COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Neil Kinnock’s Fate Awaits Bill Clinton : When both parties sound alike, voters pick the incumbent.

The shock of the Conservative victory in the British election last Thursday holds an ominous message for Bill Clinton and his Democrats.

The loser in Britain was a Labor Party carefully purged of all controversial ideological baggage. Labor’s leader, Neil Kinnock, had won the plaudits of mainstream political commentators for making his party virtually indistinguishable from its Conservative foe. The overwhelming consensus of the experts was that Prime Minister John Major would go down to defeat, yet Major won an absolute majority and Labor remains on the opposition benches where it has been languishing these 13 years.

It seems that voters scanning the campaign pledges of the two main parties noted that Labor was promising to raise taxes on incomes of more than $36,000 by 9%. Absent any compelling vision of change from Labor, the proposed tax bite scared enough voters to put Major back in 10 Downing Street.

Clinton isn’t promising to raise taxes, but in most respects he has followed Kinnock’s assiduous pursuit of respectability and has similarly reaped the plaudits of the mainstream press. Pundits praise his pro-business stance, his rejection of “divisive” rhetoric.

It’s likely, barring some scandalous disclosure, that Clinton will journey to November on a cloud of media esteem, presidential in demeanor and already meditating the themes of his inaugural address. Poor Kinnock was swollen by similar illusions until the British electorate rudely reminded him that if business-as-usual was all that was offered, they might as well stay with the government already installed. The crisis for both Labor and the Democrats is that neither has any ideas beyond minor fine-tuning.

The Democratic Party Establishment is furiously resistant to the notion of new ideas rather than centrist blather, as was strikingly illustrated by the reception given Jerry Brown’s flat-tax plan. The plan, albeit sketchily outlined and poorly defended by Brown himself, offered something laudably different from traditional Democratic pledges and politically well-timed in a year when mistrust of special-interest politics is at record levels.

Brown proposed to strike down the tax deductions, exemptions and credits that now cost the government $395 billion (the size of the current federal deficit); raise the same amount of revenue within a vastly simplified structure; then focus on the expenditure side, where national priorities could be cleanly set and debated, rather than squirreled into the tax code.

Seldom has the intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party been more dramatically displayed. From Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Carol O’Cleireacain (finance commissioner of New York City and former labor union economist) to Citizens for Tax Justice, the rallying cry went up in defense of the present system.

There was a double failure of intellect and vision. The present tax system embodies a welfare state for the rich. The entire structure is regressive. An article by Neil Howe and Phillip Longman in April’s Atlantic magazine gives some useful numbers. If we add up all tax expenditures (deductions, exemptions and credits) and all direct outlays for 1991, the average household earning less than $10,000 received $5,690 in benefits, as against the average household earning more than $100,000, which received $9,280 in benefits, including mortgage interest exemptions.

Brown’s critics, ardent to defend what they falsely called “the moderate progressivity” of the present ramshackle, unjust structure, demonstrated their absolute incapacity to think outside its terms. Brown was attacked for proposing to wipe out medical exemptions by critics refusing to acknowledge that he was also advocating single-payer national health insurance. O’Cleireacain savaged Brown for threatening state and local tax deductions. She was apparently unable to conceive of a Democratic Administration that would reverse the revenue-sharing priorities established in the Reagan-Bush years. Thus was the only proposal of any intellectual substance injected into this year’s Democratic debate dismissed out of hand.

So far as the articulation of any compelling vision of change is concerned, the New York primary was this year’s decisive political event. Albeit maladroitly, with disastrously poor organization, Brown outlined a plan anchored in tax simplification and a structural shift toward a high-tech environmental strategy for economic renewal. The Democratic powers-that-be rewarded his presumption with furious abuse and with acclaim for his opponent. Thus has the initiative been passed back to the Republicans, just as Neil Kinnock passed it back to John Major.