[A-List] UK corporate state: government records

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Where America has elected to go, no one will follow

The mid-term results show the stark contrast between the US and Europe

Hugo Young
Thursday November 7, 2002
The Guardian

Not long ago, George Bush and the Republicans seemed to have something to
say to European parties of the right. The British Conservatives, in
particular, were entranced. Last December, the red carpet was rolled out
when Iain Duncan Smith paid his first visit to Washington as leader. He saw
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, a full house of the warrior right. The Americans,
who had often received him when he was Tory defence spokesman, obviously
thought he mattered. He for his part saw Bush as a role model. On his
return, he wrote a piece headlined "My Manhattan project for a transatlantic
conservative revival".

Each part of this fanciful construct is now in tatters. Bush must wonder
what he ever thought he was doing, giving 40 minutes' face-time to the
swiftest loser the Tories have ever put in the field. And now the day this
president reaches a pinnacle of power, and at last, legitimacy, turns out to
be the day when IDS, in the happy phrase of my colleague Simon Hoggart,
became the first leader in history to turn himself into a suicide bomber.
"The most desperate day," added the Telegraph, of all papers, "in the
history of the Conservative party." So much for the Manhattan transfer.

But the other part of the ruined conjunction of the transatlantic right is
what really matters. This is about agendas not people. Bush has secured his
power with an agenda that no mainstream European party could expect to put
before its voters and then win an election. Compassionate conservatism,
coined by Bush and lifted by Duncan Smith, was for a time a phrase graced
with truth and common relevance. Pumped out often enough, the mantra helped
Bush defeat the legacy of the Clinton years without entirely disowning their
tender side. Tuesday's victories in the Senate and the House were, by
contrast, triumphs for the right, paving the way for an unequivocally
rightist programme, in which compassion will be consigned to the wastebin of
political artifice where it probably always belonged.

There are ways of denying this analysis, and pretending that the US has not
made a clear political choice. Bush, it can be justly said, had the
advantage of incumbency at a time of national crisis. If, like 9/11, the
crisis unites the nation, a president would be incompetent not to gain
strength from it, and Bush has shown that, in the business of partisan
campaign politics, he is a master. Presenting himself as a heroic leader -
first warlike, then, when the polls shifted, a man of reason at the UN - he
placed Saddam Hussein in the gap left by Osama bin Laden in his presidential
curriculum vitae. Perhaps he won as a hunter of evil ones on behalf of this
great nation, not as an ideologue.

There are other alibis. As incumbents, the Republicans raised more money
than the Democrats. To an extent, they bought their victories. These were,
in any case, local not national. Bush faced a party, moreover, that was
singularly inept. Ever since Al Gore lost the election the people had really
given him in 2000, he failed to perform like an opposition leader. There was
no opposition leader. Bush, the heroic riser to the challenge of 9/11, had
nobody to match him, round whom the country could gather to express its
discontent with an economy that is failing, not to mention the corporate
scandals that taint the presidency itself. All this can be used to explain
away the election result as something less than a decisive choice with
enduring consequences.

But that is not persuasive. Even if the process was messy, the outcome is
unambiguous. Now that he controls all the political institutions - House,
Senate, White House - Bush can move to infiltrate the judiciary. Dozens of
conservative federal judges with lifetime tenure await confirmation they can
now expect to get. This will permanently reorient constitutional trends. The
slashing of forests and the drilling of wilderness, by timber and oil
interests newly let loose, will be still less reversible. The rich men's tax
cuts of 2001 will be secured against revision, and other tax cuts added. The
40 million Americans without health insurance can expect to remain that way.
Axioms of inequality will be engraved deeper into the pillars of American
society.

None of these preferences has much appeal to many Europeans, and the best
exemplar of this is not German social democracy but British conservatism.
The Republicans confirm themselves as a role model the Tories cannot follow.
This should have been apparent as long ago as the Thatcher era, when the
state's share of gross domestic product remained stubbornly unchanged. The
high priestess herself had difficulty making Britain into a low-tax society,
and was eventually frustrated by popular demand. This has not gone away.

After the Budget last April, when ICM polled voters on Chancellor Brown's
tax rises, 76% approved them. More tellingly for any British politician
hoping for a rightist resurgence on the back of a Bush-like philosophy, no
fewer than 54% of Conservatives thought Brown had done the right thing.

The mid-term elections, therefore, lock the America-Europe divide more
firmly into place. They define a society, more starkly than at any time in
50 years, that's trending in a different direction. Far from telling the
benighted Tories how to win, they show what IDS's successor will have to
avoid if he's to make a rendezvous with the dominant instincts of British
society. From east to west, in several unexpected places, sometimes
marginally but always decisively, American voters have made a statement that
separates them from most other mature societies.

How this plays out on the international scene is now the question. It may
not alter much in the existing prognosis for Iraq. The American stance was
already bi-partisan in its rigour. Democrats agreed with Republicans, which
was one of the problems they faced in fighting the heroic national leader.
Bush's patience in going through the UN process operated in parallel with
his willingness to go to war, and this will not change. But neither will the
arguments on the other side. The mandate Bush has secured from his own
people does have its limits. It may increase his confidence, but doesn't
make unilateralism over Iraq any easier an option.

This was the week, however, when the US declared itself a different country.
That's what will leave a historic mark. The capture of the Senate makes
possible the advance of materialistic individualism on many fronts. State
and community are in retreat. Corporate power, instead of being shamed by
its recent crimes, can be expected to advance. This is the Republican way,
which America has now undeniably endorsed. A truism often heard is that what
happens in California today will quickly reach New York. Its sub-clause says
that the political economy of the US will sooner or later make its way east
to Europe. The 21st century is beginning quite differently.