January 13, 2011
2 Things
Thing 1
There’s a new book out by Nick Shaxson: Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.
Back in 2009, I did a bunch of archival research for Nick, some of which has made it into this volume. Whatever you think about the moral (and legal) status of tax havenry, the research I did is independently interesting insofar as it shows the Whitehall complicity in the growth of offshore finance in the late 1960s. I haven’t read the rest of the book yet, but early reviews look very good.
For tasters, see the serialised extracts (here and here) in The Guardian. The dedicated website is here. There’s also a documentary being made, scheduled for release next year.
Satisfying stuff.
Thing 2
I want to catalogue blogs (and more generally, websites) that are explicitly aimed at educated, thinking readers and which carry a political/current events angle combined with analytic reflection.
These don’t need to be “academic” blogs (I consider Stumbling and Mumbling very much a thinking person’s page, for example). They just need to be starting out from a basis of (semi-)specialised knowledge, aimed at intelligent and intellectually curious people, and running the sort of content that idiots will be too confused by to dominate comment threads.
So on the list at present would be the likes of:
Crooked Timber
Normblog
Virtual Stoa
US Intellectual History
Ntabwo ni twa Muzungu
Consider Phlebas
Bad Science
A Don’s Life
Leiter Reports
Balkinization
…and so forth.
Links in comments, please.
January 12, 2011
“Alarm Clock Britain” vs. The Enemy
A lot of very good, very venerable political philosophy focuses upon the importance of consensus. This is quite clear in what usually goes by the name of the Social Contract tradition, where shared agreement underpins the basis for political society.* Much democratic (and democratic-friendly) thought emphasises that even if individuals in the demos disagree about specific issues, those disagreements can be accepted as resting upon a more basic consensual agreement on how to make decisions. The 20th century’s most impressive attempt to articulate a single political theory – John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice – put the (rational) consensus of free and equal persons absolutely centre stage.
In general the motivation for working within and towards consensus is well-grounded. Politics often means using force to control human lives. Force is generally nasty, and the more of it that gets nakedly deployed the worse people’s lives tend to go. The more consensus that can be established, the less force – and violence – we are likely to see. Furthermore, it will be much easier to justify any remaining necessary violence, insofar as it is founded in some sort of basis of consent amongst those variously subjected to it. (Though such attempts at justification will, of course, vary in success.)
It can be slightly troubling, therefore, to look at what we might call the anthropology of politics as practiced in modern societies and find significant instances of anti-consensual practice, which operate explicitly by exploiting insider/outsider dichotomies.
Take, for example, Nick Clegg’s rather distasteful sop to readers of The Sun. Attacking “scroungers” is, of course, a tried and tested ploy of the right. What attracts my attention is Clegg’s explicit drawing of an “us vs. them” dichotomy. On the one hand there is valiant “Alarm Clock Britain”, the decent folk like you, who get up every morning and go to work. On the other is the enemy within; the workshy scrounging layabouts stealing your taxes.
The efficacy of Clegg’s gutter strategy lies precisely in creating an “us vs. them” opposition. He casts himself on the side of the Good, who are in turn invited to cast aspersions on the Bad. In the process, the target audience will (hopefully) see Clegg as One Of Them. In turn, any anger at Government policy will (so the strategy goes) be redirected towards the common enemy.
This is a staple ploy of effective demagoguery – but my suspicion is that the causality is uncomfortable here. I doubt that such dichotomies are created and effective because politicians somehow invent them. Rather, I suspect politicians find the use of such dichotomies effective because people already have a deep disposition towards employing them – whether that disposition be innate, or the product of deep social forces (as, say, Marxists would contend).
Furthermore, the desire and urge to form “us vs. them” dichotomies isn’t manifested only in straightforward politics. Look at the hysteria over paedophilia in recent years, or in the past (or contemporary America) over child snatchers. Or further back, fear and hatred of witches. The enemy within – the terrifying monster to be rooted out and destroyed – is hardly a new phenomenon. And neither, of course, is the perennial enemy without: the French, the Russians, and now the Muslims of the Middle East.
My worry, however, is that if a tendency to structure group organisation – and particularly, successful political practice – around insider/outsider dichotomies is pervasive and recurring, then it is quite likely that such dichotomies exist because they successfully fulfil some sort of purpose. For example, it may be that organising around an us/them opposition is what allows the people within the “us” to co-operate and put aside their own differences, in light of the threat posed by rivals (whether real or imaginary). This need not be at the level of crude resource competition, but of complex psychological accommodation. Accordingly, we must entertain the possibility that human society is only viable to the extent that opposition is found – or if necessary, constructed – between insiders and outsiders.
And if that is indeed the case, it is surely troubling for any politics which seeks to be built upon and/or broadly uphold consensus. Because it indicates that the prospects of consensus are inherently limited, insofar as human society – and in turn, much successful politics – transpires to be inherently and fundamentally oppositional. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t seek political consensus when possible; for the reasons noted above, consensus is generally very desirable. But nonetheless, we may have to set our goals rather lower than we would like, and grit our teeth rather harder than is pleasant.
–
*Personally, I’m increasingly suspicious that this is an unhelpful label, lumping together very diverse thinkers. But no time for that today.
January 11, 2011
A History of Violence
Like Shuggy, I am conflicted. Blaming Caribou Barbie and her Tea Party for the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford sits uncomfortably with a general suspicion of ascribing easy mono-causal responsibility. Chris Dillow, as usual, offers the sober corrective.
On the other hand, Michael Tomasky is surely onto something:
“Direct responsibility for what happened Saturday? No. Mentally ill people are mentally ill. The Beatles weren’t responsible for the messages that Charles Manson heard in their music. But there’s a difference…Today’s Republicans and conservative commentators, however, surely understand the fire they’re playing with. But they do it, and a tragedy like Saturday’s won’t stop them, as long as they can maintain a phoney plausible deniability and as long as hate continues to pay dividends at the ballot box.”
Dave Osler points to the pervasive violence of American popular culture. Although I resist the inference that violent films/video games/rap music lead to political violence (loose gun laws seem far more important), again I think Dave is onto something.
For America exhibits an extraordinary history of violence, which I don’t think is comparable with the modern histories of (say) west European states. (It’s always worth remembering, of course, that American only has a modern history; this is often important in its politics and culture.)*
Not forgetting the 17th century religious persecutions of the North-Eastern seaboard (perpetrated, of course, by believers who had fled persecution), pre-revolution colonial America was arguably characterised by two things in particular. Firstly, violent competition for territory between (especially) Britain and France. Both recruited Native American mercenaries who were employed to kill the other side – but who were then defrauded of their own lands, or exterminated by their erstwhile allies. Secondly, slave-based agriculture, especially in the South. These are social and political foundations simply shot-through with violence, which then lived long in both the reality and mythology of the western frontier.
The modern Tea Party, of course, takes its name from an early event in a violent political revolution – and ultimately, war – perpetrated by white patrician slave-owners. An uneasy compromise between North and South following the implementation of independent federal government held until the mid-19th century, when this new nation tore itself apart in the bloodiest and most brutal war the planet had ever seen. (It would have to wait until 1914 to see a worse one).
Even with the abolition of slavery, something approaching black equality was only seen after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And despite the left-liberal white intelligentsia adopting the pacifist Martin Luther King as its poster boy, we really shouldn’t forget Malcolm X. Or the fact that King himself was assassinated. In the same decade, incidentally, that one President and his President-hopeful brother both met violent ends. And whilst we’re talking about the legacy of slavery and presidential assassination, let’s not forget how the Great Emancipator left this mortal coil.
This is a very potted history; one blog post can’t sustain a worthwhile historical thesis. But the point I want to drive at is that although the Tea Party are, without doubt, batshit crazy, they are batshit crazy in a very American way. We’ve all been reminded of Sarah Palin’s infamous healthcare crosshairs. But who said this?
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Why, Third President of the Republic Thomas Jefferson, of course.
Certainly, Tea Partiers don’t have a monopoly on political Americana. We’re talking about a very multifaceted entity, and its political traditions and heritages vary and may be represented in many ways. But when people point to the latest tragedy and intimate that this is about more than just permissive gun laws, I think they’re probably right.
–
*Which is not to say that west European states don’t exhibit their own varieties of internal violence – just that they are, I think, substantially different.
January 9, 2011
Rooting out the Nets
There’s a glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the rationale behind Saturday’s Netroots UK event, and Jacob knows what it is:
“the ‘new social media’ activist movement has found itself today in Congress House having an old-fashioned face-to-face discussion, with face-to-face networking at the Netroots UK event. The fact that you had to already be connected with these people on twitter, or if you’re lucky facebook, or be a reader of quite specific blogs, to know about this event adds to the irony of a movement that is claiming to be horizontal in a manner that avoids elites.”
If the importance of social media is that it allows people to connect and organise online, why the need for an enormous offline meet up?
With a somewhat relieving touch of realism, we’re reminded that Netroots’s purpose wasn’t to bring down the government, only to share strategy and experience. But again: why not do that online, if the New Technology Revolution is all it’s cracked up to be?
Fine, confession time: I didn’t go to Netroots UK. For various reasons.
Firstly, it was the 3rd Round of the FA Cup. Secondly, the train fare. Thirdly, I have better ways to spend my Saturdays than listening to people declare that we Need A Strategy and must Build Coalition Movements and Mobilise, without any actual concrete resolutions, or practical pay-out, in sight.
What actually happens over the coming year is going to be determined by individuals and groups taking specific, concrete actions to attempt to secure outcomes and goals. Such actions will happen when they happen, but are unlikely to be significantly shaped by large-scale group conversation and rhetorical grandstanding one Saturday in January.
Personally, I’ll turn up when things start actually happening. I have no particular use for big talking shops where people gesture vaguely at the inevitability of some undetermined actions. It may be different for serious organisers and activists (amongst which I do not class myself). But still, why not just do it online, or in the pub?
Of course I could have heard some nice tit-bits from various contributors. But then, I can just find out about them by, er, reading blog summaries. And the added bonus of staying at home is that I avoid interminable panel debates of “experts”, who actually don’t know very much at all. Hopi Sen, on the money:
“Dislike of panel q&a’s is based on fact when I’m in audience panel seem to know less than me, so if on panel, know audience thinking same… Also no-one in history of panel q&a’s has ever said ‘sorry, i don’t know’ then shut up. This would reduce bulls**t quantities tremendously.”
And it doesn’t placate me that apparently audience “experts” were invited to spew forth. At these sorts of events, the few insightful contributions are usually out-weighed by floor-hoggers riding tedious hobby horses until their inner thighs bleed red raw.
So I stayed at home.
You, of course, may have felt otherwise. You may have enjoyed the prospect of meeting up with like-minded lefties. You may have found the panel debates interesting and insightful. You may, in short, have decided that listening to lots of people talk about politics was the way you most preferred to spend your Saturday.
And that’s fine. It takes all sorts. You’re free to get your kicks however you like. But here’s the rub, and where I get on people’s nerves.
Does the enjoyability of Netroots UK retain its sheen if we accept that it was, effectively, just a massive talking shop at which people cold enjoy their Saturday afternoon? I suspect not, because surely the appeal of these events is, precisely, the sense that you didn’t just hang out with your (e-)mates and hear people chat about politics, You Did Something Important With Your Weekend.
Yet if we admit that the political efficacy of Netroots UK was effectively zero, it’s difficult to see how the last bit can be sustained. Correspondingly – and somewhat ironically – if people were a bit more honest about the reasons and motivations for attending these sorts of events, they might in turn see such hootenannies as somewhat less purposeful.
But then, I can only speak for myself. And believe me, the Arsenal-Leeds game was terrific.
January 7, 2011
The Leviathan vs. The Bankers
Despite lots of tough talk from The Coalition, UK-based banks are planning to pay-out billions in bonuses:
“The government is resigned to UK banks paying out billions of pounds in bonuses this year, despite its calls to curb the payments, the BBC has learned.
The best the coalition can hope for is a declaration from the banks that they will pay out less than they would have without government intervention, said BBC business editor Robert Peston.”
At times like these, I like to sit in a quiet space and ask myself a profound question, seeking guidance from One who once walked amongst us. What Would Hobbes Do?*
The answer, it turns out, is pretty clear:
“Seventhly, is annexed to the sovereignty the whole power of prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may enjoy, and what actions he may do, without being molested by any of his fellow subjects: and this is it men call propriety. For before constitution of sovereign power, as hath already been shown, all men had right to all things, which necessarily causeth war: and therefore this propriety, being necessary to peace, and depending on sovereign power, is the act of that power, in order to the public peace.”
Which basically means: without an absolute sovereign power, nobody’s stuff is secure from being snatched by others. So the concept of “property” only has meaningful content when there exists an absolute sovereign power. Accordingly, that absolute sovereign power gets to make the rules about who gets what stuff, when they get to keep it, and what they’re allowed to do with it. And that absolute sovereign power’s decisions is final.
From which follows:
“Further, seeing it is not enough to the sustentation of a Commonwealth that every man have a propriety in a portion of land, or in some few commodities, or a natural property in some useful art, and there is no art in the world but is necessary either for the being or well-being almost of every particular man; it is necessary that men distribute that which they can spare, and transfer their propriety therein mutually one to another by exchange and mutual contract. And therefore it belonged to the Commonwealth (that is to say, to the sovereign) to appoint in what manner all kinds of contract between subjects (as buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, letting, and taking to hire) are to be made, and by what words and words and sign they shall be understood for valid.”
Which basically means: the Leviathan is boss, and the bankers have no special right to go around setting bonuses willy nilly. If the Leviathan says “no bonuses, bankers”, then it’s no bonuses, bankers. And if the bankers decide to pay out bonuses anyway, then the bankers are for the chop. And they have no right of redress or remonstrance. ‘Dems the Leviathan’s rules, and only the Leviathan can say otherwise.
Why am I telling you this? Because in my area of academic interest, a lot of effort is put into showing (I think, rather plausibly), that the modern state is conceptually ordered in a way heavily influenced by Hobbes’s view of an ultimate sovereign power which calls the shots, and above which there is no right of redress in the final instance. (Nice fluffy modern states may institute checks and balances to prevent the worst excesses of power and suffering – but behind those checks and balances nonetheless stands the brooding Leviathan).
But the bankers appear to be challenging this hegemony.
Of coure, it could just be that George, Nick, Vince and Dave don’t want to push the bankers very hard. That they’ve considered extending the long arm of the coercive state – but have decided on balance they’d prefer not to. In which case, the Leviathan is being indulgent. (Perhaps because of cognitive biases – or confusions – about the nature of power on these individuals’ behalf.)
But what if the underlying truth is that the Leviathan can’t enforce its will against the bankers? That if it tries, they will collectively act so as to undermine, counter and possibly overpower the Leviathan. Or alternatively, move their operations elsewhere in such a manner that the economic impact is such that threat of doing so is tantamount to coercion?
Indeed, that the latter possibility is at the very least in the minds of political decision-makers, surely indicates that the terms of trade (excuse the pun) have at the very least changed. The Leviathan is clearly no longer master of all it surveys within its domains – even if only because the people who currently operate its jaws do not believe it to be so.
Which, of course, is another way of putting the oft-heard worry: that global capitalism has bred megacorporations that are bigger – and more powerful – than sovereign nation states. But it’s also a way for me to express that I think there may be a significant (though by no means complete) truth in this worry, and at a serious intellectual level.
–
* Or as the bracelet I wear simply states, WWHD? Which of course nicely doubles up for “What Would Hume Do?”, for when I’m in a different frame of mind. I accept this may be funny only to people either religiously schooled, or who were exposed at an impressionable age to the activities of bonkers Christian organisations.
January 5, 2011
Towering Over the Dilletantes
Max Weber worried extensively about the rise of bureaucracy in modern mass democracies. One particular reason was that bureaucracies bred experts, whilst politicians always had to be generalists. Specialist bureaucrats could “tower over” politicians, reducing them to mere “dilettantes”, forced to accept the mandarins’ words as gospel truth.
Yet this was a serious problem: bureaucrats are, by their nature and purpose, anti-political creatures. Their function is to protect and preserve their own departments (and in turn, jobs). What bureaucrats cannot offer is the calling for politics; an appreciation of the grave ethical responsibilities incumbent upon political decision-makers. To the extent that bureaucrats dominate politicians, Weber thought, political nihilism threatens.
After George Osborne’s recent appearance on the Today Programme, however, I’m wondering if in fact politicians are making dilettantes of voters.
Osborne defended the Tory-led government’s deeply regressive VAT rise on the grounds that it would lead to growth in jobs. This set economists like Philippe Legrain spitting feathers:
“The notion that raising VAT will boost employment, as Osborne claimed on #r4today , is voodoo economics.”
And you can understand Legrain’s frustration, having only the day before written a column explaining why VAT rise is likely to increase unemployment.
But here’s the rub. If I’m honest, I just don’t know if Osborne is telling porkies. Because I’m not an economist. Sure, I can think over the rudiments of simplified macroeconomic theory, picked up at A-Level and first-year undergraduate. That higher VAT is likely to depress consumer spending, reducing aggregate demand (ceteris paribus), thus likely reducing aggregate levels of employment.
Yet that’s all very basic and sketchy; I don’t honestly know whether VAT will likely boost or hurt employment. And you don’t either, unless you are a fairly well-qualified economist with lots of good data about the current state of the economy.
Of course, I can go and read economic journals, newspapers and blogs. I can thus try to educate myself, and form a balanced opinion. (And perhaps I should. Though, given that I’m disposed to distrust anything that comes out of Boy George’s pie-hole, I’ll probably come down against him in any case. If he announced that “Madagascar is an Island”, I’d instinctively take that with a pinch of salt.)
But the point is, most voters won’t go and do detailed research (and in all honesty, I probably won’t either). Not because they are (all) lazy and stupid, but because time is precious and life is short. Osborne can make the statement “a VAT rise will boost employment”, and many may simply take him at his word (or do the opposite, depending on their political leanings). In practice, most people have little alternative.
Which raises a problem. When it comes to (especially) economic policy, politicians can play the expert card, and most voters have no choice but to assume that they are not telling brazen porkies.
Now you might think this is ok: that if unemployment doesn’t fall, people will spot the falsehood and kick Boy George out of office. Except there’s 4 years until the next election; employment trends will do a lot of funny things between now and then. And anyway, Tory electoral prospects will be determined by much more than VAT porkies (if indeed they are such). And Dave and Co. know this.
The jargon of economics in particular offers numerous opportunities for politicians to turn voters into dilettantes. At one level, this simply illustrates that democracy is imperfect. (Though the fat man was doubtless right regardless: it remains the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.)
At another level, however, this does illustrate a point I was getting at recently: that democracy (whatever that complex thing turns out to be in the end) may not match up cleanly with one’s other ethical and political values. For example, if we have lots of equal participatory democracy, but a very uneven spread of knowledge and expertise, there’s no guarantee that the illuminati won’t “tower over” the ignorant, regardless.
And it’s simply not clear that introducing more “deliberation”, or “participatory frameworks”, or any other favoured procedural gewgaws of the idealistic left, is going to significantly change that.*
–
Isn’t the word gewgaws simply fantastic? Thus, another benefit of reading the classics for yourself. If I hadn’t tackled the obscure Book III of the Wealth of Nations, where would I have come across such a wonderful term?
January 3, 2011
Why are we all democrats now?
I don’t see eye to eye with Norm on a fair few things, politics-wise. But his recent piece on the self-serving abuse of the word (and concept) “democracy” amongst much of the left is basically spot-on:
“… what is worst here is something captured not by any single quotation, but by a kind of miasmic subtext. This is that there exists somewhere underneath the deficiencies of ‘electoral democracy’ an already formed will of the people, a will in support of what Gopal and other meshuggeneh-leftist spokespeople want, but which is blocked by the distorting mechanisms of the non-real democracy they lament. This extraordinary assumption, supported by no empirical evidence, never seems sufficiently to agitate those who hold it into trying to explain why no party or movement standing on the kind of political programme [they] would want to see has been able to come even half way close to winning an electoral majority.”
That there is a “real” democratic will of “The People”, lying behind what is currently actually being expressed by the people, is not a particularly new thought. It also has a fairly long and somewhat ignoble history. (Les Jacobins, anyone?)
In the rush to equate “democracy” with whatever particular value or outcome political leftists favour, the complexity of that concept is almost always overlooked. (Ditto when smearing any opposed position as “undemocratic”.) Yet democracy refers to at least two things. Firstly, a process by which decisions are made. Secondly, a value about the ordering of political systems and activities.
Indeed, the word “democratic” is now thoroughly loaded with positive value-connotations, whilst “undemocratic” is an unambiguous political slur. Yet this is actually a quite remarkable fact. Because until roughly the 20th Century, no sane person ever thought democracy was a good idea. Rule by the people? Power in the hands of the mob? You’d have to be stark raving crackers to want that.
The only place it was ever tried was a slave-owning Greek city two and a half thousand years ago, where the adult male citizenry of just 40,000 was given direct decision-making power. The experiment lasted about 100 years, in which time a devastating war was lost to neighbouring Sparta, before Macedonian conquerors put a stop to it all.
For the next two millennia “democracy” was a term of denigration; a synonym for anarchy. So how did a very different modern take (i.e. electoral representation) on an ancient Greek idea about processes of decision-making undergo such reversal of fortunes? How did “democracy” become the only legitimate form of politics admissible on the world stage today, and in turn the cardinal political value in the West?
One very interesting answer is offered by the political theorist John Dunn.* That at some level, it basically comes down to the rise of American power.
Despite its federalist political system having been originally sold as republican (and as explicitly not democratic), by the 20th century America found itself an ascendant global super-power. As well as having just contributed to the defeat of Fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the USA was facing down the world’s other global superpower: Soviet Russia. Which of course claimed to be a workers’ paradise, run by and for The People.
After the defeat of Fascism in Europe and in the face of Communism in Russia, American-style representative electoral democracy was enthusiastically promoted by that Superpower (and its allies) as the only legitimate form of rule. And by the mid-20th Century, that form of rule was now universally known (for reasons that would take too long to explain) in the West as “democracy” – despite looking nothing like the original Greek experiment.
To keep cutting a long story short, America won the Cold War. If this didn’t quite bring The End of History, it did do an awful lot to finalise the ubiquity of “democracy” as the only legitimate form of political organisation, and its inauguration as the cardinal political value. In a Europe where only 75 years ago significant sections of both left and right would have pooh-pooh’d “democracy” as either fraudulent or undesirable, we’re suddenly all democrats now.
If Dunn’s answer is broadly right, however, it leads us to noticing a certain irony. Much of the unreflective left, which brands all its values as synonymous with “democracy”, trades precisely on the ubiquity of democracy as the cardinal political value in order to advance its aims. Yet much of that same left typically rails against American hegemony and “imperialism” – without considering that it may be the rise of American power itself which largely explains their felt need to equate all approved political values with “democracy”.
Of course, there may be no significant practical consequences to this; ironies need not have any applied pay-out. Then again, one might believe that a touch of (historical) self-awareness helps to breed more considered self-reflection, and perhaps better political judgement. Or at the very least, the penning of marginally less banal political polemics.
–
*See his Setting the People Free (by far the most accessible of his work, though this theme is pursued in his other writings).
January 2, 2011
Party Animals
“ALL untaught Animals are only sollicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations” - Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue
Just under a year ago I joined the Labour Party. I will not be renewing my membership.
This is not, however, because of some ideological disenchantment. Neither
is it due to dissatisfaction with Ed Miliband’s faltering start, or the Party’s lamentable response to the Coalition. The truth is, I’ve done nothing for Labour since the 2010 General Election. I’ve not even bothered updating my CLP membership since moving to Cambridge. And the basic reason for this is that I intensely dislike political campaigning, and party-political activities.
I find knocking on doors at best boring, and at worst utterly unpleasant. This isn’t so much because I’m averse to meeting the general public, as that I’m averse to looking them in the eye and lying. Like when they say “Labour has a rubbish policy on Trident/ID cards/immigration/the 10p tax”. Or “Gordon Brown is a crap Prime Minister, I’m not putting him back in power”. And I’m supposed to sit there and pretend that they’ve got it all wrong. Because The Party is fantastic and if it wins everything will be sunshine and kittens.
Likewise, away from the doorsteps I find the experience of party-politics pretty nauseating. The herd mentality in particular is stifling. It’s like being stuck with a bunch of football fans who only want to talk about their team and how great it is – apart from the heretics and traitors trying to ruin it from the inside, of course. That, and the constant, compulsory mantra about how awful and evil the other teams/parties are.
These tedious diatribes rarely track facts, reality or careful analytic judgement. But they pass the hours in many a constituency office. I say this, of course, as somebody who was (of all things) a Lib Dem MP’s researcher for most of 2009.* The above is certainly not unique to Labour. It’s the essence of party politics. Petty, bickering, self-indulgent, tribalistic and relentlessly tub-thumping in the face of reality. Your side against theirs. The Greater Good, pursued via the medium of Shit Policies.
The fact is, to stay active in grass roots party politics you have to enjoy this. Or at the very least, be able to engage in it whilst not contantly battling the urge to shove pins in your eyes.
Of course some people are able to so partake and nonetheless maintain good judgement, political sense and basic moral principles not determined by party policy. Don Paskini is the outstanding example here, though Chris Brooke gets a mention too. But these types are, in my experience, very rare.
The typical party animal primarily enjoys the petty, tribalistic, self-deceiving (our out-right lying) drudgery of party activity itself, and for its own sake. That, after all, explains why many are still engaged, year after long year.
But furthermore, those that go on to be seriously successful – to head local councils, become MPs, or even government ministers – have to invest enormous amounts of time and energy in this world of perma-propaganda, dogma, and tedious tribalism. So they, too, must find the entire process in some way satisfying. Or else they’d go off and do something else. Like make money, or save the whales.
Which leads me to some conclusions. Real world party politics is far removed from any vision of individual political agents striving-forth to right wrongs by clear-sighted application of moral principle. It’s far more to do with the actions of individuals deeply-involved in a daily process of tribalistic, competitive political hustling .
Sure, these individuals will possess moral values and principles, of varying degrees of coherence and sophistication. But what drives many is the appeal of politics as a participatory activity. They do politics because politics itself is how they like to spend their time: propagandising, disseminating and tub-thumping for their chosen tribe.
Which this leads again to the conclusion that there’s something very misguided about conceiving of politics as being fundamentally an exercise in applied ethics. And that any political theory maintaining otherwise will be quite seriously deficient.
–
*It was partly seeing how shit the Lib Dems are that made me think Labour was some sort of superior alternative. Which I still think it is, overall. But not enough to keep me paying yearly subs.
