Something for UK Dopers:
We’ve seen Blair’s eschatological revolution before. In the 1990s, critics of Blair and Clinton wrote them off as soppy centrists who didn’t really believe in anything other than staying ahead of opinion polls. They were mistaken. Blair’s revolutionary spirit remade the world. Along with Clinton, Blair launched a revolution in governance and sold all aspects of globalization, from the open society to open borders, as necessary, inevitable, and good. The opponents of globalization, mass immigration, and “state-society” partnerships became fringe figures. The West has never been the same.
Nor have its leaders. In Blair and Clinton, there was a degree of competency and confidence that hasn’t been seen since. This absence of effective leadership—capitulation to the caretaker class—is one of the reasons progress has stalled. Blair returns not just to provide a paradigm for wielding power well, but to bring the rejuvenating spirit of the old-time religion. He talks about algorithms with the same sense of faith and purpose with which he once talked about globalization. This is what makes him so dangerous.
Blair’s political career may be over, but he is the armed prophet of a new fusionism. His faith in power and progress made his paeans to globalization so seductive to the left and the right at the end of the 20th century. That faith may prove just as seductive in the 21st.
This is rather terrifying. Blair is not going back into politics directly, but according to this, his Institute is increasingly influential, and his ideas even more so. And he doesn’t believe in a liberal society. He believes in delivering results, and technological progress at all costs, regardless of what the public wants.