In the fusty British town of Blackpool, the British Conservative Party’s 2005 Conference is, as we go to press, settling down to select a new leader — its fourth since the British Labour victory of 1996. When Labour was in opposition in the 1980s, it was widely speculated that they might never win power again. Now it is the Tories who appear to be on the back foot of history — since the primary act of Labour’s last term in office will be to introduce a preferential voting system guaranteeing a permanent Liberal Democrat–Labour coalition. In Germany, the CDU and SDP have gone into ‘grand coalition’, locking out the Greens and the new East German-based Left Party. In the US, it is not impossible that voters will be faced with Clintons and Bushes for the next two or three elections to come. And in Australia, the Latham Diaries — beyond their gossip and hypocritical concerns about privacy — paint the picture of a party with a more archaic structure, and consequently deeper problems, than most. One doesn’t have to believe the latter’s self-serving argument that the party is ‘stuffed’ to suspect that it could find itself in opposition for so long that there will be the risk of a profound internal collapse of morale and membership.
These are all varying responses to the same process — a flattening of the mainstream political terrain so profound that opposition parties find it hard to oppose, from either the putative Left or the putative Right. A single form of government has arisen as the unquestionable manner of leading a hi-tech society that is moving from an industrial to an information/knowledge base: a combination of minimal social market policies, with an added and ever-expanding authoritarian control over social life. Each side draws on its own traditions to achieve the latter — the Right talks of nation, the Left of social cohesion — but the result is the same. Each side has to appease its interest groups in terms of the former, but the economic blueprint remains similar. Political philosophies — liberal individualism, democratic socialism — stand out as impossibly abstract in relation to the central process. The politically minded leave politics and the administrators take over. In such circumstances, what could an opposition possibly say? Those who stand up for the socially excluded — the new German Left party — themselves become excluded, while those who stood for an alternative vision — the Greens — get drawn into the administration of a society they once criticised at the deepest level.
It is not easy to look this global process in the eye, but it would be foolish to pretend that it is not happening. In some areas of the UK, voter turnout has dipped into the 30 per cent area, and the turnout for proliferating instruments of democracy — local assemblies and the like — has fallen to around 10 per cent. Rarely do people get a chance to make a clear choice, and when they do — such as the French ‘No’ vote for the European constitution — they are chided for letting down their rulers. The system by its nature sets up not two competing visions of society but a technocratic certainty up against an incoherent and often contradictory refusal. Both the hard Left and the hard Right campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in France. They were, in effect, campaigning simply for the continuation of politics.
What will come after this, and how, remains to be seen, but can anyone doubt that we are at the end of one period and prior to the beginning of the next? The only question is how far back that prior period stretches. Are we seeing the end of a process that began in 1968, or in 1789?
