"How Do We Get Rid of You?"

"'A historical perspective is the key to democratic politics, which if denied can bury the real issues and confine news coverage to high-level gossip about the rich and the powerful, reducing us to the role of spectators of our fate, rather than active participants,' he argued. 'The obliteration of the past strengthens the short-term calculations that pass for political thought, and for me the real heroes are those few who try to explain the world in order to help us to understand what we can best do to improve our lot.'"

John Nichols at The Nation marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Tony Benn's birth.

"Democrats Must Offer Material Improvements to the Lives of Working-Class Americans, not Just Ironic Camouflage Trucker Hats"

"But the subjects of Shenk's narrative aren't the not-so-great men at the end of history. Rather, they are the insiders, standing behind those men, out of the spotlight: strategists Stan Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, 'political Zeligs' who emerge, again and again, on the scene of left-liberal parties' fabulous failures across the globe, hopping from ship to sinking ship over the past 30 years. But Greenberg and Schoen were no chameleons. They brought with them dueling ideas on how to reverse the losses wrought by dealignment. And through their rivalry, Shenk contends, we can understand the real story of dealignment, and how we might reverse it."

Ben Metzner at The New Republic reviews Timothy Shenk's Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.

"His Very Success Generated a Double Backlash"

"This principled decision of European solidarity and liberal economics contrasted with the approach of Germany and France, which was to impose temporary restrictions on free movement for the first few years. But it was a decision made by default, according to Ed Balls, who was then a Treasury adviser: 'We didn't see the extent to which low-wage people would move. Fundamentally, we didn't think they would.'"

John Rentoul at the Independent says that, regarding Tony Blair, "politics today is the opposite of what he and his supporters hoped for."

"Was Brexit Inevitable?"

"A misguided narrative is taking hold about Brexit, both here and abroad. According to this argument, David Cameron called the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union solely for party-management purposes. When he did, he unleashed a wave of atavistic xenophobia whipped up by the tabloid media, and uneducated, working-class Britons were consequently fooled by lies and false promises.
"If only politicians hadn't picked the scab, the country could have ticked along quite happily, so the conceit goes."

Henry Newman at The Atlantic writes that the above "interpretation might provide comfort to some, but it's fundamentally specious."

"A Satire Meant to Be a Warning"

"But our friend Throgmorton didn't simply see meritocracy as some sort of Platonic ideal—he jingoistically claimed that the United States was already a meritocracy, and the world’s only example of it. Not only did he overlook the peculiarly British irony in which Young couched the term, he also missed out on an irony much closer to home: In 1959, five years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools, African Americans were still being systematically denied equal access to education across the South."

Ben Zimmer at The Atlantic discusses the legacy of Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033.

All Change and Back to 1994

"On the one hand, like Welsh's Trainspotting, early Oasis songs spoke of a Thatcherite scorched earth in which nothing was worth working for and the simulated escape route offered by drink and drugs seemed like the only option. But at the same time, and much more radically, Oasis also wrote songs–Live Forever and Acquiesce–of rare optimism and euphoria, songs that seemed to hint that some sort of spectacular collective recovery might be won in the teeth of the 80s nightmare."

In a 2014 Guardian article, Alex Niven argues that "we could do a lot worse than look beyond the stereotyped accounts of the 90s and try to recover their undertow of disaffection and supressed idealism."

The British Bernie Sanders

"So what exactly is Corbyn’s worldview, and how might he govern if elected prime minister of the United Kingdom? Corbyn is a self-described 'socialist' or 'democratic socialist,' an old-school tax-and-spend left-winger who believes government spending—not austerity—is the key to economic stimulus. He wants to close the U.K.'s budget deficit by, in part, raising taxes on the rich and ending corporate subsidies.
"Domestically, he wants to renationalize the country's much-maligned railways, scrap university tuition, and introduce rent controls. Many of these positions enjoy widespread support, though another—his support of mass immigration to the United Kingdom—does not."

Ahead of the Labour Party's leadership election, Krishnadev Calamur in The Atlantic looks at frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn.

As does Matthew D'Ancona in The Guardian.

"The Filthy Lens of Political Extremism"

"In Trilling’s portrait of the last decade, the BNP was a predictable phenomenon, one that naturally accompanies cynical Blairite politics and a growing gap between rich and poor. But the 2000s look like a golden age compared to the perpetual desolation of the Cameron era. Miliband’s reviving Labour Party and the less ideologically blinkered press have to make the case for government and against the mindless dogma of austerity—austerity that doesn’t just destroy communities and ruin lives in the long run, but that hasn't even succeeded on its own short-run fiscal terms to lower deficits or stimulate private sector demand. Otherwise we may see not only the continuation of this British nightmare, but an even darker time in which the only alternative for most Britons is Griffin and his ilk."

Jason Farago in The New Republic reviews Daniel Trilling's Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right.

"One of Triumph of the Person over the Politics, or of the Politics over the Person"

"Eager to refute accusations in the British press that he was 'Bush’s poodle' or enabler, Mr. Blair reminds the reader of his own belief in an interventionist and morally driven foreign policy, articulated years earlier during the Kosovo crisis. He also argues that by being in the room, he hoped to press the United States to go the United Nations route and 'pitch to George the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process.' 'If you wanted to be part of the planning,' he writes, 'you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action.'
"Left unaddressed is the contention of many politicians and journalists that Mr. Blair failed to get the Bush administration to embrace a multilateral approach and a broader 'road map' for Middle East peace, because, in the words of the Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, 'he committed the greatest error in diplomacy: he declared his hand too early,' thereby enabling the Americans to take him for granted."

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Tony Blair's A Journey: My Political Life.