The Notion

Memo to Hillary: Friends Don't Let Friends ♥ Fascists

By D.D. Guttenplan

How much should it matter to Americans that David Cameron, who will probably become the Prime Minister of Britain in May, recently took his party out of the main center-right group in the European Parliament to join the European Conservative and Reformists (ECR)--a group whose chairman, Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, began his career in the neo-Fascist National Revival Party, and where the Tories' new bedfellows also include Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP whose party annually marches alongside veterans of the Latvian SS?

A week ago, when I blogged on this issue in the Guardian, it seemed purely a British affair. But two things have led me to change my mind. First, London's chattering classes have spent the past week tying themselves up in knots over an invitation to Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, to appear on a BBC discussion program this Thursday evening. The BBC claim that by winning two seats in the European parliamentary elections last June the BNP demonstrated a level of national support which needed to be reflected in coverage. To those of us used to First Amendment protections even for arguments we abhor the debate may seem odd, but in a country where, until recently, duly elected Sinn Fein members of Parliament were banned from the airwaves, the decision to grant Griffin a platform has been extremely controversial.

At the same time, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Cameron's failure to revisit his alliance with the ECR has put a spotlight on this afternoon's meeting between Hillary Clinton and William Hague, the Tory MP who would become Foreign Secretary in a Cameron government. The British press, from Rupert Murdoch's anti-European Times across to the pro-European Guardian, worry that the Conservative's far-right BF's will make Britain a less useful--and therefore less influential--ally for Washington.

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October 21, 2009

Brighton Beach Postcard

By D.D. Guttenplan

Brighton.

Short of sashaying over the waves, or flying Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 (perhaps on loan from his good friend J.K. Rowling) into the Labour Party conference here yesterday, there wasn't much Gordon Brown could do to keep the British press from writing his political obituary. With an election due sometime before May, Labour is currently third in the opinion polls, trailing not just David Cameron's Conservatives but also the Liberal Democrats. Outside the Brighton Centre, a noisy handful of demonstrators shouting "Don't they know there's a bloody war on!" shuffled along the seafront, sharing sidewalk space with a more numerous assemblage from the postal workers' union, protesting government plans to sell off part of the Royal Mail. (The delay in postal deliveries from strike action in London meant that your correspondent's press credentials, mailed in mid August, still haven't arrived.)

On Monday Labour delegates cheered Peter Mandelson, who twice resigned from the cabinet in disgrace only to be drafted back last year by an increasingly desperate Brown, when he told them "If I can come back ... we can come back." And they loved it when Mandelson, architect of the postal sell-off and master of all political dark arts, told them "this election was still up for grabs." Brown's job was to make them believe it.

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September 30, 2009

The Dog That Didn't Bark

By D.D. Guttenplan

Though the punters (that's you, dear reader) aren't usually let in on the secret, it is a truth universally acknowledged among journalists that any story belonging exclusively to the competition must be rubbish. This has nothing to do with politics: in the early days of the Watergate scandal the New York Times, which had endorsed George McGovern, ran fewer than a third as many column inches on the story as the Washington Post.There are (very rare) exceptions: one of the many pleasures of Robert Caro's The Power Broker is his account of the way Fred Cook, the great muckraking reporter at the New York World-Telegram (and a longtime contributor to The Nation) kept his expose of Robert Moses alive by sharing the material with a friend (and competitor) at the Post. But so far the Guardian, which last Wednesday broke the news of how two newspapers belonging to Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked into the mobile phone accounts of "two or three thousand" people, as well as "gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills [belonging to] Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars" has the story pretty much to itself.

On the surface this is surprising. Here, after all, is a story that combines boldface names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle MacPherson, Nigella Lawson and George Michael with the official spokesman of the Conservative Party (Andy Coulson, media strategist for Tory leader David Cameron, was editor of the News of the World when the paper allegedly paid private investigators for access to the celebrities' accounts) and Rupert Murdoch, the world's most powerful media baron. The BBC put the story at the top of its world news lineup, and followed up the next day with a story about how some of famous targets were contemplating lawsuits. So why has the Guardian's incredible scoop turned out to be a 2 day wonder?

Partly, I suspect, precisely because it was a scoop. London has five "quality" papers: The Times (owned by Murdoch), the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Mail. No American city has anything to match the cut-throat competition of British journalism, and though papers here are bleeding financially just as badly as those in the US, fighting over a shrinking market has only increased their mutual ferocity. The story was also just complicated enough to need a lot of space--not something most editors want to give to a rival. The hacking part was straightforward, but the story seems to have originated in sealed court documents that formed part of a settlement between the News of the World and its Murdoch tabloid stablemate, the Sun, and the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, the soccer players' union. And while the BBC has every reason to rejoice in any potential embarrassment to Murdoch, owner of its rival Sky, there is no evidence that the Australian billionaire was himself aware of how his underlings were spending his money.

Still, in a society increasingly sensitive to surveillance, but just waking up to the idea that Big Brother may not work for the state after all, this is a story that deserves to run and run. So here's a suggestion for reporter Nick Davies and his bosses: when it comes time to break the next piece of this puzzle, maybe instead of splashing "exclusive" on the front page you should consider giving part of it away. And if the thought of sharing with one of your direct competitors is too distasteful, you know where to find me.

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July 13, 2009

The L-word: Senator Specter Changes Trains

By D.D. Guttenplan

In my new biography of I.F. Stone, legendary investigative journalist and one-time Washington correspondent for this magazine, I occasionally use the term "liberal" with what some readers may consider a lack of due reverence. If we are all, as Newsweek recently insisted, socialists now, then surely we ought to be even more delighted to answer to the name liberal. To which eminently reasonable argument I can only reply: not so fast. There are really two points here. The first, perhaps lesser, is that truth in labeling matters. If what we want is a society where the market is not the supreme arbiter of values, and where goods are allocated at least partly on the basis of need or other social criteria rather than simply ability to pay, we ought to say so, loud and proud. So although many of my oldest friends are liberals, I wouldn't use the L-word to describe my own politics.

What does this have to do with Arlen Specter? Partly I'm trying to figure out why the news that he'd crossed the aisle made me smile this morning. I don't think I have a sentimental take on how rapidly, even with 60 Democrats, the U.S. Senate is likely to bring about the blessed community. And although somewhere in our barn in Vermont I still have the campaign button my father, a Democratic precinct captain, wore when Specter, then a registered Democrat, but, far more important in our household, a Jew, ran for District Attorney of Philadelphia, I don't think filial devotion or ethnic loyalty explains it either. Certainly Arlen Specter is no Bernie Sanders (though of course the Nation has had plenty of arguments with Vermont's socialist senator over the years as well).

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April 29, 2009

Postcard from the Summit

By D.D. Guttenplan

Dear Nationistas,

I can't honestly say that covering the G20 from the inside was fun or that I wish you'd all been there, cooped up (if not exactly "kettled") inside the bleak cavernous expanse of the ExCel Centre. The main problem was not the venue, though the unfailingly amusing Tory columnist Andrew Gimson spoke for most of the press corps when he said that the ExCel, a conference hall about as close to the center of London as The Meadowlands is to Times Square, "felt like a cross between a high-security prison and one of the less charming provincial airports." And that was before the hour-long queue to be allowed to leave the building. No, the real difficulty is that the media at a summit are like eunuchs in a harem--however luxurious the perks, we never get anywhere near the action.

This morning's papers will be full of big numbers: $1.1 Trillion according to the FT, President Obama's "$2 Trillion in global fiscal expansion", $5 Trillion according to the rather more optimistic accounting of host Gordon Brown. But the devil is in the details, and so far no one knows (a) whether any of these save-the-world stimulus dollars are new money (b) where most of these funds are coming from. What we were told--$100 billion for the IMF from Europe, another $100 billion from Japan--suggested that a lot of this money had been already been committed weeks, even months before the G20. China's $ 40 billion contribution was new, but the amount, less than some had predicted, was seen more as an expression of Chinese annoyance with still being excluded from the top table at the IMF and the OECD than as an endorsement of any global pump priming. Nor (c) can I report the details of whatever deal--or diplomatic magic--persuaded French President Nicholas Sarkozy not to take his bat and ball and go home as he reportedly threatened to do if Obama and Brown didn't agree to a more dirigiste approach to international banking. (Though Obama might well have been sympathetic, that was always going to be a tough sell for the British. It was hardly the balmy climate--or even the much-improved local cuisine--that lured the world's bankers to London in the wake of Thatcher's de-regulatory Big Bang)

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April 3, 2009

A Teachable Moment

By D.D. Guttenplan

So there we were, two Americans summoned to 11 Downing Street to advise the movers and shakers of British culture on the lessons to be learned from FDR's New Deal, and particularly from Federal One, the WPA Arts Program that between 1935 and 1943 allowed thousands of painters, writers, actors, dancers, sculptors, musicians and designers to define themselves as working artists rather than destitute citizens on the dole. Alan Brinkley, author of Voices of Protest and Liberalism and Its Discontents and currently the provost of Columbia University, gave an eloquent resume of the New Deal's ambitions and limitations. Then your correspondent followed up with a few points aimed at translating the language of 1930s America into contemporary Britain. But far more striking than anything either of us said was the sheer cultural leverage of the assembled audience, who included the chief executives of the BBC, the Royal Opera House, the British Council, the Arts Council, the Southhbank Centre, the Heritage Lottery Fund, as well as the serving ministers of Culture and Work and Pensions, MPs from both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, not to mention Alastair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, with his wife Maggie, acted as our hosts.

That these people, each of whom controls a budget as large or larger than the $50 million portion of President Obama's stimulus package for the US National Endowment for the Arts that proved so contentious, were prepared to spend a big chunk of time listening to a history lesson--and an American history lesson at that--was evidence of just how seriously Britain takes its culture industries. (Anyone tempted to denigrate culture's contribution to Britain's balance of payments would have quickly been set straight by Tessa Ross, who as head of Channel 4's film division greenlighted Slumdog Millionaire.) But this morning's gathering was also testimony to the power of an idea. We had been invited to launch The New Deal of the Mind,, the brainchild of journalist Martin Bright, who in an article in the New Statesman argued that by putting all of their emphasis on bailing out banks or big, long-term infrastructure projects the British government was missing out on one of the few undisputed successes of the New Deal, the Federal Arts Programs. "If ministers have decided to go down the route of work creation backed by borrowing," urged Bright, "they should at least do it with some imagination and flair."

Similar ideas have been floated in the US--most recently by Charles Peters and Tim Noah. But what was remarkable about Bright's modest proposal was not so much the content as the response--this lone lefty journalist's trial balloon had somehow commandeered not just a respectful hearing (and, courtesy of the web and Bright's energy, a wide audience) but office space, the ears of the powerful, and thanks to Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the promise of real money. All within just over a month.

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March 24, 2009

Time for a New Popular Front?

By D.D. Guttenplan

The British press seems to have finally recovered from President Obama's supposed "diss" of Gordon Brown. Instead, today's papers wonder if the Troubles have returned to Northern Ireland and whether Jade Goody a Z-list celebrity who became famous for her fecklessness on reality TV, and has since been diagnosed with terminal cancer, will really die--I was going to say "live"--on camera. Or, for the London chattering classes, the pressing question of whether it was criminally malicious or just pathologically stupid for a novelist to use her her teenage son's addiction to "skunk"--and subsequent family torment--as grist for her new book.

Since I think the answers are obvious (No. Who cares? Give me a break!), and because this is supposed to be a conversation, I'd like instead to come in behind Eyal Press. I don't often find myself on the same page, politically, as Roger Cohen. But like Eyal, I'd noticed Cohen's searing denunciation of Israeli brutality in Gaza, and had indeed emailed several American friends both an earlier column and Henry Seigman's even more powerful, and prophetically angry, contribution from the London Review of Books. Perhaps American Jews really have reached a limit, with more and more of us refusing to remain silently complicit.

But Eyal's argument implicitly raises another point--namely about the left's ability to make common cause with people we don't always agree with. For far too long we on the left have allowed ourselves to be mesmerized by what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences." Properly distrustful of power, the stories radicals told ourselves were all about betrayal and defeat. And after so many decades under siege--with even "liberal" considered a term of abuse--maybe that was only to be expected. But the truth is that recently all sorts of notions shunned by the mainstream--from national health care to nationalizing banks--have suddenly entered the realm of political probability. We may not all be socialists now but those of use who were socialists all along need to get ready for some company. Indeed we might start by improving our manners.

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March 11, 2009