The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy

The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History by Luke Savage 

In 2016, Tony Blair reached his conceptual limits: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now,” the former Labour leader told The Guardian and Financial Times. The emergence of Corbyn and Sanders, he said, signalled a baffling desire on behalf of voters to “rattle” the socio-economic cage, coupled with an equally perverse “loss of faith” in the ideological centre ground.

Blair’s confusion reflects the unique circumstances of his electoral success. New Labour rose to power in the late 1990s on a wave of cheap credit and artificially-inflated asset prices. The 2008 financial crash wrecked that formula by liquidating vast chunks of middle-class wealth and inaugurating a decade-plus of flatlining wages. Blairism’s appeal lay in the illusion of debt-fuelled prosperity. When that illusion collapsed, so too did the conditions that made Blairand, by extension, his worldviewplausible.

Naturally, Blair himself missed the paradigm shift. In 2012, he urged Labour to “rebuild its relationship with business.” He did the same thing in 2015. And again in 2019. Three months ago, Blair advised Keir Starmer to ditch the “wokeness” and “far-left” rhetoric of the Corbyn mob and lean back into Britain’s conservative “centre of gravity.”

The Dead Centre, a collection of essays by the Jacobin writer Luke Savage, probes the afterlife of Blairismor, rather, its variants in Canada and the US. Gone is the hegemonic swagger of the Clinton generation. What we have now is a feeble rehash of the Third Way. Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau may think of themselves as hard-headed pragmatists ready to make painful political compromises for the sake of progress. They are, in fact, gatekeepers of convention, fatally ill-equipped to tackle the many overlapping crises—social, economic, environmental—of late capitalist dyspepsia.

Savage has a nice piece on Trudeau. Elected on an ostensibly social-democratic platform of deficit-financed spending and tax hikes for the ultra-rich, this dauphin of the Canadian Liberal establishment rapidly reverted to type. Over the past seven years, Trudeau has abandoned every progressive pledge he has made, from slashing Canada’s carbon output to justice for the country’s Indigenous communities. The hysteria that greeted his election in 2015 was a form of “burlesque satire,” Savage writes. The internet may have swooned at the youthful prime minster’s “yoga poses and diverse collection of socks,” but the Trudeau premiership has so far been a spectacle of nothingness“blandly reassuring, managerial, devoid of specificity or commitment.” 

Savage subjects Barack Obama to a similar critique. Obama’s elevated campaign rhetoric was a ruse, he argues. In 2008, the Democratic nominee fed off America’s deep popular frustration with the Bush administration. By the end of his presidency, he had one major legislative achievement to his namea healthcare reform act that gilded the pockets of private medical companiesand a string of pointless bipartisan ‘concessions’ in Congress.

What binds these two leaders, Obama and Trudeau, together? Both are nebulous political celebrities custom-built for the Instagram age. Both failed, or refused, to meet the expectations raised by their initial bids for office. And both buried grassroots demands for change beneath an avalanche of high-minded jargon and procedural excuses. 

Savage is good at wrenching open ruling class conceits. In place of policy, he says, we, the public, get performance. Instead of material solutions to the compound problems of modern life, we get a PR-approved checklist of inoffensive character “attributes.” 

Inevitably, as the existential challenges mount, liberals have drifted deeper into Sorkin-esque fantasies of elite technocratic rule. Hence the popularity of shows like Borgen and The West Wing, which cast presidents and prime ministers as flawed but ultimately honest, competent political actors, fired up by an irrepressible sense of civic duty. The unsettling yet urgent question Savage’s journalism asks is this: what if they aren’t honest, and what if they don’t know what they’re doing?

The Dead Centre feels structurally lopsided. Savage’s chief insightthat the triangulating project of late-‘90s liberalism has run aground, leaving the descendants of Blair and Clinton scrambling to recover a hint of their forbears’ lost élanis powerful but overused. Having deployed this line of attack against the modern-day protagonists of centrist politics, he administers precisely the same treatment to the ideology’s supporting charactersAmy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourkeas well. The effect is, ironically, a bit deadening. This book could shed 20 or 30 pages without sacrificing any of its centrifugal force. 

Still, as a writer, Savage is smart and funny enough to keep you reading. His tone is part-bemusement, part-contempt. He views the mainstream obsession with individual leaders—their intellectual credentials, their perceived relatability, above all, their reverence for oppressive political normsas a consoling mechanism for an outlook fundamentally unmoored from everyday concerns. “The superlative quality in the [liberal] taxonomy of virtues is seriousness,” he writes. Everything elseclimate change, income inequality, opioid deaths, affordable housing, healthcare, the survival of democracy itself—sits a distant second in the prevailing list of centrist values.

The Dead Centre sweeps through the vanities and delusions of the people who govern our lives. We don’t know why they’re there. Increasingly, they don’t, either. Obama, Biden, and Trudeau might have made sense 30 years ago, in an era of rising living standards and unlimited credit. But today, faced with insurgent rightwing populisms and record-breaking heats, reasserting the status quo ante isn’t going to cut it. That, surely, is something even Tony Blair could understand.

Comments (3)

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  1. 220818 says:

    ‘…a spectacle of nothingness—“blandly reassuring, managerial, devoid of specificity or commitment.”

    “Both are nebulous political celebrities custom-built for the Instagram age. Both failed, or refused, to meet the expectations raised by their initial bids for office. And both buried grassroots demands for change beneath an avalanche of high-minded jargon and procedural excuses.”

    And we’ve got Nicola Sturgeon.

    This is a curious book. On the one hand, it usefully exposes ‘the mainstream obsession with individual leaders—their intellectual credentials, their perceived relatability, above all, their reverence for oppressive political norms—as a consoling mechanism for an outlook fundamentally unmoored from everyday concerns’, while, on the other, it seems obsessed with the intellectual credentials, relatability, and, above all, the reverence shown by the likes of Obama, Starmer, Sturgeon, and Trudeau for oppressive political norms. It offers little in the way of structural analysis or understanding of this development in our political culture, let alone any practical suggestions, on the basis of such an analysis/understanding, as to what we might do to overcome that development.

    1. JP58 says:

      Your comments 2208xx (date dependent – how clever?)could very ably be used to critique your continued comments on this website.
      You obviously love the sound of your own voice and try to dress your usually simplistic opinions with verbosity.
      If someone try’s to criticise you you rarely answer the specific points raised and often descend to insults. If someone answers in kind you then accuse others of the type of behaviours you are happy to indulge in yourself.
      You are nothing more than a troll who try’s to use high faluting language to cover this up.

      1. 220818 says:

        And your substantial point is…?

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