"The Dead Centre, a collection of essays by the Jacobin writer Luke Savage, probes the afterlife of Blairism—or, rather, its variants in Canada and the US. Gone is the hegemonic swagger of the Clinton generation. What we have now is a feeble rehash of the Third Way. Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau may think of themselves as hard-headed pragmatists ready to make painful political compromises for the sake of progress. They are, in fact, gatekeepers of convention, fatally ill-equipped to tackle the many overlapping crises—social, economic, environmental—of late capitalist dyspepsia." Jamie Maxwell
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The Dead Centre feels structurally lopsided. Savage’s chief insight—that the triangulating project of late-‘90s liberalism has run aground, leaving the descendants of Blair and Clinton scrambling to recover a hint of their forbears’ lost élan—is powerful but overused. Having deployed this line of attack against the modern-day protagonists of centrist politics, he administers precisely the same treatment to the ideology’s supporting characters—Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke—as well. The effect is, ironically, a bit deadening. This book could shed 20 or 30 pages without sacrificing any of its centrifugal force.
Still, as a writer, Savage is smart and funny enough to keep you reading. His tone is part-bemusement, part-contempt. He views the mainstream obsession with individual leaders—their intellectual credentials, their perceived relatability, above all, their reverence for oppressive political norms—as a consoling mechanism for an outlook fundamentally unmoored from everyday concerns. “The superlative quality in the [liberal] taxonomy of virtues is seriousness,” he writes. Everything else—climate change, income inequality, opioid deaths, affordable housing, healthcare, the survival of democracy itself—sits a distant second in the prevailing list of centrist values.
The Dead Centre sweeps through the vanities and delusions of the people who govern our lives. We don’t know why they’re there. Increasingly, they don’t, either. Obama, Biden, and Trudeau might have made sense 30 years ago, in an era of rising living standards and unlimited credit. But today, faced with insurgent rightwing populisms and record-breaking heats, reasserting the status quo ante isn’t going to cut it. That, surely, is something even Tony Blair could understand." Jamie Maxwell