July 23, 2001
As Labor Lost Ideology, U.S. Parties Found It
By ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE
WASHINGTON—NOBODY can accuse George W. Bush and Tony Blair of neglecting the trans-Atlantic relationship. Mr. Blair was the first European leader to make an official visit to the newly elected Republican. Mr. Bush returned the compliment last week, dropping in on Mr. Blair's country residence. The two have discovered they have so many things in common they even use the same brand of toothpaste.
Yet the two leaders seem to be trying too hard to erase doubts about their relationship. The obvious reason for such doubts is that they come from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Mr. Blair and Bill Clinton belonged to a series of trans-Atlantic fellow travelers that included Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Harold Wilson and John F. Kennedy, and Harold Macmillan and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Mr. Bush is no more inclined to chat about the "third way" than Mr. Blair is to wander around Texas in cowboy boots.
There is another explanation for the difference — one that touches not just on policy but on their whole approach to politics. The two men are both products of political revolutions that have transformed their respective parties in opposite directions. The Republican Party has become more ideological while Labor has ditched ideology for a bland but effective pragmatism.
This represents an extraordinary turnaround. The Labor Party was forged in the fires of ideology. The party's constitution of 1918 promised to nationalize the "means of production, distribution and exchange." The party took advantage of its sweeping victory in 1945 to seize control of the commanding heights of the economy and establish a nationalized health service.
The party clung to its founding ideology even when it spelled electoral disaster. Labor's interminable 1983 election manifesto was famously described at the time as "the longest suicide note in history." But when the electoral catastrophe came, many argued, in the immortal words of the Labor activist "Red Ted" Knight, "there can be no compromise with the electorate."
For much of their existence American's political parties were all about "compromise with the electorate." They were formed not by ideology but by the geographical divisions of the Civil War. The Republican Party included Wall Street bankers, Main Street shopkeepers, Farm Belt isolationists, Northeast liberals and Sun Belt conservatives, while the Democratic Party embraced Southern conservatives, urban political machines, liberal do-gooders and even a few socialists.
This meant the parties needed to put more emphasis on brokering deals than preserving ideological purity. It also meant, when it came to running the country, they turned to Washington's permanent establishment.
Eisenhower saw himself as a problem-solver rather than a party tribune; he even considered dropping his Republican label in 1956 and running for re-election just as himself. He padded the federal bureaucracy with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, installed Earl Warren on the Supreme Court and invited Nikita S. Khrushchev to the United States.
Richard M. Nixon, for all his weakness for right- wing speechifying, followed in Eisenhower's footsteps. He shamelessly stole Democratic policies on everything from Keynsian management to affirmative action. In 1970, he considered changing the name of the Republican Party to the Conservative Party for the pragmatic reason that polls showed half the voters identified themselves as conservatives, while only a third identified themselves as Republicans.
The Labor Party's ideologues held out against this sort of thinking for as long as they could. But the party's third defeat in a row, in 1987, allowed Mr. Blair and his fellow modernizers to seize control. They immediately set about rechristening it New Labor and implementing their philosophy that "what matters is what works."
New Labor cleverly stole Mrs. Thatcher's best ideas about deregulation and privatization. It displayed its pragmatism by going even further. Almost its first act after winning power in 1997 was to give the Bank of England its independence. It is now drawing up plans for private companies to run bits of the welfare state.
New Labor is now thoroughly technocratic. Mr. Blair is turning the cabinet and prime minister's offices into "centers of delivery," with performance targets. His minions talk about "re-engineering the welfare state." Members of his foreign office team call themselves "practical Europeans" to defuse Britain's most combustible issue, abandoning the pound for the euro. Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, boasts about his love affair with a woman called Prudence.
But just as the Labor Party was becoming more pragmatic, the Republican and Democratic Parties grew more ideological. The civil rights movement helped detach Southern whites from the Democrats and also loosened the bonds between Northerners and the Republicans. The likes of Barry M. Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. fashioned a conservative intellectual movement. Rockefeller Republicans left their ancestral party. As Marshall Wittmann of the Heritage Foundation points out, Mr. Bush has no choice but to "pay homage to the ideological right of the party."
THE contrast between America and Britain is growing. American politics is now split down the middle on values. "The single greatest divide in American politics is that the Bush coalition consists of people who are religious and respect traditional morality while the Gore coalition consists of people who are not traditionally religious and favor a more relativistic morality," said Michael Barone, co- author of "The Almanac of American Politics." Republicans no longer have to abandon their ideology in Washington. They can rely on a counterestablishment of conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and networks like the Federalist Society.
This sort of cultural politics is as dead as the dodo in Britain. Simon Green, a sociologist of religion at All Souls College, Oxford, argues, "There is no religious divide in Great Britain because there is no religious constituency: fewer than 5 percent of the population regularly attend church." The debates about abortion, guns and drugs that fuel America's culture wars are all but absent in Britain. A few weeks ago a former deputy head of the Conservative Party suggested marijuana should be legalized. The result was not cries of outrage from the Tory heartland but murmurs of agreement.
It is true that Tory voters were willing to embrace a more ideological stance when fighting trade unions in the 1980's. But since then ideological posturing has proved to be ruinous. John Major's Republican-inspired "back to basics" movement ended in embarrassment. William Hague's attempt to turn the recent election into a crusade against forces (like the euro and asylum seekers) that threaten to turn Britain into a foreign nation led to catastrophe. Ann Widdecombe, the closest thing Britain has to an American-style religious conservative, had to withdraw from the current Conservative leadership contest because she failed to find one supporter among parliamentary Conservatives. The party now has a chance of electing an old-fashioned pragmatist, in the bear-bellied person of Kenneth Clarke, as its leader. The choice, in truth, is between him and disaster.
The fine talk about the trans-Atlantic relationship was flowing freely last week. But it is hard to find the magic that touched the relationship between British and American politicians in the past. Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair don't just have different political views. They speak a different political language. The special relationship will now have to stand or fall on its own merits.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
