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  here
are no permanent victories in politics," said Lady Thatcher presciently
in 1990 — a mere six weeks before she was ejected from office.
By the same token, there are no permanent defeats in politics either.
Politicians and journalists often forget this, treating a particular
landslide as the Verdict of History binding on all future governments
and electorates. In his recent accomplished history of the Goldwater
campaign, Before
the Storm, radical historian Rick Perlstein enjoys himself
in the final pages, quoting all the wise men on both sides who saw
LBJ's victory as the permanent installation of a consensus liberalism
and the final defeat of a nineteenth-century conservative philosophy.
He concludes drily: "At that there seemed nothing more to say. It
was time to close the book." In fact all that had concluded was
the foreword to a new and historically momentous volume of political
history.
I am writing these words before the results of Britain's general
election are known. Unless a reversal greater than Truman-Dewey
proportions has taken place by the time you read this, however,
New Labour's Tony Blair will have achieved a landslide victory and
William Hague's Tories will have suffered the greatest defeat in
that party's long and successful history. What remains to be seen,
however, is whether this result is the last hurrah of a failing
ideology as was LBJ's victory. Or the confirmation that a new establishment
liberalism is now firmly ensconced as with FDR's defeat of Landon
in 1936.
National Review has never claimed to speak with History's
voice — quite the reverse. NR was established to halt
and reverse a particular course it then seemed to be taking. And
the publication's relative success in that endeavor prompts me now
to point out that none of the trends I discern below should be seen
as inevitable. They will only occur if right-minded people organize
and work for their success.
That said, I regard New Labour's success as the end of an intermission
between the collapse of Communism and the establishment of a genuinely
post-Cold War politics. That intermission has been marked by the
success of left-wing social-democratic parties making the apparently
reasonable appeal that they can run the market economies (all parties
now accept) more compassionately than their conservative opponents.
The beginnings of a disillusionment with this style of mildly interventionist
government have been seen in the victory of Silvio Berlusconi in
Italy, the success of Spain's center-right governing party, and
arguably even in George W. Bush's victory last year.
Britain has not yet caught up with this trend in part because Britain
was late in swinging leftwards to the social democrats. New Labour
was elected only four years ago — five years after Clinton
and three years after the Italian leftist "Olive Tree" government.
Furthermore, it compensated for its lateness by swinging left with
particular force. After Lady Thatcher's great historic achievements,
John Major's last four years of Tory government were almost comically
accident-prone, sleaze-ridden, appeasement-minded toward the European
Union, and above all directionless. It lost the Tory party's traditional
reputation for economic competence when its misguided policy of
joining a pre-euro system of European fixed-exchange rates collapsed
under market pressures on "Black Wednesday." And it clung to office
through every disaster with the pointless desperation of a man clinging
to the mast of a sinking ship. By May 1997 British voters thoroughly
loathed and despised the Tories; they flung them out of office with
the virtuous feeling that they were cleansing the Augean Stables;
and the Tories have not yet been able to persuade the voters that
they were wrong.
Mr. Blair was the beneficiary of those feelings in 1997. Where the
Tories were seen as corrupt, incompetent and even heartless, he
was invested by the electorate with the qualities of idealism, efficiency,
compassion, and "modernity." Not enough has gone wrong since then
to persuade the voters that they were completely mistaken. In particular,
the strong economy that New Labour inherited from Major (his sole,
and characteristically cursed, achievement) has been maintained.
Britain voted this week in a climate of tranquil prosperity. Radical-left
political errors have been confined mainly to constitutional reforms
which, like depth charges, produce delayed explosions, metaphorically
in Scotland where a botched federal devolution is encouraging Scottish
nationalism, literally in Northern Ireland where the peace process
has advanced the political fortunes of terrorists and hindered those
of democratic moderates. And the emollient and ideologically androgynous
Mr. Blair is himself regarded by nervous Middle England voters as
the only force protecting them from a socialist government.
All of this helps explain why Britain probably sleepwalked to a
curiously dull Labour victory today. But it also suggests why that
victory may vanish like mist on a summer morning. Britain voted
Labour because it thought that the Tories deserved continued punishment
and that Labour deserved a second term to carry out the promises
of improved public services it had plainly not delivered in the
first term. From now on, however, the voters are unlikely to acquiesce
in blaming Labour's failure to improve health and education on Tories
who lost power in 1997. That damages the Blair government below
the water-line — for it cannot deliver improved public services
simply by throwing money at them — and gives the Tories their
opportunity to recover.
Probably nothing the Tories did this time could have won them the
game. It was rigged in advance by deep-seated public resentment
against them. As it was, William Hague fought a decent, cautious,
and moderate campaign in general — and in his opposition to
Britain's adoption of the euro and its larger absorption into a
European federal state, he fought a brave, principled, and (according
to the polls) popular campaign. Next time, however, the Tories must
be brave and principled across-the-board. They must make the case
for limited government, seriously lower taxes, the improvement of
monopoly public services not simply by pouring money into them but
by subjecting them to private-sector competition through vouchers
and private insurance, and a foreign policy based clearly on preferring
Britain's traditional support for a U.S.-led Atlantic alliance to
Blair's evident desire to participate in the emerging European superpower.
All of these themes were present below the surface of the recent
Tory campaign. When they emerged into the open, they were denounced
as evidence of "nostalgia," "irrelevance," or "extremism." But they
are about real political issues; they tap into deep public sentiments
(and where they concern declining public services, deep public anger);
they reflect the main, if presently submerged, classical liberal
and conservative traditions of British political life; and they
are likely to provide the tinder for the political conflagrations
of the next four years.
Whether they are also, Goldwater-like, a wave of the future, or
a backwash from the recent Thatcherite past — that I will leave
to the National Review editors of 2038.
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