GLADSTONE LIVES

Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party Conference yesterday was the most memorable since Margaret Thatcher’s stunning performance the day after her hotel and cabinet had been bombed into a pile of rubble and dust by the IRA. How strange that one of the greatest evils of the modern world should have brought out the best in two prime ministers. But how fitting as well. Take a moment to read the full text of Blair’s speech. There are some marvelous passages: “Understand the causes of terror. Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11. The action we take will be proportionate, targeted; we will do all we humanly can to avoid civilian casualties. There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must.” Thus a Labour prime minister sends a rhetorical cruise missile into the leftist editorial offices of the Guardian, the Observer, and the Independent. Then there’s his passionate defense of America: “America has its faults as a society, as we have ours. But I think of the Union of America born out of the defeat of slavery. I think of its constitution, with its inalienable rights granted to every citizen still a model for the world. I think of a black man, born in poverty, who became chief of their armed forces and is now secretary of state, Colin Powell, and I wonder frankly whether such a thing could have happened here. I think of all this and I reflect: yes, America has its faults, but it is a free country, it is our ally and some of the reaction to September 11 betrays a hatred of America that shames those that feel it.” Take that, Mr. Chomsky. Blair’s pro-Americanism isn’t like Thatcher’s. She revered America’s defense of freedom, its relatively small government, its defeat of tyranny abroad. Blair admires its liberalism and search for social justice. Both, of course, are right. And neither, strictly speaking, is or was a Tory in foreign policy. They’re Gladstonians – convinced of their morality, determined to defeat what they see as evil, and committed to semi-utopian visions of the possibility of world progress and the duty of the righteous to impose it. My own vision is closer to Thatcher’s than Blair’s, but grown-ups realize that these two strains in Anglo-American politics – conservative liberalism and liberal liberalism – are both necessary for a healthy politics in both countries. What neither Thatcher nor Blair really believed in was the dark pessimism of real Toryism or the true socialism of the British Labour past. As such they represent the two political wings of Britain’s Americanophilia. The United States – in Reagan and, now, Bush – was lucky to have each of them at exactly the right time.