Brown’s forced conversion to neoliberalism damaged him where Blair’s cost nothing

Evidence

Newsinger contrasts Brown with his rival and predecessor as British prime minister, Tony Blair, a very different case. While Blair – who presented the strange spectacle of a postmodern messianism – never had any beliefs that he had to recant on, Brown’s move from Presbyterian socialist to New Labour supremo was a long, arduous and painful process of repudiation and denial. ‘Whereas, for Blair, the embrace of neoliberalism involved no great personal struggle because he had no previous beliefs to dispose of, Newsinger writes, ‘for Brown it involved a deliberate decision to change sides. The effort, one suspects, damaged his personality’. Blair was the Last Man by nature and inclination; Brown has become the Last Man, the dwarf at the End of History, by force of will. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 116

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what happened to Brown’s stated plan to make Labour ‘something different’ — and does the personality-damage thesis appear in serious biographies or just polemics?
• XREF: connects to: Gordon Brown fabricated a capitalist rather than working-class background — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 115

Related

• Gordon Brown fabricated a capitalist rather than working-class background (similarity 0.84)