Deborah Orr writes:
Tony Blair says he is
“baffled” by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie
Sanders because of “the question of electability”.
For him, these choices are
simply not pragmatic.
No matter what fine ideas candidates may espouse, for
Blair the key matter is whether they can achieve power.
Not that he thinks
Corbyn and Sanders are exactly brimming with fine ideas: “Free tuition
fees: well, that’s great,” he says. “But someone’s
going to have pay for it.”
But the answer, of course, is obvious. Pragmatism itself
doesn’t seem terribly pragmatic any longer. Pragmatism, as practised by Blair,
ended in disaster, despite the supposed cleverness of its compromises.
Even if
the financial systems that Blair so pragmatically supported hadn’t collapsed,
pragmatism had been delivering high and increasing inequality, of a type that
even the most pragmatic of social democrats – which Blair claims to be – could
only ever look upon and say: “I failed. I utterly failed.”
But Blair is not
quite pragmatic enough to observe that.
It was people exactly like Corbyn
and Sanders who were contemptuously ignored, when they warned about seemingly
pragmatic choices actually being dangerous ones.
Pandering to wealth creators
made them more wealthy, so that they had to be pandered to more.
When
everything blew up in our faces, when the wealth they’d created was revealed as
fraudulent, they’d already been pandered to so much that they were inviolable.
There was no alternative but to do more pandering, while ordinary people,
especially young people, were instructed to suffer the pain of austerity.
That’s where Blair’s pragmatism led. And he wonders why people don’t want more
of it.
There is no mystery, nothing to
be baffled by, in youthful enthusiasm for Corbyn and Sanders.
Pragmatism cuts no ice with those guys.
They know that Blair was unconcerned
about spiralling property prices. They know he grabbed plenty of that action
for himself.
They know that Blair was unconcerned about low, insecure wages,
because there were always people who had no choice but to accept them, in the
globalised economy the City wanted.
They know, even if Blair doesn’t, that the
Iraq war was conceived as a dynamic economic power play, one that turned out to
be exactly the disaster he was warned it would be.
Pragmatism, people have learned, transfers ever
increasing power to the already powerful, protecting them from their own huge
mistakes, and exposing others to their consequences.
People have become ardent
supporters of Corbyn or Sanders partly as a rebuke against the recent past,
which judged it pragmatic to dismiss their concerns and fears.
But sometimes
it’s simply because they understand that they can’t win, but vastly prefer to
go down fighting anyway.
It may not be pragmatic. But it’s
defiant, hopeful, courageous, even.
When you’re so pragmatic that you can’t see
that – then it’s because pragmatism has hollowed you out, and left nothing but
a ghastly husk.
Supporting Corbyn or Sanders are
ways of resisting that fate. They may not be sophisticated ways. They may not
be sensible.
But they are so much more invigorating than the cowed acceptance
that pragmatism demands and keeps on demanding, again and again.
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