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.
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*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.
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*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 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.
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*See his Setting the People Free (by far the most accessible of his work, though this theme is pursued in his other writings).
December 5, 2010
The Most Odious Vice, or The Coalition’s Dangerous Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is an inevitable component of politics. Individuals must promote institutional and party commitments they personally disagree with. Parties must sometimes make dishonest pledges to attain power, in the name of achieving a putative greater good. Governments may sometimes secretly contravene their expressed public policies, in the name of national security or prosperity.
But as David Runciman reminds us, an essential task in modern politics is spotting which forms of hypocrisy are necessary costs of functioning government, and which cross the line into moral and political unacceptability.
Consider the dissonance between the Coalition’s plans for economic retrenchment and student finance.
On the one hand, our Government claims that debt is A Bad Thing. Accordingly, it aims to eliminate Britain’s structural deficit in four years. Apparently we must not “burden” future generations with debt. (Ignore for now that Britain has run a structural deficit since the 18th century, allowing us to build railways, urban centres, vast road networks, a free health service and world-class education provision, as well as fighting two world wars and lots of smaller ones. Apocalyptic pronouncements about national debt can be calmly offset by picking up a history book.)
On the other hand, the Government prepares to introduce legislation dramatically increasing the level of fees students must pay to attend university. This means graduates will likely start their careers burdened with £35-40,000 of debt. If debt is such a Bad Thing that a national sovereign state can’t run a structural deficit, why must young people seeking educations – educations which current cabinet ministers received for free – become personally indebted to such enormous levels?
Debt dissonance might not be so bad on its own – but it’s underpinned by a much bigger piece of hypocrisy.
The Tories have constantly insisted that we are “all in this together”. But clearly we are not. Disability living allowance and housing benefit are being cut. The unemployed will undertake forced labour for failing to work phantom jobs in a recession-stricken economy. Poor children will lose their EMAs. Mobility allowances for the disabled and elderly will be removed, confining them to care homes and ending their independence. The list goes on and on – but time and again it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer.
At the other end of the spectrum, Philip Green avoids billions in tax but is invited to advise the government on how to implement its cuts. Vodaphone systematically avoids billions, and the Treasury effectively gives them the green light. Kraft gives Britain the same treatment. Each year, rich individuals and mega-corporations use the world’s offshore hidey-holes to deprive our Revenue of at least £25billion.
We are blatantly not all in this together; the hypocrisy of telling us otherwise stinks. But hypocrisy is precisely an odious vice; it really gets up people’s noses. Although they are not reacting from revulsion to hypocrisy alone, the outrage that hypocrisy generates has surely animated the student protests and popular anti-avoidance campaigns of recent weeks.
Ordinary people have a formidably capacity to sniff-out intolerable hypocrisy. When even the Daily Mail starts slamming tax-dodgers, a Government should watch out. Politicians can get away with a lot, but outrageous hypocrisy is off the menu. Middle England – feeling the squeeze, and worrying about its kids’ futures – may soon lose all patience with this administration’s predilection for talking out of both sides of its mouth. The Coalition is more fragile than its core ideologues seem to recognise.
November 8, 2010
Workfare, Slavery, Libertarians and History
Don Paskini demonstrates how unworkable the Coalition’s “workfare” plans will be in practice. Yet thinking philosophically about the implications of “workfare” – i.e. the state forcing people to work – can also be fruitful.
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State minimalist libertarians are fond of arguing that taxation is a form of slavery. Apparently, if you pay 30% of your income in tax, then allegedly 30% of your working time is owned by the state, and that allegedly means you’re enslaved for that period. Although intricately fancy, such arguments are in fact relatively straightforwardly refuted.
But if anything looks prima facie like state-imposed modern slavery, it’s forcing some group (e.g. the unemployed) to work for nothing. Indeed that description might appear a plausible candidate for a starting definition of slavery. Yet appearances can be misleading, so let’s consider the obvious objection that “workfare” is not a form of slavery: that unemployed people will not work for nothing because they will receive unemployment benefit which will now be conditional upon the aforementioned work.
Viewed from a careful philosophical and historical perspective, however, this argument may generate more problems than solutions – for libertarians in particular.
Firstly, benefits are – by their very nature – not a form of remuneration for labour undertaken. The whole point of out-of-work benefits is that they exist to support those who would otherwise be destitute. Benefits are a safety-net, a source of income for those without other means of support.
Secondly, benefits have never been part of some 20th century egalitarian revolution, the tides of which are being turned by making benefits “conditional”. Unemployment benefits (in particular) are a pragmatically-evolved political response in the post-war era to the realisation that leaving people to the mercies of capricious market forces will – in times of economic hardship – push the destitute into the “solutions” of desperate political extremism, like fascism, Nazism and communism. Benefits are a safeguard against the extremist politics that grow in the fertile soils of disempowerment and economic hardship. That is – historically – a major reason for their existing as precisely unconditional supports, supplied by the state and financed from general taxation.
Out-of-work benefits are thus not – and never have been – remuneration for labour. To make them such entails that they are no longer benefits. In turn, to threaten to take away such now-conditional “benefits” from those who do not undergo state-prescribed work placements is to effectively force people to labour for (barely) subsistence remuneration. It’s: work-for-the-state, or be destitute in the gutter.
To re-iterate: if “benefits” become dependent upon work, then that work becomes – for those who would prefer not to starve in the gutter – enforced labour extracted by the power of the state. Accordingly, that now starts to look rather like a form of state-enforced slavery in the context of societies that have developed legal structures and norms that previously provided for the unconditional protection of the most vulnerable. The more general point being that these sorts of issues cannot properly be analysed out of the relevant historical context.
A switch to benefit-conditionality cannot, as a basic fact of reality, happen in vacuo. Its impact upon state-citizen relations must be understood against the background of what has gone before. Hence: if people were previously guaranteed a basic subsistence minimum, and now they will only get that if they work for the state, there is a strong case for saying they are now being forced to work for the state. And forced work is, at some level, at least analogous to slavery.
I’m happy to admit that the analogy with slavery will not hold anything like all the way down, however. The psychological and moral dimensions of actual slavery – the rendering of thinking, feeling human beings into mere property, left wholly at the mercy of owner-dominators – are deeply objectionable, and put slavery-proper on a different moral and political plain to the Government’s “workfare” proposals. But having said that, “workfare” may look a lot closer to slavery-proper than the polemical libertarian suggestion that paying tax (via a developed and established legal-social structure, ratified democratically, and backed by rule of law) is akin to slavery, because of the alleged appropriation of worker’s labouring time by the coercive extractive power of the state.
Unless, of course, you’re a libertarian. Then, your response is likely to be: the state is not forcing anybody to work via “workfare”-type proposals, because if people would rather not work they can forego their “benefits” and starve in the gutter; it’s their choice.
What I want to end by suggesting today is not simply the usual charge that this is a bizarrely brutal political outcome to advocate, and which strikes most ordinary people as abhorrent and very possibly mad. (After all, the proposition that the worst-off should be abandoned so as to “protect” the property rights of the already more fortunate, who would allegedly be “enslaved” if they were forced to pay tax to fund wider welfare support systems, looks blatantly bonkers to especially the non-philosophically minded majority).
To that oft-repeated observation, I would add two further points however. Firstly, that the libertarian response is defective insofar as it refuses to engage withthe reality of a preceding practical context against which to understand the state-citizen relationship in something like “workfare” reforms.It is just not good enough to attempt to analyse political interactions and changes in vacuo – at least if one wishes to produce a serious and rounded analysis. Changes and power structures happen in concrete political and historical contexts; abstracting from those tells you only about your abstraction, not about the world people actually must live and interact in.
Secondly, that much libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant, insofar as it does not pay attention to why systems of benefit support have evolved in our societies. And in turn libertarianism is naive, insofar as no attention is paid to the empirical evidence that when people are left to the capricious mercies of the market they do not sit around picking their noses, but agitate for (often violent) forms of political extremism to address social and economic short-comings.
Thus, the irony: because libertarians are generally historically ignorant and naive, they advocate likely self-defeating political programmes. In the short term, the newly-established Republic of Libertopia would see benefits (etc) withdrawn and taxation drastically reduced to defend the (alleged) property rights of the better-off, so as to prevent their “enslavement” through “coercive” taxation. Yet in the longer-term, the inevitability of economic strife at some point* would push the destitute and abandoned to seek-out radical political solutions that would not only over-turn the libertarian arrangements of the status-quo, but (if the 20th century is any guide) risk instituting forms of political organisation that would be drastically more antithetical to the aims and desires of most libertarians than the oh-so wicked tax regimes of western liberal democracies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adolf Hitler was rather more of a threat to people’s liberty and property-owning prosperity than Clement Atlee or FDR.
Perhaps it is therefore fortunate – for want of a better word – that most libertarians in practice don’t actually go Galt at all. They just live in affluent American suburbs, and vote Republican.
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*To those who would reply that under the (Austrian?) economic system of state-minimalist Libertopia there would be no economic crises or hardships, we simply reply with the derisory silence this sort of self-assured refusal to engage with reality (by living in imaginary sky-castles of convenient a priori theory) deserves.
October 27, 2010
Necessities of War
Saturday’s Wikileaks revelations – of British and American troops in Iraq covering-up civilian deaths whilst systematically ignoring and facilitating torture – have begun to expose the full horrors of a war that long-ago went terribly wrong. Yesterday’s Guardian revelations – that British troops systematically employed torture methods that violate the Geneva Convention – makes the picture darker still, even if only by adding detail.
One consequence of the latest revelations is that they demonstrate the nonsense-thinking behind the original case and “justification” for war.
A central plank upon which the Mad Mesopotamian Adventure was floated was the claim – made tacitly or overtly – that this would be a new kind of war. Our troops would not be invaders but liberators; warriors of peace welcomed by grateful Iraqis. Smart bombs would target military installations only ensuring a minimum of civilian deaths. The Axis of Evil would be confronted by the Forces of Freedom; if there was violence only Bad Guys would receive it, as Good Guys basked in the death-lite glory of Shock and Awe.
Such, at least, were the assurances given by a Bush Administration salivating for war.
Connectedly, what came to be known as the “Decent Left” in the UK criticised those who refused to back military action. The Decents chastised what they claimed were the gutless faux-principles of an anti-war left which wouldn’t put its cruise missiles where its mouth was.
Underlying this rhetoric of decency was precisely the American assurance that a new kind of war could and would be fought. A very special kind of war, in fact: one which transcended the horrors that history teaches have attended every other war in history. Somehow the Republican Party – with Tony Blair in tow – would negate the logic of all previous conflict and be back in time for Christmas.
Hence: no longer would the presence of armed victors over invaded peoples lead to the use of planned and calculated violence against civilians. No longer would senior officers employ violent tactics to deal with rebellious native populations who viewed their “liberators” as oppressive invading conquerors. No longer would scared and exhausted young men (sent into a country to act as killing machines and operating in permanently hostile environments) enact revenge on civilians or suspected enemy fighters they (rightly or wrongly) believed had killed their comrades and were trying to kill them.
Rather, the logic of what armies do in conflict situations – or even what individuals in positions of power are prone to do to those they control – would be magically left behind. The Bad Guys would get their comeuppance, the Good Guys would ride off into the sunset. This would be, precisely, a Decent War.
We now know for sure that it didn’t work that way. Abu Ghraib, for a start, was no aberration. “Our” side did profoundly horrible and nasty things for the fundamental reason that profoundly horrible and nasty things are constituent features of all wars – and they are perpetrated by all sides, albeit in varying degrees in varying places and times.
Chris Bertram is thus right when he says:
“During an earlier phase of discussion, when those advocates [of war] were still unapologetic, but whilst the slaughter was well underway, we were treated to numerous disquisitions on moral responsibility: yes there is slaughter, but we are not responsible, it is Al Qaida/the Sunni “insurgents”/Al-Sadr/Iran ….
Well the latest Wikileaks disclosures ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, and covered up for the commission of such crimes by others. The incidents are not isolated episodes: rather we have systematic policy.”
But we can and must go further. The latest revelations are much more than just a reminder that the advocates of war were wrong in this instance. They drive-home a fact about war that should never have been forgotten in the first place: that war is always, and by necessity, hell.
The next time a Bush (or a Blair) comes offering “humanitarian” war of liberation, we would do well to remember such a basic fact. Iraq now sadly confirms an already long-established judgement of history: that “humanitarian war” is inevitably oxymoronic. Even if some wars, very occasionally, have to be fought regardless.
October 20, 2010
Thatcher’s Children
Most people remember where they were on 9/11. Epoch-changing events have that effect, especially when they are so spectacular and obviously far-reaching in their ramifications. But not all epoch-changing events are spectacular, and they don’t always advertise themselves so obviously.
With that in mind, remember where you were today. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review may become a date historians return to.
Much of Britain’s post-war history can be summarised – simplistically, but with some accuracy – as follows. After the devastation of global war, and the realisation that unchecked economic and social strife leads to the violent recourse of desperate extremist politics, west European nation states erected new social settlements both to rebuild shattered economies and polities, and to serve as prophylactics against the politics of extremism.
During the 1970s the social settlement in Britain underwent extreme strain for complex reasons, but in particular due to economic difficulties of both domestic and international origin. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister, and the first phase of a radical re-settlement began. The position of organised labour within Britain was crushed, and the role of private enterprise was drastically increased. Deregulation of finance and industry expanded the scope of market provision, and contracted the role of the provider-state. However the core of the post-war social settlement – what we loosely call “the Welfare State” – was left essentially intact, although modifications were made to the way it provided services, reflecting moves towards a general market-default.
From 1997-2010 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour put the Thatcher project on hold, but did not reverse it. If anything the role of private enterprise in particular was expanded. Although core components of the welfare state – in particular education and healthcare – saw enormous increases in spending from 2001 onwards, this was undertaken within the framework of accepting the Thatcherite re-settlement on the economy as a whole. Although laudable efforts to reduce poverty were undertaken – with some considerable successes – socio-economic inequality increased, as the marketisation of everything continued apace.
From May 2010 onwards, what can be described as the second phase of the Thatcherite resettlement began. Under the banner of massive fiscal retrenchment – justified (rightly or wrongly) as a necessary response to the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis – the Conservative-LibDem Coalition has proceeded to instigate massive spending cuts which are fundamentally over-turning the post-war “Welfare State” and attendant social settlement.
Indeed, it is worth noting what has already been pushed through since spring 2010.
Whilst Michael Gove’s highly ideological free schools programme, and parallel withdrawal of ordinary state school funds, has attracted much attention it has simultaneously distracted from the massive reconstitution of the NHS being conducted by Andrew Lansley (arguably without democratic mandate). Universal child benefits have already been withdrawn. The affordability of higher education for all may be finished as the LibDems U-turn on one of their oldest electoral promises. The system of state benefits has come under severe attack from Chancellor George Osborne, as dramatic welfare caps are introduced. And reports ahead of the CSR going official indicate that the Government already expects at least half a million new unemployed from public sector redundancies alone.
And this is only the beginning, the warm-up; the light shavings of the razor before the axe falls proper.
As John Gray has explained so well Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are Thatcher’s ideological children. They see this as the only way, for they have known no other way. And thus, it may very well come to pass that 20th October 2010 will be noted by future historians as the day the British social settlement completed the change of direction begun in 1979, entering new – and as yet, uncharted – waters.
So remember where you were. Your grandchildren may want to know.
October 19, 2010
The Corruption of our Moral Sentiments
Yesterday morning, 35 leaders of the UK’s “biggest companies” signed a letter to The Telegraph urging George Osborne not to slow-down his programme of austerity cuts. At one level Gary Dunion’s tweet gets to the heart of things:
“35 of the richest people in the world support ideological cuts to services they don’t use and jobs that aren’t theirs. Hold the front page.”
But there is more to be said. These outbursts by business leaders are hardly unheard of; before the last election Tory deficit tough-talk received a glowing endorsement from industry fat cats. Why do we collectively tend to give space to the views of super-rich big business leaders? Why do their pronouncements receive an apparently automatic level of respected deference, even when they spout partisan self-serving nonsense?
Part of the answer is simple politics: the right wing Telegraph pushes right-wing agendas, and business leaders are happy to partake in this. But that doesn’t go deep enough.
A more incisive answer lies in acknowledging the existence of a general misperception of “merit”, and a mistaken belief that industry leadership (often signaled by high pay) corresponds to unique and unmatched “talent” . This results in a common belief that big business leaders have some special, unrivaled insight to offer. But as Chris Dillow has repeatedly shown, “leadership” is a chimerical beast, because its usually organisational structure and contextual factors that determine success, not the special “talents” of fat cats lucky enough to climb to the top.
Nonetheless, a general (mistaken) belief that business leaders are supremely talented individuals is likely to generate a level of deference and toleration towards their opinion-spouting that other, more lowly-placed members of society, will not enjoy.
But there’s more, and like last week the Scottish Enlightenment may have something to teach us. Adam Smith was intrigued as to why ordinary people imagined the lives of the great and powerful to be full of happiness and pleasantry, when a little reflection shows that power and responsibility bring burdens of duty and the pains of intriuge and betrayal. Furthermore, Smith noted that ordinary people have a curious tendency to be more forgiving of the “vices and follies” of the great and powerful, than of even the “poverty and weakness of the innocent”.
Smith’s account of why this might be is (typically) complex. But one important factor is his belief that in modern commercial society people are presented with two competing paths along which to run their lives. The first emphasises “wisdom and virtue”, but the second promotes material gain. Yet we soon see that most people offer greater praise and encouragement to “the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous”. As a result, the path of material gain is privileged by most, even (crucially) those individuals who never get very far along it themselves. Growing up in societies where the “rich and the great” have their plaudits sung most widely, it is unsurprising that ordinary people come to imagine that those who are rich and great lead exceedingly more pleasant and happy lives, and their “vices and follies” are tolerated as being more forgivable in such outstanding characters.
But Smith was dubious about this conclusion; reflection on the lives of the “rich and the great” appears to reveal much that a contented soul would be better off without. Furthermore, Smith worried about the consequences for all our lives of this tendency to idolise the materially successful:
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”
For Smith, this represented a deep problem of modern commercial society that his moral theory attempted to navigate. 250 years later, it is far from clear that anything fundamental has changed. So you’ll forgive me if I give short shrift to the self-rightous pontifications of the Telegraph 35.
October 18, 2010
The Failure of Multiculturalism?
Long post alert. Available as PDF for the hard-core faithful.
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Angela Merkel has declared that in Germany “the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed.”
I don’t want to offer an analysis of German politics. As with France, dipping into German political culture without knowledge of, and sensitivity to, its unique and complex history will lead only to declarations of ignorant nonsense. So I’ll confine myself to general remarks, equally applicable to Britain as to Germany.
“Multiculturalism” is a phenomenon much debated, much misunderstood, and consequently much abused. Nonetheless, it will be helpful to employ a basic – thus imperfect and loose – definition:
Multiculturalism refers to the manner of ordering a state whereby no one “culture” – be it ethical, religious, political or ethnic – is given over-riding and official privileged status, and to which citizen conformity is demanded. Competing and differing “cultures” are allowed to exist alongside each other, as well as any dominant “established” or “traditional” “culture”, provided they conform to a set of basic precepts demanded of all citizens (and groups) within the legal-coercive structure of that state.
That last qualification is important. Multiculturalism does not mean “anything goes”. Whilst religious and ethnic groups may be free in a multicultural state to eat, dress, pray etc in whatever way they choose, certain activities are proscribed regardless of whether they are part of some group’s “culture”. Thus activities such as pederasty, ritual sacrifice and forced female circumcision are outlawed by most multicultural western societies insofar as such practices fall outside the remit of permitted cultural difference. Groups that persist in such activities will not be tolerated by the state legal apparatus, and conformity will be extracted coercively via police and courts. Those that refrain from such “out-of-bound” activities will be free to live as their “culture” demands.
With that basic understanding of multiculturalism in place, I would immediately add that multiculturalism is in fact a relatively superficial phenomenon; a product of more profound underlying forces than the above definition can possibly intimate. This is because multiculturalism is clearly a political response to deeply political – and economic – tensions.
Over the past 30-60 years western European nation states have experienced large influxes of disparate ethnic and religious groups. A means of accommodating these groups both to the coercive-legal state apparatus of their new nation state and, crucially, to other ethnic and religious groups within that nation-state, needed to be found to ensure the peaceful continuation of stable society. In short, multiculturalism has been that answer.
More specifically, the past 30-60 years have seen a processes migration into western states driven by two factors in particular. First (and particularly in the more immediate post-war era) former colonial powers accepted the influx of cheap-labour provided by migrants from former exploited territories, who aided post-war recovery and economic advancement, but then stayed and settled families as citizens with relatively distinct ethno-religious cultures. In Britain this mostly meant migration from the Indian sub-continent, and the West Indies. In France it was north, and to a lesser extent west, Africa. Other west European nation states have different ethnic migration patterns largely depending on their relevant political-economic histories. Germany’s complex relation with Turkey, and its present large ethnic-Turk minority, reflects its unique, complex and not-quite-colonial history.
The second major factor is the advent of truly globalised capitalism, which demands enormous cross-border flows of not just goods and services, but also of labour. Demand for migrant work has been high in west European nation states, and foreign-born labourers have been prepared to take the menial and poorly-paid work native citizens have had the luxury of being able to turn down. (Thus the recent phenomenon of east European labour in west European states and the concerns of how many of these peoples may be “flocking” to ones shores).
These two factors have meant that, increasingly, west European nation states have needed to accommodate influxes of different groups over different times, many of whom brought deep (and not-so-deep) cultural differences with them. Luckily, within the frameworks of broadly liberal and broadly secular modern nation states this has been largely possible. Indeed looked at in the context of Europe’s long and bloody history of sectarian religious violence, post-war multiculturalism has, if anything, been a resounding historical success. Western nation states have not disintegrated into bloody inter-group massacre, and for the most part immigrant communities have accepted the social, political and economic inequalities that come with being a near-permanent economic lower class with remarkable good will and passivity. Similarly, grumbling from figureheas of dominant “native” cultures has largely been kept precisely to grumbling, rather than vicious political persecution (though France may be trying to change things).
When Merkel declares that multiculturalism has been a “failure”, she is not only playing to a xenophobic and reactionary gallery, she is also being profoundly short-sighted. Firstly, because she mistakenly focuses only on the day-to-day tensions between different groups that multiculturalism inevitable throws up. Given the great social and economic tensions western nation states face in an increasingly economically globalised world (and as the rise and thankful fall of the British National Front in the 1980s shows, this is nothing particularly new), it is unsurprising that multiculturalism does not always run smoothly. It is unsurprising that dominant ethno-cultural groups – i.e. white Christians (and secularised former Christians) – resent and fear the unknown and different Other “taking over” areas of cities where the white native Christian working class formerly lived and provided labour. It is unsurprising that white Christian working classes feeling marginalised and vulnerable thanks to receding skilled economic opportunities in a globalised economic world. It is unsurprising that they blame the Others who are perceived as “taking” jobs, and whose non-native cultural identities are read as offensively invasive. And it is unsurprising that economically and politically marginalised immigrant communities hunker-down and cling fiercely to their shared cultural heritages in the face of hostile native majorities, thus “refusing” to “integrate” in the manner demanded by dominant cultural groups.
Precisely because multiculturalism is a political solution to very serious and complex underlying political and economic tensions, it is imperfect in its daily workings and experiences periodic aggravations and crises of confidence within and between heterogeneous groups. Having said that, multiculturalism does also boast some unambiguous successes – but which Merkel pays little attention to in decrying it a “failure”.
Secondly – and as importantly – Merkel’s comments betray no grasp of the underlying economic and political problems which underpin the political arrangement she chastises. Multiculturalism is a response to a world in which the mobility of labour necessitates political compromise, and thus the development of a modus vivendi between groups. The logic of economics (especially modern trans-national capitalism) is always global and disrespectful of historically-created national borders. But the logic of modern democratic politics is by necessity national. Economic forces propel (and have in the past propelled) migrant labour across arbitrary national boundaries, thus transplanting and re-rooting different ethnic and cultural communities within different nation states. Transplanted groups themselves develop and react over time, not least to further generations of migrants as well as the established “native” culture of any given state.
Political tensions within nation states inevitably develop precisely because one nation no longer underpins one state. It is hopeless to brand multiculturalism a “failure”, therefore, without acknowledging the underlying economic forces that have brought it into existence and make it a very necessary feature of contemporary West European politics. Merkel’s (wilful?) ignorance is aptly displayed when she gives a speech claiming multiculturalism has “failed”, yet which the BBC can report as “[making] clear that immigrants [are] welcome in Germany.”
And it is, finally, worth asking: if multiculturalism has “failed”, what exactly does Merkel think can be put in its place? Given the above it should be clear that multiculturalism – contrary to the myths of many of its right-wing detractors – is not some sinister imposition of the “politically correct” left, but a spontaneous and necessary response to the fundamental political and economic challenges faced by west European nation states. Multiculturalism is an accommodation, a way of trying to contain potentially explosive forces without resorting to the intolerance and jack-booted politics that led west Europe (and the rest of the world) into so much grief and bloodshed in the last century.
One worries what Ms Merkel thinks could possibly replace multiculturalism. One also hopes that a German Chancellor, of all people, will be especially alive to the dangers that lurk beneath a discourse of claiming that this most difficult of modern political solutions has “utterly failed”.
October 8, 2010
The Passing of Blair Rage
I used to be angry with Tony Blair. Really angry. About the Iraq war (especially). About his continuation of Thatcher’s legacy. About the assault on civil liberties. About the wasted opportunities which followed the two largest Labour majorities in history.
But I’ve recently started to change my assessment of the man himself. And my anger is mutating into something else.
Take David Runciman’s unmissable review of Blair’s memoirs in the LRB. It is focused on two defining features of Blair’s premiership: his 10-year battle with Gordon Brown (or rather, his 10-year resistance to the assassin next door), and his decision to back an American invasion of Iraq. In Runciman’s withering assessment, Blair not only got two of his biggest decisions wrong, he got them the wrong way around.
The time to be decisive and head-strong was mid-2001, after Labour had been returned with a second landslide. Blair could have dispatched Brown there and then. The rest of his premiership, and New Labour’s record, would have been profoundly different. The time for hesitancy and refusal to land a body-blow was 2002-3, when the American war effort was going into full effect. But instead Blair embarked on the worst foreign policy disaster in British post-war history.
Runciman’s assessment is broadly shared by Andrew Rawnsley in his The End of the Party. Yet what comes through most clearly in Rawnsley’s treatment is what a terrible judge of situations, and what an ineffectual decision-maker, Blair was at crucial junctures.
Blair lacked the stomach for a fight with Brown, and mistakenly thought he could charm Bush out of bellicosity. The result was disaster at home and in the middle east. Yet what Rawnsley claims, in particular, is that on crucial occasions Blair made shockingly bad political decisions: he brokered lop-sided bargains with Brown that left him totally exposed; he pledged unconditional support to Bush and thereby forfeited any potential British leverage. There are many more examples.
I had long assumed that image of Blair projected whilst in office reflected the real thing: a supremely talented politician with a ruthless Machiavellian gift for the back rooms of politics, combined perfectly with the buckets of charisma that made him a media-manipulating genius.
What Rawnsley (and to a lesser extent, Runciman) bring out is the extent to which Blair charmed and bluffed his way to the top, believing in his own vacuous rhetoric along the way. Yet when the really big moments came he turned out to be made more of straw than steel. For a politician so obsessed with his legacy, Blair may end up very disappointed with how history remembers him.
But two other things have also influenced my reassessment. First, over at Potlatch Will Davies has a very funny – but also incisive – post suggesting that Blair is incapable of feeling embarrassment. Read it; there’s definitely something there.
Second was Chris Brooke’s epic (and slightly bonkers) marathon tweeting of A Journey. What struck me reading Chris’ summary was the extent to which Blair was apparently deluded in his basic grasp of the world. Indeed I asked Chris if he shared this impression, and he replied:
“Yes — I think he has become a fantasist. He says at the end that he’s much happier now he’s out of office, and obviously part of that is that he doesn’t have to deal with Gordon Brown or the British media every day, but I also wonder whether part of it is that he isn’t so constrained by the real world any more, and so can just live in a fantasy of his own construction.
The final chapter of the book seems pretty delusional to me — as Blair insists he is “progressive” while defending an exceptionally right-wing approach to dealing with the economic crisis which involves low direct taxes on rich people, allowing banks to write new rules for regulation, jacking up indirect consumption taxes, & so on.”
These two factors – the dispelling of the illusion of Blair as political colossus, and the possibility that he may actually be psychologically unhinged – have had the effect of making me considerably less angry at Blair. I’m still – don’t get me wrong – angry at what happened over those 10 years. But towards Blair himself I’m starting to feel something decidedly different: a bizarre form of condescending pity.
Again, I’m fairly sure that’s not the sort of legacy Blair had in mind for himself. Fittingly, that compounds my emotive revaluation of him.
