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.

More "West Wing" Than Left-Wing

Magical Thinking: So compelling was Aaron Sorkin's script for the hit TV series The West Wing that it was easy to forget that "President" Jed Bartlett was a right-wing "New Democrat" in the mould of Bill Clinton. Many Labour and Alliance staffers (some of them now MPs) were won over by Sorkin's hard-headed 1999 definitions of feasible politics. Thirteen years after the series first aired, and in spite of the Global Financial Crisis comprehensively discrediting "Clintonomics", they remain more West Wing than left-wing.

 

THE SAME YEAR New Zealanders elected the Labour-Alliance Government, 1999, NBC launched Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. The fast-moving, fast-talking television drama series soon became compulsory viewing for Labour and Alliance staffers. Sorkin’s intelligent, razor-sharp dialogue revealed a world of politics very different from that portrayed by the cynical members of the Press Gallery. “President” Jed Bartlett’s staffers offered much, much more than the usual smarts and wisecracks. What transformed the day-to-day activities of characters like Josh Lyman, “Ceejay” Cregg, Sam Seaborn and Toby Ziegler into such compelling television was that they were motivated by real and passionately articulated principles. Sorkin had done the seemingly impossible, he had made back-room politics sexy.

 

The model for The West Wing was, of course, the Clinton White House. As the first “Baby Boomer” President, Clinton brought a looser (as it turned out a much looser) and more informal style to the administrative warren which gave Sorkin’s series its name. The fictional Bartlett (played superbly by Martin Sheen) may have hailed from straight-laced New Hampshire (a far cry from Clinton’s sleazy Arkansas) but viewers warmed to the younger characters who were as “cool” as they were competent. Characters who commented on blogs and confronted protesters – not with billy-clubs and tear gas, but with weapons fashioned out of (shock, horror) facts and figures. These were people who could command arguments.

 

But among all the “walk and talk” tracking shots and fast-talking riffs on everything from Middle Eastern politics to stem cell research, it was easy to miss the underlying political identity of the “Bartlett Administration”. This was not a collection of New Deal Democrats (except, maybe, for Toby Ziegler). President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett was a Nobel Laureate in Economics – neoliberal economics. Sorkin’s politics were and are the “liberal” politics of the so-called “New Democrats” and their “moderate” Democratic Leadership Council. In short, Sorkin was channelling the Clintons’ politics: Bill’s and Hillary’s.

 

It’s the politics that gave the world NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and declared “the era of big government” to be “over”. The politics that put an end to “welfare as we have known it”. Sorkin's Bartlett Administration is a paean to the virtues of Anthony Gidden’s “Third Way” – presented to the world by a master screenwriter whose persuasive powers not even Tony Blair’s master manipulator, Alastair Campbell, could equal. There was a darker side too. On matters of “National Security”, Bartlett’s chief-of-staff, Leo McGarry, was as hard-line as Sorkin could imagine: an avenging American Eagle in a White House briefing-room already bristling with hawks.

 

Such were the role models that Labour’s and Alliance’s young staffers attempted to emulate. And Sorkin’s pithy justifications for everything from fiscal responsibility to free-trade were to leave a deep impression. When the young men and women who filled the offices around Helen Clark and Jim Anderton (Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, John and Josie Pagani) recall the exemplars of “modern social democracy” do they think only of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, or are Jed Bartlett, Josh Lyman and “Ceejay” Gregg also in their minds?

 

That The West Wing was able to present itself as a progressive drama was only because the Right (especially in the USA) had become so utterly bereft of anything even remotely resembling principle. That, and a long economic boom which appeared to confirm everything its neoliberal architects preached and predicted. Helen Clark and her Finance Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, floated on these economic updrafts for nearly nine years: long enough for those who worked on their staffs to become convinced that while the “reforms” of the fourth Labour government may have been poorly sequenced, and much too brutally imposed, they were, in the context of their time, the right thing to do.

 

Today, the grim legacy of the magical political and economic thinking that Aaron Sorkin so brilliantly gave voice to in The West Wing lies all around us. The Third Way we bought from Clinton and Blair, Clark and Cullen turned out to be a pup. The Fed’s credit-fuelled boom turned to bust. The middle class maxed-out its credit cards. The working-class fell off a cliff. Social inequality spreads through the body-politic like a deadly, metastasizing cancer. Only the rich are smiling.

 

Sorkin, himself, has recognised the shift. His new television series, The Newsroom, lays bare the moral and material legacies bequeathed to America by the political-economy of his West Wing characters. Tellingly, the smart, sassy and principled heroes of this, Sorkin’s latest paean to the faltering American dream, are no longer politicians – they’re journalists.

 

Here in New Zealand, however, the young staffers of 1999 have become the middle-aged politicians and senior advisers of 2012. And although their waistlines have widened, the ideological path followed by these ageing West Wing fans remains as straight and narrow as a Jed Bartlett budget. Their understanding of the electorate is still rooted in the expert analyses of poll data and focus groups. (Sorkin’s satire was never sharper than when he made Joey Lucas, Jed Bartlett’s hot-shot pollster, deaf). Worst of all, the economic and social arguments these unreconstructed "utopian realists" continue to hurl against their critics (both Right and Left) all come from the era of dot-com bubbles and sub-prime mortgages.

 

Arguments that sound more West Wing than left-wing.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Study In Mauve

Mr Shearer Makes His Stand: Mauveine, the world's first aniline dye, allowed Nineteenth Century textile manufacturers to produce the same washed-out combination of red and blue on an industrial scale and without noticeable variation. A cynic might say it is the perfect colour choice for a modern Labour Party leader.

IN 1856 WILLIAM PERKIN invented mauve. He didn’t invent it on purpose, the world’s first aniline dye was the accidental by-product of a failed chemical experiment involving coal-tar. In fact, young Mr Perkin was on the point of throwing the gloopy substance away, when he became fascinated by its “strangely beautiful” colour.

He wasn’t the only one. Mr Perkin’s new colour – a soft, mellowed-out shade of purple, reminiscent of lavender and lilac – turned out to be a huge hit with the ladies. Queen Victoria chose a mauve outfit for her daughter’s wedding and the fashion-setting French Empress, Eugenie, reckoned the colour matched her eyes.

Soon mauve was everywhere. More importantly, mauve was everywhere the same. Unlike the highly variable and often unreliable “natural” dyes made out of plants, rocks, and even insects, aniline dyes offered the fashion industry consistency on an industrial scale. One person’s mauve was exactly the same as the next person’s.

Within thirty years, Mr Perkin’s patented “Mauveine” dye had become so pervasive that the 1890s became known as the “Mauve Decade”. Mr Perkin’s “applied science” had made him a very wealthy man.

The colour purple (of which mauve is but a pale cousin) is itself a combination of the two primary colours red and blue. So rare and expensive was purple-producing dye that from classical times its use was restricted to royalty and rulers. Being “reared in the purple” meant being born to rule.

In contemporary political terms, purple could be thought of as the ultimate ideological compromise: a regal blending of revolutionary red and conservative blue. In the United States such a politician would be the hybrid offspring of Republican Party red and Democratic Party blue – Bill Clinton, perhaps?

Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council can certainly lay claim to making globally respectable the long tradition of centre-left and social-democratic parties seeking to smooth-off the jagged edges of socialist politics.

Working from the assumption that it is a lot easier to change a political party’s policies than the public’s prejudices, Clinton re-branded Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats into a “Republican-Lite” party, pandering to the fads and foibles of suburban “Soccer Moms” and their white-collar professional spouses. Out went social-justice and in came “the era of Big Government is over”.

"Hey, Tony, have you ever thought about mixing Labour Red and Tory Blue and then adding a whole lot of water? Worked for me." "Crikey, Bill, what an excellent idea!"

The British Labour Party leader, Tony Blair, was absolutely besotted with Clinton’s makeover of the Democratic Party and immediately began blending Labour Red and Tory Blue into what became “New Labour”. The reviews of Blair’s purpling exercise were equally mixed. While the Blues hailed him as a statesman, the Reds denounced him as “the bastard son of Maggie Thatcher”.

Long before either Clinton or Blair mounted the podium, the New Zealand Labour Party had recognised the potential electoral advantages of mixing National blue and Labour red. As far back as the early 1960s, when Arnold Nordmeyer was Labour’s leader, there had been calls for the party’s “modernisation”.

The extraordinary success of the First Labour Government’s economic and social reforms had given birth to what the British political scientist, Austin Mitchell, called “the half-gallon, quarter-acre, pavlova paradise”. Kiwis kidded themselves that this was about as good as it got. Post-war electoral contests boiled-down to a handful of “marginal” electorates – most of which encompassed vast tracts of “ticky-tacky” suburban housing chock-full of young families. These middle-class mums and dads held great expectations: both for themselves and their children.

The very proletarian intrusion of Norman Kirk in 1965 was all that prevented Nordmeyer’s modernisation programme from purpling Labour in the late-1960s and 70s. “Big Norm’s” great skill as a left-wing politician lay in convincing New Zealanders they were all entitled to great expectations, and that Labour was capable of fulfilling them. Kirk’s was a manifesto grounded in the abundance of the post-war boom, and when, in 1973, the First Oil Crisis brought that boom to an end, he and his government were doomed.

It was David Lange who finally blended Kiwi reds and blues into the ominous shades of the Rogernomics era. In terms of applied political science, his efforts far outshone those of William Perkin. Looking at New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, the world saw only red. While the spectacle of a Labour Government privatising state assets was rendered entirely in the deepest shades of blue. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were never so bold.

Nor were Helen Clark and Michael Cullen. Under these two political colourists New Zealand saw a whole lot of water added to Labour’s ideological palette. Kirk’s vivid reds were puddled into pale pinks, and the Roger Douglas blues reduced to something much weaker. Under Ms Clark and Dr Cullen New Zealand experienced its own “Lavender Decade”.

On Saturday, speaking to the big union rally for Auckland’s beleaguered watersiders, Labour’s new leader, David Shearer, spoke reassuringly about “flexibility and fairness”.

He was wearing a mauve shirt.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 March 2012.