Tony Blair, Right-Wing Progressive

Another kind of Red Caesar

Compact has published my review essay of Tony Blair’s latest book, where the former prime minister sets out the program for a new coalition that draws left and right-wing progressives together, leaving others out in the cold. We should pay attention.

If paid subscribers run into a paywall, they can contact me at nathan.pinkoski@gmail.com for the full article.

1997 campaign poster, created by M&C Saatchi for the UK Conservative Party.

I once thought of Tony Blair the way I did of Princess Diana: part of my fading childhood memories. After a decade as prime minister, Blair was rejected by his party and disgraced by the Iraq War. He looked doomed to a career of lucrative yet obscure consultancy. His forays into politics after Brexit, such as his failed attempt to launch a second referendum, seemed like the archetypical example of an out-of-touch former politician who didn’t understand the significance of the post-2016 populist revolt.

I was wrong. After 2016, the Iraq War became ancient history. Brexit and Trump’s election became the defining political events of the early 21st century. Elites pivoted away from anxieties about American overreach and focused on stopping populism. Blair emerged from exile, welcomed by those who had once spurned him. At precisely the moment when Blair’s political interventions in British politics seemed worthless, his stock was rapidly rising. It hasn’t declined since. Blair has created one of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental organizations: the Tony Blair Institute. Employing nearly 1,000 people worldwide, it is a unique operation, functioning simultaneously as a think tank, public-policy engine, and political consultancy. Blair is now better positioned than anyone to influence the British government as well as other governments abroad.

That’s why he’s written On Leadership: Lessons for the Twentieth Century. The book contains precious little moralizing and, mercifully, no tedious apologias for the author’s political career. Instead, it offers counsels on how to gain, wield, and relinquish power. Blair echoes Machiavelli’s The Prince—most clearly when he argues that it is better to be respected than loved or feared. On Leadership is a manual for 21st-century princes, a guide for aspiring Caesars. 

But like Machiavelli, Blair isn’t just offering gritty realist advice. He has a project, which is what makes On Leadership so intriguing. The book shows that the left was correct 20 years ago: Blair really is rather right-wing. The basis of his program is a kind of post-liberal progressive rightism that promises to co-opt the progressive left while crushing the populist right. It’s the sketch of a coalition that will probably define the 21st century. 

Read the rest over at Compact.