Indulge me in a feeble pun, but Britain’s shadow chancellor Ed
Balls had some chutzpah when he commented the other day, “I think
[former two-term London mayor David Livingstone, Labour] would be a
better mayor for London on Tube fares and jobs and housing than
[incumbent Conservative] Boris Johnson who, let’s be honest, is a
bit of a joker, a bit of a buffoon.”
Johnson, 47, beat Livingstone, 66, handily, in a rematch of
their 2008 contest. In a city that tends to vote Labour, the
popular Johnson saved the Tories from total humiliation in last
week’s voting. It was not that, pace Mr. Balls, he is
likely to be “better” than “Red Ken” on such issues as public
transportation, affordable housing, and employment. Perhaps he is;
what Londoners liked is that he does not pander to them or lie
about what is possible, given the economic outlook for London and
England. He promises “conservative” policies to make a better
London, without any cheesy multiculturalism.
Although Labour pounded the governing coalition in municipal
elections across England, staying well ahead of the Tories and
obliterating their Liberal-Democratic partners, the Scot Nats took
Glasgow, a traditionally Labour bastion, and seemed poised to gain
a plurality in Edinburgh, which should allow them to govern the
cultural capital of Scotland with the Socialists as junior
partners.
Devolution toward greater Scottish autonomy? It is not
impossible that Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party (SNP)
leader, will seize the momentum and sunder the union that has
existed since 1707. Salmond would like to have it both ways,
maintaining existing welfare regimes for Scotland that are largely
subsidized by the prosperous regions of what some (not
multiculturalists) still call Great Britain in the south of
England, while at the same time getting full control over local
social and economic policy and indeed eventually charting an
independent Scottish foreign policy. This could mean — as far as
Salmond is concerned, the Scot public not having been consulted —
among other things, joining various “boycott Israel” movements that
have gained some traction in European academic exchange policies as
well as trade and commerce.
Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s opponent in London, acquired a
reputation as a consistent critic of Israel, regularly engaging in
provocations smacking of anti-Semitism. Many in the Labour Party
hoped he would not seek to regain the mayoralty, and his response
was that he did not care as “rich Jews don’t vote for me” anyway.
At any rate, Boris Johnson said with tongue only half in cheek that
he was grateful his opponent was “Red Ken,” who announced his
retirement from politics after this defeat. It is not a given,
however, that a more centrist Labourite would have fared better
against the incumbent.
There has been much talk about how recent elections in Europe
are referenda on the poor management of economic affairs, and in
fact Boris Johnson has been remarkably pragmatic about making the
best out of difficult times, and the voters did not miss this.
Meanwhile, the voters of Greece, Italy, Spain, and France have
booted out their incumbents, as have the voters of Hungary. There
does not appear to be a clear ideological trend here — left to
right or right to left, authoritarian hard guys being replaced by
“feminized” nice guys, as someone remarked recently. There is no
clear trend at all. In Britain, for instance, the leaderships of
both parties are seeking the soft middle ground. Conservative Prime
Minister David Cameron — Dave to his friends — has his
Thatcherite moments, particularly with regard to European policy,
but then he backpedals. Why not pull Britain out of Europe if
things are going badly in Europe? It is politically, legally,
technically, not so simple to rend the institutional wires that
bind the European states together; but has he raised the “Britain
Out” banner?
Boris Johnson, pragmatist — which means he thinks that what
works for London, works — could prove to be a much more
conservative leader of the Conservative Party than David Cameron,
which is why the enthusiasm for his victory, the best news for the
Tories in a long while, was somewhat muted at No. 10 Downing
Street. Mr. Johnson, who came to politics from journalism. He still
writes a fine, highly original tennis column for the
Telegraph, which many observers of British affairs
consider, with the Daily Mail, the top of the press in
England. Having blocked “Red Ken” and saved Conservative hopes,
there surely will be pressure on Mr. Johnson to wrest the party
leadership.
THE “AGAINST” TREND in Europe expresses itself within party
politics as well as in the perpetual competition between governing
parties and opposition. You did not even have to wait for French
President Nicolas Sarkozy to go down last Sunday for talk to begin
of a “recomposition” of the center-right. Indeed, with less such
talk and more unity, he might have squeaked by his Socialist
opponent, François Hollande.
However, one simple explanation for the
vote-against-whoever’s-in trend in Europe is that Europe, the thing
as opposed to the place, ain’t working. That, at any rate, is the
ready-made explanation usually adopted by blind-deaf-dumb
journalists and instant experts from the academic boondocks.
Mounting public debt — 90 percent of GNP in France! — insolvent
pension funds, ever-greater demands for entitlements and high
salaries by everybody, not only members of public sector unions,
have bankrupted the old continent. A remote, technocratic,
unelected European Union civil service, barricaded in the
Berlaymont on Brussels’ rue de la Loi, passes laws and regulations
that no one wants but that cramp business, cripple economic growth,
prevent EU Europe from claiming and asserting its rightful place in
the sun.
This is a seductive argument for Americans, and especially for
conservative Americans. It suggests that you get into trouble if
you use “The Three Little Pigs” as your guide for living. And it
allows them to warn that if we do not mend our ways, we will go the
way of Greece or worse — Ukraine.
This is unfair to Greeks and Ukrainians, who after all cannot be
blamed entirely for the pass to which their politicians have
brought them. And it certainly is not very useful advice for
Americans. America is not Greece or Ukraine; it is not even England
or Scotland, in case anyone needs reminding. Instead of engaging in
trans-national comparisons of dubious usefulness, we ought to
consider the more reasonable notion that the travails of
contemporary advanced democratic states have to do with the state
of advanced democracy.
Voters in democratic regimes always ask candidates, Whatcha got
for me?, and candidates and pols always respond with some variation
on This, that, and the other thing. And quite honestly, why should
they not, I mean voters and public affairs leaders both? The danger
now would seem to be that the less attractive qualities that
democracy promotes in both voters and leaders are like loose cannon
without the traditional guardrails that, as Adam Smith perceived
with regard to economic life, function as a kind of “invisible
hand” to turn vices, or at least less than noble attitudes, into
socially beneficial forces.
“Not from benevolence,” Smith wrote, does the baker bake your
bread or, in general, does anyone do anything. This human trait is
not turned into its opposite by democratic regimes as they evolve
into welfare states, and the bankruptcy of these is not likely to
weigh heavily on the minds of bakers, bread-eaters, any more than
on politicians and voters. If anything, welfare states seem to
increase the human propensity to think in narrow selfish terms.
Nicolas Sarkozy tried to reform the French welfare state and for
a time even hoped to break the grip of “welfare statism” on the
modern French mind. He did much more than his predecessor Jacques
Chirac, a nominal center-right man, but that he was disavowed last
Sunday, albeit by a slender margin, suggests that France, like
Chicago, ain’t ready for reform.
Will the recently elected Mariano Rajoy (Partido Popular,
center-right) have more success in Spain (public debt 60 percent of
GNP) than Sarkozy had, as he tried to reverse decades of
full-turbine welfare statism? Will the “austerity” championed by
German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a counter to the European
Union’s debt epidemic serve as a rallying point for those who want
to get the house in order? Will Boris Johnson’s win in London have
a “thatcherizing” effect in Europe? When, in 1981, the French
elected a Socialist president on a radical platform, the example of
Mrs. Thatcher served as a counter-point and reference for
anti-socialists not only in France but across the continent and
indeed across the Atlantic as Americans came to realize their
recently elected president, along with the Iron Lady, were
proposing an alternative model to the one that was supposed to have
the wind in its sails.
This model held, prevailed, then came under suspicion again.
Once again we are in a period of alternative visions. Democracy’s
“gimme gimme” ethos is unlikely to ever change. Mr. Reagan and Lady
Thatcher both knew this. They knew the arguments and arguments will
swing back and forth as to whether your gimme is best got through
the state or your own efforts — or some of both. But they also
knew human nature can be channeled (sometimes negatively, by the
state getting out of the way), wed to virtuous qualities, directed
toward generous impulses, courageous stands. Sr. Rajoy just
recently took a stand against creeping Stalinism in Ukraine — here
we go — hinting that if Yulia Tymoshenko, the former, essentially
liberal (in the European sense) prime minister is not released from
the jail in which she was thrown by the thugs who are now in power
in Kiev, Spain will lead a boycott of the Europe soccer finals,
scheduled to be played in July in Ukraine.
It’s only sports, but it does not matter where you start, so
long as you continue. The key quality to look for this year of
nearly serial elections across the democratic West culminating in
our own presidential contest surely is the moral quality of the
pretenders to leadership. It is not a matter of grading saints and
sinners, but of finding people with the ability to point to real
and true reference points and insist on them. Our societies can
muddle through the welfare-state-capitalist mish-mash to which
democratic politics have brought them. They cannot survive moral
and intellectual bankruptcy.
