The Delusion At The Heart Of The Left

ACCORDING to David Selbourne in The Spectator, Tony Blair’s rebranding of Britain’s Labour Party as “New Labour” betrayed the principles and traditions of the left. With the current financial crisis, the Labour Party ought to be going great guns, but it is not. In “Blairism has destroyed the Labour Party” he tries to explain why Labour is flat on its back.

Yet at the very time when socialist and quasi-socialist methods have been adopted to deal with the crisis, Labour, gripped by defeatism, flounders. The reason is not hard to find: Labour as a popular movement, as a party, and as the embodiment of an ethic, was destroyed by Blairism.

This is a rather selective reading of the problem. After all, it was Brown’s boast that he had abolished boom and bust that encouraged government and the private sector to crank up the debt. But for Selbourne the reason for the destruction is that Labour abandoned its principles.

More important, ‘rebranding’ sidelined many of Labour’s old beliefs in the virtues of community, the dignities of productive work and the ethics of public service.

Now this is very helpful because, far from illustrating Labour’s old virtues, Selbourne explains the fundamental delusions at the heart of the social democratic project that lead it again and again to destruction.

First of all: community. The left makes a big deal about community, but conservatives have developed a devastating critique of their notion of “community.” You do not have community when you have a government program. What you have is compulsion. If you want to talk about community you must confine yourself to groups of people that do not wield government power. Back in the nineteenth century ordinary people built this kind of community in a network of non-governmental associations; in the twentieth century the left destroyed it.

Next: productive work. The point about productive work is that it is work for the production of goods and services for other people. It is a form of service. In particular, the capitalist system has cunningly sublimated the warrior virtues instinctive in men to the service of the community. Today men fight for market share not for glory in battle. But the left has always interfered in this process by privileging “the workers.” Once you have started down this road he next step, of course, is to screw the consumers in the interest of protecting the workers. But productive work must always be work that is directed at serving the consumers, not in protecting the producers. We live in the modern economy by doing stuff for others; we thrive by doing things well for other people.

Finally: public service. Joseph Schumpeter rather conclusively argues in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that Democracy is not the rule of the people. It is the rule of the politicians. The role of the people is to decide which people are to rule them. The politicians compete in a competitive battle for political success. Thus the term “public service” is really misleading. People who work for government and people who compete for political office are people interested in power. They are not really in the service business; they are in the power business.

So these three ideas, the driving principles of the progressive movement, are in fact delusions. They can never be realized, and never could be.

And that is why it is correct to say that the progressive movement and its welfare state are cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and deluded.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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