What does Hillary stand for? The Economist’s front cover posed that question last week: The frontrunner for the US Democratic nomination in 2016 will have to craft a plausible answer.
Does she still understand the anxieties of ordinary Americans whose real wages have stagnated while the economy surged? And is she more than a moderate and experienced liberal person who, in the end, has no clear answers to what elected government can actually do for those families in the face of corporate American power, Wall Street’s flash boys and the sleepless hatred of the Republican right?
But we should not single out Hillary over this. She is only one prominent example among many on the Centre-Left, who have a difficult time matching the poetry and aspiration of opposition with the prose and practicality of governing. The same question, in various permutations, faces all parties and leadership candidates of the Centre-Left across the developed capitalist world.
Though the question itself was there long before 2008, it has sharpened, and certainly been felt to have sharpened, since the financial crisis. In Europe, the question applies in many places, from Athens itself to Edinburgh, the Athens of the north. And it is a question that all Centre-Left leaders in large and small countries, not least in the United Kingdom, struggle to answer in electorally plausible and politically sustainable ways.
What, in Britain in 2015, does Labour stand for? Many are asking that during this election. Ed Miliband has asked himself it continuously over the years. Few politicians are as focused on the issue as he is.
As Rafael Behr’s informed and important Guardian account of the Labour leader this week makes clear, Miliband has always had a more ambitious instinct about what to answer. He has always believed, as Behr puts it, that government should intervene more to correct the injustices that inevitably follow when wealth and power are hoarded by a minority. Mistakenly or not, Ed believes he is Labour leader in order to sell that belief and to implement it.
Public opinion has often been broadly sympathetic to the things that Ed stands for. Yet, today, Labour struggles to break the 35 per cent ceiling. For more than 20 years, through most of the Thatcher-Major-Blair years, about 60 per cent of the population thought that taxes and public spending should increase. They do not think so any more, particularly since the financial crisis, and they lack confidence in the government to solve the country’s problems.
This is why Labour’s failure to combat the narrative that “Labour wrecked the economy” — chorused again last week by Prime Minister David Cameron and Nick Clegg — remains so damaging. It means Labour has been denied the standing to make the kind of case that Ed wants. Public opinion remains massively critical of industries such as banking, insurance and energy. Yet, outside its core support, the Centre-Left fails to connect and inspire.
Why should this be? The failure to rebut the charges against the Labour record is certainly part of it. So is the amateurishness of some of the Ed team’s leadership. Perhaps the team, indeed, is a bit second rate, not up to the undoubted scale of the task. Given how much time Ed and his advisers seem to have spent talking about what they needed to do, they have ended up with a rather modest plan. Further back, New Labour can certainly be criticised for not making better use of the political space that it commanded in the late 1990s to put inequality, and the disproportion between the power and wealth of the few compared with the many, at the centre of its project.
So it is definitely not all Ed’s fault. If making social democracy work in a globalised capitalist economy was easy, it would have been done long ago. So forget any accusations of betrayal.
The answer to social democracy’s failure, which it is important to say is relative rather than absolute (the National Health Service would not stand where it does if social democracy was wholly discredited), is not to abandon it wholesale. That was the mistake a few (not all) Blairites made. But the answer is not to keep trying to hammer the wrong-shaped peg into a differently shaped hole, either.
If making social democracy work in a globalised capitalist economy was easy, it would have been done long ago.
Watching the final DVD of Ken Burns’s US television series on the Roosevelts the other day, there was a glimpse of why Ed and many others may be missing an important trick. In his 1944 State of the Union speech, Franklin Roosevelt told Americans that, when the Second World War was over, it would be time to enact an economic bill of rights, a second constitutional tablet of stone to set alongside the political rights that were America’s foundation.
Roosevelt listed the rights he had in mind: The right to a useful and remunerative job; to earn enough to provide for one’s needs; to produce and trade products without unfair competition; to have a decent home; to good health and adequate medical care; to protection from the fears of old age and unemployment; and to a good education. It is a simple but compelling list.
It is in some ways of its time and not ours. Yet, it speaks across the decades, and if Roosevelt had lived to govern again in peacetime — he died 70 years — more might have come of it. We do not pose social justice in these individual rights terms today. Instead, we are stuck in a more traditional collectivist and statist approach that large numbers of voters understandably do not believe in any more. Yet, economic rights, built up in a variety of ways — supported in the courts, but driven by government — would be a powerful and patriotic organising idea for a leader or party that made it work.
The answer to the “what do you stand for?” question would immediately be clear too, clearer perhaps than any argument about instruments of policy could ever be. To pose social justice in terms of individual economic rights that only the government can ensure, but which are nevertheless not provided by the man in Downing Street, fits the nature of an era in which many think as consumers rather than producers. It puts values above policy pledges. And it makes a fresh and much-needed argument for politics and government. It may help Hillary Clinton persuade a lot of Americans too.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
