Earlier today Tony Blair called for the dissolution of Parliament and a general election on May 5. That’s right: one month from today, with the campaign actually not getting completely underway until after Pope John Paul II’s funeral on Friday and Prince Charles’ wedding on Saturday. So it’s basically going to be a three-week sprint to the wire, astonishing as that may seem to us Americans who are used to two-year marathons.Moreover, Blair’s announcement coincided with the release of a couple of national polls showing Labour’s margin over the Tories shrinking significantly. The Guardian/ICM poll has Labour at 37 percent, the Conservatives at 34 percent, and the LibDems at 21 percent, with a lot of indications of voter volatility. This is a bit misleading, since Labour enjoys a vote-distribution advantage that would convert these numbers into a parliamentary majority of somewhere between 90 and 100 seats, but it’s still likely to be a more competitive election than appeared likely just a couple of weeks ago.As many of you probably know, British party politics in the last few years have revolved around four dynamics: (1) significant public unhappiness with Blair’s foreign policies, and especially Britain’s role in Iraq, which have offset general approbation of Labour’s domestic, and especially economic policies; (2) the chronic weakness of the Tory opposition, which suffers from leadership and message problems that make the superficially similar problems of American Democrats pale in comparison; (3) the steady transformation of the LibDems, who used to be generally considered a centrist party, into a Left Opposition to Labour, especially on foreign policy and cultural issues; and (4) restiveness about Labour’s relatively long hold on power, which would become really remarkable if it wins a third straight general election.I don’t know how many NewDonkey readers are interested in British politics, but I do intend to blog about this semi-regularly between now and May 5. And while I will try to present objective analysis of what’s going on, I’ll disclose right up front that I am a Tony Blair and Labour partisan.No, I’m not happy with the moral and intellectual support that Blair has provided not just to George W. Bush’s foreign policies, but to Bush himself (every time they have a joint press conference, I half-expect Bush to respond to a question with: “What he said.”), but what do you expect from any British Prime Minister? I have zero doubts, and lots of reasons to believe, that 10 Downing Street would have been ecstatic at a Kerry victory last November, and that the U.S.-British alliance would have flourished as never before.But the bottom line is that on every key issue facing his country, our country, and the world, Tony Blair has an abundance of exactly what virtually all U.S. Democrats say a party of the center-left should have: a clear, articulate vision; a values-based progressive message that does not ignore collective security or cultural issues; and a full agenda for shaping change in the interests of most people, especially those with no privilege or power, even in places like Africa. He is also, of course, one of the few twenty-first century survivors among the wave of center-left politicians who won striking victories throughout the West in the 1990s, consigning, or so it seemed at the time, Reagan-Thatcher style conservative politics to the dustbin of history. And to the extent that left-leaning Labour activists (and their U.S. counterparts) with various issues with Blair hope Gordon Brown succeeds him as P.M. during a third term, let me add that I think Brown is a potentially great leader as well, and shares Blair’s New Labour vision more than a lot of observers realize. So I hope Labour wins, but will try to offer a few news items and insights on the campaign as it develops, and however it develops.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 17: A Closer Look at the “Uniparty” Fable
RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:
Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”
Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:
“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …
“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:
“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”
The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:
“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”
Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.
MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.
So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.