The Establishment’s Question Times, commentators, and newspapers:
how they long for a “sensible” and “responsible” opposition, and how the public
vehemently rejects their every appeal. From the Centrist Dads’ knight in armour,
David Miliband, to the ghost-like Liberal Democrats, the options on the table
are unpopular at best and objects of ridicule at worst. Attempts at creating a
prepackaged, out-of-the box neoliberal party along the lines of Emmanuel Macron’s
En Marche have flopped, despite the best efforts of Renew and similar elitist
watering holes.
Seeing this situation, it is only natural that Tony Blair, whose
supporters can’t even muster 5 percent of the vote in the party he nearly destroyed,
is seething with anger. His pet think tank, The Tony Blair Institute For Global
Change, described by the New York Times of all outlets as “a front for the
restoration of the global elite,” has worked overtime railing against “extremism”
and “ideology,” as if it were still 1991 and the public was paralyzed with fear
of the spectre of the old Soviet Union. Blair even has the audacity to use “For
The Many, Not For The Few,” as a slogan at the same time as Corbyn has once
again rocketed ahead in the polls under the same banner (perhaps tellingly, the
“about” page of his Institute For Global Change leaves “Not For The Few.” Make
of that what you may).
Primarily, however, Blair’s think tank has served as a launchpad for his philosopher of the future, now that Anthony Giddens looks a tad
unfashionable: Yascha Mounk, a professor at Harvard and a senior fellow at The
New America, a think tank populated by the likes of Francis Fukuyama, David Brooks,
and a smattering of corporate CEOs (the neocon impulse never died, it seems).
Mounk, as anyone would suspect, is not a fan of Jeremy Corbyn
and his supporters, pulling out the usual “Hamas” and “Chavez” fear-words. His obsession
with norms and pluralism over economic justice rival his counterparts in newspapers
and magazines like the Economist and The New York Times. Of course, he has
applauded NATO’s illegal airstrikes in Syria like any good Blairite.
What’s more disturbing, as well as instructive, is the length
he goes to attack opponents of his centrism, including Melenchon and Momentum, which
ends up in a defence of actually “illiberal” actions. He advocates the “subversion”
of RT along with other outlets that spread propaganda and what he describes as “alternative
truth” -that is to say, radical left and right-wing outlets that lie outside
the Cameron-Clegg-Brown consensus. He advocates for browser extensions to flag “fake
news,” the makers of which praise Google efforts to derank socialist and
communist websites such as Truthout, AlterNet, the World Socialist Website, Commen
Dreams, and even rights groups like Amnesty International that have reported on
US war crimes in Syria.
Mounk has portrayed the Italian coalition government- a
fascist administration ruled by dime-store populists and a noxious separatist party-
as a “red-brown alliance,” placing in a same category SYRIZA in Greece and the “anti-war
left” in the US, who “see nothing worth defending” in the American tradition
and fail to treat Trump as unique evil. He attacks “left populism” for focusing
on “odious villains” (such as the rich and elitists like him). He finishes this
neoliberal screed by warning darkly of “the 20th century”- in the minds
of Mounk and his ilk, a 100-year indictment of socialism or politics with any
vision beyond the enrichment of the City and Wall Street.
At a time when large majorities of UK voters back nationalising
the railways, electricity, water, and even to an extent the banks, Mounk endorses
an undemocratic and dystopian vision of “radical markets,” a theory proposed by
economist Glen Weyl that treats voting itself as a commodity where one can “spend”
on the policies they find important (one can only imagine where this might lead
if the media defines an issue, say, multiculturalism in the UK or guns in the
US, as the most important, allowing financiers to spend their own credits on
actually controlling what matters).
The point of mentioning all this is not to smear Mounk or even
Blair as the demons of the future (lord knows they and their ideas won’t stand
a chance in any British election in my lifetime). Rather, it is to call out centrist
democracy’s advocates - who created the detention camps for children in the
USA, the “hostile environment” in Britain, and who greenlighted Saudi and
Israeli genocide abroad - as extremists, on levels that easily surpass the left
and right they oppose so rabidly. The fact that it is the “democrats” who go
further towards censorship and dictatorship than even Golden Dawn in Greece, should
tell the socialist, anarchist, or communist reader, the hypocritical and repressive
nature of their project.