchik cites the president’s remark to a European audience that “there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive”. But he carefully omits the next line – “But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious”.
For many of Mr Obama’s critics, however, this kind of detail is beside the point. They believe that the president is running his country down – and that such a policy is weak, unpatriotic and ultimately dangerous. Newt Gingrich, a leading Republican, worries that Mr Obama is sending the wrong signal, arguing that “the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators – when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead”.
This kind of debate is not unique to the US. John Howard, a conservative Australian prime minister, decried what he called “the black armband version of Australian history”, which saw his country’s history as “little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism”. It took 40 years to elapse before a Frenchpresident, Jacques Chirac, was able to acknowledge in public that Vichy France had collaborated in the Holocaust and to apologise.
Many patriotic defenders of the US would bridle at any such comparison. In their view, other countries apologise because they have a lot to apologise for. But America is, as Ronald Reagan liked to say, “a shining city on a hill” – the nation that restored freedom to Europe in 1945 and then faced down the threat of the Soviet empire.
It is true that modern America has more to be proud of than most other nations. But it would be absurd for Mr Obama, whose wife is descended from slaves, to deny that America, too, has shameful episodes in its past.
What America thinks about its recent history, in particular, is of more than academic interest. The US is the global superpower – and what it says about its past tells us something about what it will do in the future. So when Mr Obama suggests that the US has made mistakes in its dealings with Europe or the Muslim world, he is quite deliberately sending a signal.
[The US has NOT made mistakes when dealing with Europe. Europe is fortunate just to be alive and free. If Europe seeks an apology, it should look within itself, not to America.]
To his conservative critics, the signal he is sending is one of weakness. But no fair reading of Mr Obama’s various comments suggest that he is ashamed of his country, or that he intends to sacrifice American interests. What he is doing is trying to improve some of the poisonous relationships that he inherited from President George W. Bush by acknowledging, usually in rather coded language, that the US, too, can make mistakes.[LAUGHABLE] In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the torture scandal, this is not an unreasonable point to make. Proclaiming that the US is always right and virtuous may go down well in the American heartland, but it tends to antagonise foreigners – and that is simply counter-productive.
More important, a willingness to discuss your country’s history self-critically is a mark of an open society.
Vladimir Putin has had Russian history textbooks rewritten to take a more positive view of Stalinism. The Chinese ferociously repress any challenges to the official version of the history of Taiwan. Mature democracies do things differently. They are not afraid of open discussion.
Mr Obama’s willingness to acknowledge past American errors is a sign of strength, not of weakness.
[TO PLACE OBAMA'S APOLOGY TOUR ON PAR WITH THE ADMISSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND REPRESSION SUFFERED AT THE HANDS OF THE STALINIST SOVIET UNION AND COMMUNIST CHINA REGIMES IS ABSURD.]
President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.
Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has "a moral responsibility to act" on arms control because only the U.S. had "used a nuclear weapon." In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy" -- as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not "pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors" because we "failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas."
By confessing our nation's sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has "changed the image of America around the world" and made the U.S. "safer and stronger." As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.
That's now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president's wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War.
There is something ungracious in Mr. Obama criticizing his predecessors, including most recently John F. Kennedy. ("I'm grateful that President [Daniel] Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old," Mr. Obama said after the Nicaraguan delivered a 52-minute anti-American tirade that touched on the Bay of Pigs.) Mr. Obama acts as if no past president -- except maybe Abraham Lincoln -- possesses his wisdom.
Mr. Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in American exceptionalism. He said he did -- in the same way that "the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism." That's another way of saying, "No."
Mr. Obama makes it seem as though there is moral equivalence between America and its adversaries and assumes that if he confesses America's sins, other nations will confess theirs and change. But he won no confessions (let alone change) from the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua or Russia. He apologized for America and our adversaries rejoiced. Fidel Castro isn't easing up on Cuban repression, but he is preparing to take advantage of Mr. Obama's policy shifts.
When a president desires personal popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests. It's early, but with little to show for the confessions, David Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the president planted, cultivated and will harvest "very, very valuable" returns later. Like what?
Meanwhile, the desire for popularity has led Mr. Obama to embrace bad policies. Blaming America for the world financial crisis led him to give into European demands for crackdowns on tax havens and hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the credit crisis. Saying that America's relationship with Russia "has been allowed to drift" led the president to push for arms negotiations. But that draws attention away from America's real problems with Russia: its invasion of Georgia last summer, its bullying of Ukraine, its refusal to join in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, and its threats of retaliation against the Poles, Balts and Czechs for standing with the U.S. on missile defense.
Mr. Obama is downplaying the threats we face. He takes comfort in thinking that Venezuela has a defense budget that "is probably 1/600th" of America's -- it's actually 1/215th -- but that hasn't kept Mr. Chávez from supporting narcoterrorists waging war on Colombia (a key U.S. ally) or giving petrodollars to anti-American regimes. Venezuela isn't likely to attack the U.S., but it is capable of harming American interests.
Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir "Years of Renewal": "The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies' painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values; stars by consensus.When a candidate's views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital."
A superstar, not a statesman, today leads our country. That may win short-term applause from foreign audiences, but do little for what should be the chief foreign policy preoccupation of any U.S. president: advancing America's long-term interests.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.
[Signes de remise de Français!!!//Singes mangeurs de fromage!!]
The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for "fish passage barriers" (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. "It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009," the host said, signing off. "We're counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman."
There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.
We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.
If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today's world.
[THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WAS STRUCTURED NOT FOR EFFICIENCY AND KUMBAYA POLITICAL CONSENSUS OR CORRECTNESS. IT WAS STRUCTURED PRECISELY FOR DEBATE. THE LIBERAL MEDIA ELITE ARE DOING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A DISSERVICE BY INTENTIONALLY MISREPRESENTING THE HISTORICAL PURPOSE OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION AND OUR STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT. SORRY, PRESIDENT OBAMA AND 111TH CONGRESS. YOU CAN JUST WIPE OUT OVER TWO CENTURIES OF HISTORY JUST TO SUIT YOUR SOCIALIST POLITICAL AGENDA!!]
As the Obama administration presses the largest fiscal bill in American history, caps the salaries of executives at institutions receiving federal aid at $500,000 and introduces a new plan to rescue the banking industry, the unemployment rate is at its highest in 16 years. The Dow has slumped to 1998 levels, and last year mortgage foreclosures rose 81 percent.
[OBAMA'S DECISION TO CAP THE SALARIES OF EXECUTIVES IN COMPANIES THAT RECEIVE FUNDS FROM THE 'TARP' MAKES SENSE INSOFAR AS THE EXECUTIVES ARE RECEIVING A GRANT OF TAXPAYER FUNDS TO RESOLVE A PROBLEM FOR WHICH THE EXECUTIVES WERE PARTIALLY RESPONSIBLE. THESE FUNDS SHOULD NOT BE 'MISAPPROPRIATED' OR OTHERWISE 'MISUSED' OR 'WASTED' (THREE LEGAL TERMS OF ART') FOR PERSONAL GAIN AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE. DEAR NEWSWEEK. LET'S GET IT STRAIGHT!]
All of this is unfolding in an economy that can no longer be understood, even in passing, as the Great Society vs. the Gipper. Whether we like it or not—or even whether many people have thought much about it or not—the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction.
[THIS IS NOT A FOREGONE CONCLUSION. ONLY LIBERAL PROGRESSIVES WHO WISH TO REESTABLISH THEIR SOCIALIST 'SOLIDARITY BONDS' WITH THEIR EUROPEAN COUSINS SEEK THIS RESULT. IT IS EERILY REMINISCENT OF THE 1930'S. AMERICANS TODAY MUST BE SAAVY TO THIS AND RECOGNIZE THE INACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF AMERICA FOR POLITICAL & DIPLOMACY PURPOSES. NO DOUBT, THE GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE ARE BEHIND THIS MARKETING EFFORT.]
A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.
This is not to say that berets will be all the rage this spring, or that Obama has promised a croissant in every toaster oven.
[HOW ABOUT AN EXTRA 'TRICK OR TREAT' IN EVERY JACK-O-LANTERN???]
But the simple fact of the matter is that the political conversation, which shifts from time to time, has shifted anew, and for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether we should have one.
The architect of this new era of big government? History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion.
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same. Much of that economic growth was real, but for the past five years or so, it has borne a suspicious resemblance to Bernie Madoff's stock fund. Americans have been living high on borrowed money (the savings rate dropped from 7.6 percent in 1992 to less than zero in 2005) while financiers built castles in the air.
Now comes the reckoning. The answer may indeed be more government. In the short run, since neither consumers nor business is likely to do it, the government will have to stimulate the economy. And in the long run, an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more government taxing and spending. The catch is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment). Growth has always been America's birthright and saving grace.
The Obama administration is caught in a paradox. It must borrow and spend to fix a crisis created by too much borrowing and spending. Having pumped the economy up with a stimulus, the president will have to cut the growth of entitlement spending by holding down health care and retirement costs and still invest in ways that will produce long-term growth. Obama talks of the need for smart government. To get the balance between America and France right, the new president will need all the smarts he can summon.
...9. Our day’s politically successful Left has its roots in the movement of “’68”. As the product of that wave, its roots reach back into a soil that has been critical of authority. In this they share a trait with Conservatives. The difference is that 68 had not only been critical of authority but also attacked all authority as long as it was found to be located in the democratic West. In the praxis of their “struggle”, not every authority had been attacked that exercised power. The target of hostility was, and still is, every institution that is not controlled by the Left. This is why these anti-authoritarians advocate the expansion of state power as son as they gain control of the state. This makes them into selective anti--authoritarians. They preach disobedience toward everything that they or their ideological allies do no dominate. As they do so, they covet might that can be put into their service. A wise distinction because, the projects of radical transformation advocated by the Left are, on the long run, not implementable with the support of voluntary majorities based on consent.
...12. One more thing. You might have been suspecting something like this. Ségolène Royal, the failed Socialist opponent of Sarkozi, has attended Obama’s inauguration. She used the occasion to make an unsurprising statement. In her opinion, Obama was elected on a platform that she had been running on in France.
This article appeared in the December 29, 2008 edition of The Nation
December 10, 2008
John McCain's desperate attempts to smear Obama as a socialist during the last weeks of the campaign because of his defense of progressive income taxes are well behind us. Now that Obama's economic team has been named, primarily from the center-right, the question is more likely to be whether he is still a left-wing Democrat. But the attacks were a sign of how far right the Republicans had gone in questioning a policy long accepted by most Americans. We have forgotten that under that notorious left-winger Dwight D. Eisenhower, the tax on the highest bracket was 90 percent. In recent years tax cuts have been used, very effectively, to redistribute income upward. But "socialist" seemed to work as an epithet, replacing "communist," no longer useful now that Russia and China have become capitalist, and "liberal," now overused.
While Socialist parties still play an important role in Western Europe and, increasingly, in Latin America, they have long disappeared from the American scene. Since the death of Michael Harrington, there has been no acknowledged spokesman. Though Bernie Sanders was elected as a socialist, he has not chosen to forward any socialist alternatives. There is no one around to explain what socialist approaches to the present economic crisis might be, what a platform different from Obama's very careful centrist arguments would be like.
In 1942 a quarter of the population thought that socialism, of the kind that would be elected in nearly all of Western Europe, would be a "good thing." Socialist ideas were so popular that Harry Truman, old-style Democratic machine politician that he was, ran on a platform well to the left of Obama's--or of any of his Democratic successors. He faced important competitors to his left, not only the Socialist Party's Norman Thomas but also the more popular Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace. Truman thus argued for a socialized national health insurance plan, for more TVAs as well as more public housing, hospitals and the like. Full employment, not tax cuts, was then the American priority.
Now for some real politics: how the NPA will affect the French institutional and electoral scene. This is an interview with Henri Weber (a former leader of the LCR, co-founder of Rouge, passed long ago over to the social democratic wing of the Socialist Party and a MEP). From Le Nouvel Observateur.
Onze partis de gauche, dont le NPA et le PS, ont signé un texte commun pour un “changement de cap” du gouvernement. Quelle peut être la suite de cette initiative ?
Eleven left parties, including the NPA and the Parti Socialiste*, have signed a common declaration calling on the government to change course. What could follow this initiative?
Le PS doit débattre et agir avec la dizaine de partis qui se disent à sa gauche, même s’il est en désaccord avec la plus grande partie de leur programme, tant qu’ils se réclament de la démocratie – ce qui est le cas. PS et extrême-gauche se rejoignent pour dénoncer la politique du gouvernement, au sein des mouvements sociaux, et lors des élections pour battre la droite. Le but final est tout de même de rassembler très largement au-delà de son électorat. C’est une condition nécessaire pour remporter les élections (nécessaire, mais pas suffisante : LCR et LO avaient appelé à voter PS en 2007).Mais cette union de la grande famille de la gauche n’exclut pas la confrontation. Le PS doit apporter des solutions ambitieuses et radicales, dans le nouveau paysage idéologique mondial qui a suivi l’effondrement de Lehman Brothers.
The PS should debate and act in common with these 11 parties, who consider themselves as on the left, even if it disagrees with most of their programme, insofar as they are identify themselves as democratic - which is the case here. The PS and the far left meet each other and work together inside social movements, to denounce the government’s policies, and to beat the Right during elections. The aim (ie of the PS, AC) is to bring together a much wider constituency than its own electorate. It’s a condition of winning elections, (necessary, but not sufficient - LO and the LCR called for a PS vote in 2007). Such a union of the great left family does not rule out differences. The PS should bring forward its own bold and radical solutions - in the new worldwide ideological landscape that followed the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Wary of the perennial efforts of the Parti Socialiste to colonise other left organisations (or eclipse them), the LCR and now the NPA have decided to be resolutely independent. Not that this excludes such joint statements, or actions.These can be placed, obviously, within the movement born during the mobilisation for the January General Strike. As such I suppose the qualify as ‘United Front’ tactics, common action around agreed aims. As such rather more genuine than the British SWP’s who use the term to refer to their deals with the cabals that made up Respect. This united front strategy for the LCR/NPA goes hand-in-hand with demarcating themselves(that is, standing alone, or with very close allies) in electoral politics (such as municipal agreements).
Yet how far should they remain apart? The frontiers appear variable. The LCR have called for votes for other parties, including ‘reformist’ ones, during many elections: in 1995 (when they had no candidate of their own) they recommended no less than three Presidential candidates, Robert Hue (PCF), Arlette Laguillerr (LO) and Dominique Voyant (Greens) ! (here) Now however, the will to strike separately’ is on the ascendent. It appears to extend even to left groups which, while independent, nevertheless have links and electoral agreements (local and often national) with the Socialists. As the extract below indicates.
L’Humanité reports a strained atmosphere at the founding Conference, and the following comments by Christian Picquet (Blog Here) :
Christian Picquet du courant UNIR a dressé un réquisitoire sévère contre la manière dont la direction a piloté la mue de la LCR. « Un tel projet méritait un autre congrès. » Il déplore « l’ambiance morose » dans les comités locaux. Il reproche à la direction de sacrifier le mouvement social, le rassemblement de la gauche vraiment à gauche à des intérêts de parti. Christian Picquet dénonce les « faux prétextes » pour refuser de participer à des listes du front de gauche avec le PCF et le Parti de la gauche aux élections européennes. Il est encore possible de faire un autre choix pour éviter que le premier geste du nouveau parti soit précisément le refus de l’union. « Ce serait la marque du nouveau parti. »
Christian Picquet, of the Unir tendency, laid down a tough judgement on the way in which the LCR leadership has carried out its transformation, “such a project deserves another Conference”, and he deplored the “glum atmosphere” in the local branches. He accused them of sacrificing the unity of the real left and social movements to the interests of the party. Christian Picquet denounced the “false pretexts” used to reject an alliance , the Left Front, with the PCF (Communist Party) and the PG (Left Party) for the European Elections. Though “it is still possible to change this decision and avoid making the first choiceo f the new party a refusal of unity“. Otherwise “that will be the trademark of the new party”.
Anyone doing some elementary electoral arithmetic will know that to get over the 10% qualifying hurdle in the European ballots an agreement is needed if there is to be any reasonable potential for the success of left of PS candidates. Without it, a long stay on Mount Aventine is in store for the NPA.
Added Sunday: On the possibility of an agreement for the European Elections, (Nouvel Observateur) on the Conference (which definitely adopted the NPA name):
Si le texte proposé au congrès affirme aussi le soutien du parti à “un accord durable de toutes les forces qui se réclament de l’anticapitalisme”, cette condition devrait rendre difficile un accord avec le Parti communiste, qui siège avec les socialistes dans les conseils régionaux.
If the Congress’s text asserted that the party would back a firm agreement of all forces which affirm their anti-capitalism, this conditions will make it difficult to make an alliance with the Communist Party, which sits with the Socialists in regional council groups.
Note to NPA: get those warm woolies for the peak-tops ready now!
* Les Alternatifs, la Coordination nationale des collectifs unitaires (CNCU), Lutte Ouvrière, le MRC, le NPA, le PCF, le PCOF, le Parti de gauche, le PS, Alternative Démocratie Socialisme (ADS), Alter-Ekolo. Full declaration here
A party that ought to be doing better looks for a new leader
THIS should be a fertile time to be a French Socialist. Global capitalism, demon of choice for the French left, is in chaos. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity has collapsed. France is about to rejoin the military command of NATO, seen by the left as a tool of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. And yet the French Socialist Party is busy tearing itself apart.
In November François Hollande, the party leader, is due to step down. Elbowing towards his seat are half a dozen candidates who have been publishing their “contributions” ahead of the party congress. The front-runners are Mr Hollande’s ex-partner and a defeated presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal; Bertrand Delanoë, mayor of Paris; and, in a late surge, Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and architect of France’s 35-hour week.
Given that the Socialists have lost three presidential elections in a row, some modernising might seem in order. The party has boldly given up a reference to “revolution” in its founding principles. There was a hint of renewal when Mr Delanoë, flush from his Paris re-election in March, called himself “liberal”, a term of abuse inferior in France only to “ultra-liberal”. But he hastily insisted he was “both liberal and socialist” and his liberalism was mostly “political”—eg, backing adoptions by homosexual couples.
Ms Royal’s pitch is an odd mix of old-style socialism (more workers on company boards) and surprising fiscal conservatism (a lone promise not to boost the tax take). In a recent speech to rock-star applause in Paris, she cited Engels and castigated Mr Sarkozy for favouring “the France of Falcon jets”, but called for an open mind over an alliance with the political centre. Farther left sits Ms Aubry, who has support from the teaching and public-sector backbone of the party. Her bid calls for a higher minimum wage and a tax on international capital flows, but also argues in quasi-Blairite tones that “to redistribute wealth, it must first be created”.
As rival leaders grope for a definition of the centre-left, however, a political gap is opening up to their left. One far-left politician has been grabbing attention: Olivier Besancenot, a youthful-looking, T-shirt-wearing postman and former Trotskyite presidential candidate. In a startling recent poll, he was judged “the best opposition to Nicolas Sarkozy”, beating, in order, all the old guard: Mr Delanoë, Ms Royal and Mr Hollande.
Appealing to anti-market hostility in France, the new darling of media talk-shows is launching a “New Anti-Capitalist Party”, to “prepare a radical revolutionary transformation of society” and “the end of capitalism”. Mr Besancenot’s ascent, and ready populist message for troubled times, is starting to worry the Socialists. Needless to say, the right, itself hurt for so long by the far-right National Front, can scarcely conceal its glee.
Meet ITSSD Advisory Board Member, Robert Stein, PhD
Robert Stein is a licensed psychologist specializing in school and clinical psychology. A psychology adjunct for 15 years, he has taught courses ranging from Abnormal to Lifespan Development. Dr. Stein obtained his Masters of Arts in Diplomacy and International Relations at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy, at Seton Hall University.
Dr. Stein has analyzed the psychosocial behavior of both the European Union and Brazil, as a contribution to improving the public understanding about how and why national and regional governments sometimes act.
ITSSD, The Institute for Trade, Standards, and Sustainable Development, Inc. is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan educational organization dedicated to the promotion of a positive paradigm of sustainable development consistent with private property, free market and WTO Rule Of Law-based principles. The ITSSD examines evolving international law and policy as it relates to trade, science, technology and sustainable economic freedom and development around the world.
The charitable mission of the ITSSD and its Advisory Board is further explained at: http://www.itssd.org/mission.htm and at: http://www.itssd.org/board.htm .
This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of legal, economic, scientific, technology, political and social issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn
When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said. 
It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics. 
The internecine squabbling in France and elsewhere has done little to position Socialist parties to answer the question of the moment: how to preserve the welfare state amid slower growth and rising deficits. The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.
