Viable Within The System.

Playing By The Rules: Bill Clinton's overriding ambition was to become - and remain - a political player. When he was just 23 he wrote: “For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.” To do so, however, he had to maintain his "political viability within the system." It was this urge to remain viable within the system that would lead a whole generation of Centre Left politicians to dazzling political success and abject moral failure.

 

“THE DECISION not to be a resister, and the related subsequent decisions, were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.”

 

Bill Clinton was only 23 years old when he wrote these words. Colonel Eugene Holmes, head of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of Arkansas, had arranged for the young Rhodes Scholar to join what we used to call the “Territorial Force” so that he might avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Clinton was writing to explain why, after much thought, he had decided to reject the offer of ROTC training and take his chances with the Draft.

 

“For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress”, Clinton explained to the Colonel. “It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.”

 

Had Clinton not drawn a “lucky” number in the ballot, and thus escaped service in Vietnam, his fledgling career might have been cut short by a Viet-Cong bullet. As things turned out, however, the young Arkansas law student’s “practical political ability” was enough to take him all the way to the White House. So “viable” was Bill Clinton in the American political system that, in 1993, he was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States.

 

In office, Clinton proved that his decision to risk the draft, rather than, at some point in the future, be labelled  a “draft-dodger”, was in no sense aberrant. Because, although Clinton’s concern for rapid social progress was very real, his desire to maintain his political viability within the system was much, much stronger. Throughout his career, whenever the two objectives came into conflict, Clinton was almost always willing to sacrifice rapid social progress on the altar of his own political viability.

 

Clinton was by no means alone in making the retention of personal political viability his Number One priority. Two of his most fervent admirers on the Centre Left, internationally, Tony Blair and Helen Clark, operated in much the same way. Clark’s infamous quip: “I didn’t come this far to be burnt out in a hail of gunfire”; demonstrated the importance she attached to remaining viable. As did Tony Blair’s observation that: “Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.”

 

Some have characterised Clinton’s modus operandi – dignified by some as a “Third Way” between the Far Left’s alleged lack of viability and the Far Right’s hostility to any form of social progress – as entirely consistent with the Baby Boom generation’s determination to have their cake and eat it too. While there is a generous measure of Baby Boomer self-indulgence in Third Way politics, there is also a harder, frankly self-protective, edge to Clinton’s “practical” political style.

 

The letter to Colonel Holmes was written towards the end of 1969. For ambitious leftists like Clinton, the previous two years had been heart-breaking and terrifying in equal measure. In 1968 the two greatest hopes for securing rapid social change in America – Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy – had both been assassinated. And the inheritor of the darkness into which the country had suddenly been hurled, Richard Nixon, left progressive America feeling angry, isolated and afraid.

 

In their hit song, Long Time Gone, Crosby Stills and Nash evoked these conflicting generational emotions with heart-wrenching force:

 

Speak out you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind if you dare
But don’t, no don’t, no, try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair

 

The Centre Left’s predicament did not improve in the following decades. Object lessons like Chile, Australia and Nicaragua proved that left-wing governments could be shot down just as easily as left-wing politicians. And with the last great challenge to free-market capitalism blipping-off the screen in 1991, “it’s the economy stupid” took on a whole new meaning.

 

For Centre Left parties to remain viable within the system it had become necessary for them to surrender practically every radical item on their historic agenda. It was still possible to do good, but only if the rich were allowed to do better. It was the likes of Clinton in the USA, Blair in the UK, and Clark in New Zealand, who, finally, made the world safe for neoliberalism.

 

Meaning that if, by some miracle, a genuine left-winger (like Jeremy Corbyn) should find himself at the head of a modern, Centre Left party, the Right will have no need to go looking for assassins – either real or metaphorical. To remain viable within the system, his own colleagues – all of them politicians of the most practical ability – will strike him down.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 December 2015.