Kruger 1, Remnick 0
I’ve spent some of the week end (don’t want to give the impression I’m a slow reader) reading two biggish political articles. The first was David Remnick’s New Yorker essay on Bill Clinton; the second, Danny Kruger’s Prospect essay on Cameroonianism, if that’s the right word.
I have tried many times to subscribe to the NEw Yorker, but it’s delivery is erratic so I buy it occasionally from the news agents. I was looking forward to Remnick’s article, but I was very disappointed. First, it is very badly written. Smug, cliched and even at times incoherent, not to say dull. Secondly, and related, it succeeded in making me loathe Clinton, pretty much for all the same reasons.
The profile is completely one-sided. For example, ex-President George HW Bush is profiteering by working for the Carlyle Group, while our Bill is merely working when he takes $100k for a lecture and hitches rides on the private jets of his plutocrat friends. Clinton/Remnick admit no mistakes for his Presidency, save his failure to intervene in Rwanda. Actually, his Presidency achieved little, save that it allowed Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress to push through important legislative reforms.
Clinton also says, breathtakingly, that he wishes he had been President in 9/11. Well, Bill, you were, except it was the first world trade bomb in 1993 and you did nothing about it. But then he blames his failure to intervene in Rwanda on the inability of is ”staffers” to hold a meeting on the siubject. May be they never got round to talking about al-Quaeda either.
Ugh. No doubt Remnick will become director-general of the BBC.
By contrast, Danny Kruger’s article is an excellent exposition of the new Conservative outlook. It points out that the difference between the left and the right remains the same - the former’s adherence to the state, and the latter’s adherence to the individual. The battleground remains the community, society, or as Kruger calls it, fraternity. Brown et al. see this as the province of state action, while Cameron sees it as the creation of free individuals. Cameron is of course right, which is why his GOvernment will be less eager to turn to great centralist solutions to all our problems. This is an article definitely worth reading, even if many journalists I have spoken to say they cannot understand it. Kruger is a gret man, who was harshly forced to stand down as a Conservative candidate in 2005, and who has taken some flak for DC’s foreign policy speech last week.
Guido Fawkes said on September 17th, 2006 at 8:25 pm:
First time comment-maker here. Found you via Dale’s 100 Tory Blogs list.
Ed, the flack for Danny was somewhat deserved, he did copy it wholesale from Fukuyama after all.