When Politics is Only About Spin

Ten, fifteen years ago in the heady days of the Third Way fashionable commentators were all agog about Spin.  Clinton did it.  Blair did it.  Everyone swooned.  It was so cool.

Later, when President Bush made his case for the invasion of Iraq, of course, the swooners were nowhere to be found.  It is one thing to do a bit of advocacy for the good guys, but another thing to shill for evil neo-cons.

But now, in a British row about taxing the income of pension funds according to  Robin Harris, people are even fed up with spin from Third Way progressives like Blair and his designated heir, Gordon Brown.

Now people can see the spin for what it was, trying to square circles.

New Labour’s strategy of gaining power was to be at once fresh and reassuring, to split every difference and to be all things to all men. Accordingly, generalised pledges, bland phrases and a selection of well-judged soundbites provided a substitute for philosophy.

The reason for this, of course, the substitution fo spin for political philosophy was the same for New Labour as it was in the case of Clinton spin. New Labour and Clinton Democrats were trying to do the impossible, keeping their lefty base happy by not really reforming the welfare state while assuring the rest of the country that they had left their old lefty ways behind and would be accountable and deliver government services just like market-driven retail giants.

Eventually all this was going to come crashing down, despite the best efforts of the MSM deniers.  The science is in on this.  You can’t deliver good public services with big government.  You can’t deliver flexibility; you can’t deliver efficiency.

The science is in.  Government is good for force and compulsion, and it’s none to good at that.  But we have to put government in charge of force and compulsion because the alternative to government is to have private armies floating around rather like China in the 1920s to 1940s and Iraq and Lebanon right now.  Not a nice place for peaceful people who just want to get on with their lives.

But for anything else, government is a loser.

The problem is that there are many people—bright, educated people—who don’t want to see this.

One day they will wake up from their dogmatic slumber.  They will join with us in building a better society that empowers people in the mediating structures between government and the individual. 

But that day is not yet.