In Praise of Small Things.

And Venn diagrams.

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You may have noticed that we are having some small political difficulties in France recently, what with collapsing governments and attempts to bring the country to a standstill, all under a President skilfully setting new records for unpopularity every month. Today’s essay isn’t about France for the most part, but I’m going to start with the situation here, because it helps us to better understand current structural political problems in the West as a whole. The fluidity of the French political system and the lack of party discipline means that developments are often much easier to spot here than in Anglo-Saxon countries, for example.

The standard presentation of the French problem goes like this. The Parliamentary elections of 2022 produced a situation where no party or group of parties had the 289 seats needed to control a 577-seat National Assembly. The parties supporting Macron managed nonetheless to form a minority government which survived for a couple of years. When they did badly in the 2024 European elections, Macron used his powers to dissolve the National Assembly and called fresh elections. (Why he did this still remains unclear: the man has the political judgement of a turnip.) His message to the voters was “me or chaos!” to which the voters replied, “not you mate, anyway!” The result was a stinging defeat, and the resignation of the then Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal. After a period of uncertainty and horse-trading, the respected Michel Barnier (yes, the Brexit man) was appointed Prime Minister, leading another minority centre-Right coalition.

Barnier’s government fell on a vote of censure at the end of last year, and he was replaced by another elderly figure from the traditional Right, François Bayrou, who seems to have more-or-less imposed himself upon Macron. Bayrou decided to call for a vote of confidence in his government on the Monday of last week, which he lost by a landslide. Nobody really knows why he did that. The leading theories are (1) he thought there would be a lot of abstentions and he might win and (2) he wanted to leave in a dignified manner rather than be defeated in a censure motion, thus giving himself time to prepare for the Presidential election in 2027. Maybe he wasn’t quite sure himself. So now we have a new Prime Minister, Sebastien Lecornu, from Macron’s own party. It would be overly kind to describe the situation as a shambles: as Oscar Wilde might have put it, to lose one Prime Minister may be accounted a misfortune, but to lose two in nine months seems remarkably like carelessness.

It’s also argued that the country, and the Parliament, is hopelessly divided and so the chances of putting together an effective coalition are very small. Now all of this is true as far as it goes (and it’s true there are eleven separate groups in the National Assembly, generally consisting of several parties) but there are other components of the problem as well, and we find them, in open or disguised form, in many other western countries also.

If we adopt the standard political terminology, then, keeping the figure of 289 seats in mind, we begin with a rickety “Leftist” coalition of four main parties with 193 seats, that came together to form an electoral alliance. The so-called “Centre” bloc, of three main parties supporting the President gained 166 seats. Various right-wing parties have 189 seats, and the rest of the seats are held by independents. Thus, the National Assembly has a clear centre-Right majority, as does the country. There should be no great difficulty in forming a government: in other countries similar difficulties have been overcome.

But of course it’s not that simple. The main problem is that the majority of the deputies of the Right come from Le Pen’s National Assembly (RN) which is hated by all the established political parties. Moreover, the number of seats gained by the RN (126) was many fewer than their share of the vote (37%) would have suggested, because of sordid political deals made between their opponents. This episode has created its own problems, which we don’t have time to go into here, but ironically the RN itself was probably relieved, because it doesn’t have the strength in depth to form a government anyway.

Thus, any majority would have to exclude the RN and the twenty-odd other deputies aligned with them. The “Leftist” bloc has no chance of forming a government because no-one will ally with it, and its own internal contradictions are such that it would not survive long anyway. Accordingly, we are seeing the nth reconfiguration of the limited area (essentially the “Centre” and the moderate Right) from which a government would have to be formed. Whether the current government survives depends on whether there is another censure motion, and the result of the vote depends entirely on the RN, and of course negotiating with the RN is verboten. (It takes exceptional stupidity and incompetence for a political system to get itself into that kind of mess.) The RN seems genuinely interested in trying to force Macron to call new elections (highly unlikely but you never know) whereas one of the “Leftist” parties, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) seems to be trying to provoke a political crisis which will finish in the streets and bring Mélenchon to power. Not everybody thinks that is a good idea.

Which brings us to the week’s other event: a day of action on 10 September, under the interesting slogan Bloquons-tout! or “Let’s shut it all down!” Its origins were in a set of obscure social media posts, believed by some to be linked to the “Extreme Right,” calling for blockades of everything and an attempt to close the country down, in a protest against the economic policies of the Government. The movement was then taken over by LFI, There were a certain number of incidents, some small demonstrations, a few supermarkets vandalised, buses set on fire and so forth, but the dislocation was mainly caused by organisations and businesses closing as a precaution. Altogether, an unpromising day for LFI.

Now, at this point I want to take a step back from France for a moment, and talk about the organisation and management of political parties generally. Until the last generation or so, it was possible to arrange parties more-or-less in the orderly spectrum from Left to Right that has been used since the French Revolution. Think of this, if you like, as the X-axis of a graph. Very roughly, the Left looked to the future, to improving the lives of ordinary people and to a fairer and more just society. As you travelled towards the Right, there was a desire to conserve rather than to change, a defence of the existing distributions of power and wealth and a deference to traditional institutions and customs. There was a loose correlation with other forms of change: the Left was in favour of universal education, laws to regulate working conditions and the extension of the right to vote, first to all males and then to everyone. The Right eventually followed, with more or less enthusiasm, in most cases. But there were also even looser correlations: the abolition of the death penalty, both in Britain and in France, took place under governments of the Left, for example.

So broadly speaking, voters knew where they and their parties stood, along this axis or spectrum. The monolithic nature of the parties of the Anglo-Saxon countries, together with the first-past-the-post electoral system, somewhat disguised the spectrum effect there, however. In other countries, there were many more parties, and many more choices within the broad ranges of Left and Right. We can consider this to be the Supply side of the equation. The Demand side (or Y-axis) was obviously the issues that were important to the public, and those that forced themselves onto the agenda from outside. Elections could thus be seen as the interaction of what the voters wanted, with what the parties were ready to supply, and in theory a government with a majority would be situated where the two curves intersected. Now of course that’s a caricature, but it remains true that in principle the election of a government should have at least a passing connection with the balance of political opinion in the country. With due allowance for all the complicating factors of town vs country, regional loyalties, religious and linguistic differences and the presence of minorities, something vaguely like this did actually happen up until a generation ago.

And that, of course, required disciplined and organised political parties with distinct agendas, which now scarcely exist. There are certainly different parties in western countries today, as there are ostensibly competing banks and mobile phone providers, and some of them have retained historic names. But as with banks and mobile phone companies, a lot of effort goes into publicity and advertising, but very little into real competition. In effect, politics in most western countries resembles a commercial cartel, where competition is strictly limited and the members of the cartel divide the market between them and fiercely resist the arrival of newcomers. This is what has produced the system I usually describe as the Party.

The result is that the established political parties have their own priorities, developed and enforced from the top down, and see no need (in that deadly phrase of 80s Labour Party militants) to “appease the electorate.” In most western countries, the concerns of the electorate are clear: standard of living, the economy, crime, uncontrolled immigration and public services. These are not the priorities of the ruling elites, and they see no reason to bestir themselves to satisfy mere voters. So in effect, the supply and demand curves now have no relationship: the axes never cross. Now of course if the market analogy were in any way accurate, you ought to see new parties appearing, catering to those parts of the political market that existing parties are not addressing. And that is what the Liberal theory of politics would suggest. But it isn’t quite like that, because almost all the new (and mostly transitory) parties that do appear are based solely on opposition to the current political system. There’s a limit to how far you can take that. And then what would actually you do if you ever had a share of power?

This is in a context where, as I’ve pointed out many times, today’s establishment politicians are not even very good at politics, or at running their own party. The British Labour Party was always something of a mess, but Mr Starmer’s version of it, whether as a government or just a political party, sets new standards for amateurishness and incompetence, combined with a vindictive approach to dissent. As a result, the Labour Party could not offer potential voters any genuine reason why they should vote for it in 2024, other than as a way of ejecting the widely-despised Tories, which is indeed what happened. That is typical of a political system where voters are encouraged to vote against parties, rather than for any positive agenda. And just as large private-sector companies now serve the interests of their managers and shareholders alone, and ignore and exploit their customers, so political parties now serve only the interests of their leaders and (in some cases) their donors, and ignore and exploit their voters.

The consequence is that ruling parties and the governments they form are actually weak, not strong. Behind the facade of bluster, the attempts to suppress dissent and to introduce ever more intrusive laws, are groups of frightened individuals out of their depth with problems they had never imagined would ruffle the feathers of their placid managerial world, lacking much public support, and lashing out indiscriminately and often randomly at what they see as threats.

So this ought to be a golden opportunity for new political groups and organisations. After all, no government, and certainly no western government, can resist widespread and well-organised pressure from the streets for very long. Last week’s day of action mobilised virtually all of the French state’s “forces of order,” for example, although fewer than 200,000 people throughout the country took part in the demonstrations and various other actions.

We’ll stick with that example for a moment, because it’s actually very instructive, in terms of the modern political environment. To begin with, the idea came out of nowhere: it was a pure product of social media at the beginning. It had no real programme of action, no coordination, no obvious objectives beyond shutting the country down for a day. The date chosen was bizarre: two days after the vote of confidence which brought down the Bayrou government, and on a Wednesday, when schools close at lunchtime and parents have to look after their children in the afternoon. The motivation for the day of action was apparently to protest against the government’s economic policies: fair enough, and many would agree, but there were no specific demands and no threats of repetition, so all the government had to do was wait for the demonstrators to go home. Demonstrators of all ages and all backgrounds were interviewed on TV, but no two had the same explanation of why they were there or what their grievances were. The best guess, to the extent that you trust social media statistics, is that most of the participants were young, and supported parties coded as “Left.” In effect, the day was entirely performative, and the fact that it didn’t perform very well, precisely because it was amateurish and poorly organised, enabled the government to dismiss the protesters as a discontented tiny minority.

The news that LFI was trying to take over the protests promised at least some professionalism and organisation, although it would also have discouraged a number of potential protesters. In the event, LFI made no sustained attempt to organise the day at all. I saw no slogans, no posters, no media campaign, no list of demands, no linkage to the fall of the Bayrou government: nothing much of anything, really. Mélenchon addressed a small rally, and various demonstrators carried Palestinian flags, but that was it. Some LFI stalwarts made excited pronouncements in advance about the likely magnitude of the protests, but it’s hard to believe that even they thought this would really shake the government.

This is a good illustration of the fundamental problem faced by ordinary people today trying to influence those in power. A minimum degree of consensus and organisation is necessary if anything is to be achieved, but consensus and organisation don’t just appear magically: they have to be developed and practised. In the past, opposition political parties and trades unions often provided the basis of this organisation: as far as anyone can see, Mélenchon and other political figures primarily used last week’s protests to further their own interests. For all that the Internet was supposed to bring people together (and the Gilets jaunes which we’ll get to in moment could not have happened without it) the Internet doesn’t promote consensus or organisation automatically: indeed, there’s some evidence that it’s a divisive force in such cases.

It’s worth recalling how this kind of thing would once have been organised, say in the 80s or 90s. Protests in those days were articulated around two main pillars: organisations and community. Last week’s protests would have been organised by the trades unions and the Socialist or Communist parties (OK, often in competition with each other) and would have been professionally organised, with synchronised demonstrations, massive rallies addressed by political leaders, banners, flags, hand-outs and articulated demands with lots of media coverage. It might not have achieved an enormous amount in the end, and there would certainly have been a performative element, but it would not have been damp squib like last week’s episode.

One little-noticed characteristic of such marches and rallies was the high degree of organisational control. For example, the political parties and trades unions would have had their own security teams controlling the event. As well as the usual marshalling, they would be on the alert for attempts at infiltration by extremists, or stupid or aggressive behaviour by the marchers. By convention, the police left control and security of the marches to these people, who were generally robust individuals who had done military service and were trained in unarmed combat. With the Gilets jaunes, all this had disappeared. The GJ had no central organisation, no membership, and no way of controlling access to their events. The result was that these events were quite rapidly infiltrated by all sorts of activists of different political persuasions, often looking for a fight, as well as thieves and looters. The effect of this was to give the protests an undeserved reputation for violence and destruction and so reduce public support.

Yet the reality was that the GJ were numerous enough and determined enough that they could actually have shaken the government to its foundations if they had been sufficiently organised. On at least one occasion in December 2018, there were enough of them in central Paris to have laid siege to the Elysée Palace, and indeed there was a helicopter on standby to take Macron to safety. But the GJ were from the sticks, and few of them had much idea of the geography of Paris, so they wandered around trying to find where Macron lived. As it was, the government realised that it only had to hang on and make a few token concessions, and eventually the protests would stop, which they did.

None of the mainstream political parties associated themselves with the GJ because they were not the kind of people they wanted to be seen with: ordinary lower middle-class and working class people, largely white, from distant parts of the country. It was as if the cleaning lady and the repair-man had suddenly come to demand to be paid more. This is, in fact, the default attitude in western political systems: ruling parties see the people no longer as an electoral base to cultivate, but as an enemy to be feared and controlled. The consequence is that in a number of countries now, mass movements or proto-political parties have developed as a way of channeling the disgust and despair of ordinary people. But most if not all of these organisations are dependent on a small number of leaders, usually public or media figures, and they rise and fall relatively quickly. Few of them have coherent programmes, and even fewer could seriously put themselves forward as parties of government. Even the RN in France, which has existed for decades, doesn’t have the strength in depth to govern at any level of importance.

We thus arrive at the central contradiction of modern politics, for all that it is seldom articulated. The current political system is widely hated and despised, its leaders are recognised to be incompetent, and the states they govern are becoming weaker and less effective all the time. They are overwhelmed by current crises, and are frightened by the depth of public resistance and opposition, which they make no attempt to understand. They are well aware of the fragility of the systems they head, and they know that a relatively small but determined push from the streets would topple them. They also know that Right-wing fantasies of mowing down demonstrators with machine-guns are just that: fantasies. But, other than insulting and threatening the electorate, they have no real strategy for staying in power, gimmicks like AI and drones notwithstanding.

Yet politics is rather like war, where battles are won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes. In politics, victory generally goes to the side which is less weak and disorganised than the other. Thus, western governments hang on less because of their own strength, than because their opponents, whilst strong numerically, lack discipline; organisation and ideology. Of those, I suggest that the last is the most important, because it makes the first two possible. History tends to agree. The Liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth century did not bring about the French Revolution, but they coopted it because they had an ideology. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, but in Lenin’s famous phrase they “found power lying in the streets” and took it. And the Islamists in Iran were only one of the actors in the overthrow of the Shah, but their ideology gave them the organisation and discipline to take over the country. It’s striking that, in each case, a superficially strong regime turned out to be incapable of facing a real challenge when it arrived. (I still remember the consternation and disbelief in western governments when the Shah’s regime collapsed like a pack of cards.) The problem is that waiting for collapse is not enough: I continue to insist that politics is like engineering: it requires forces to act on a body get things done. And the instruction manual, if you like, has to be based on an ideology.

It’s a common cliché today that we live in a post-ideological society, but few people pause to reflect on what this actually means. It is not as if the issues that prompted ideologies in the past have gone away. Questions of wealth and poverty, power and resistance, community, ethnicity and class, among others, have not disappeared. It’s just that our political parties today refuse to acknowledge them, except for performative purposes. The Clintons and Blairs and Macrons, with their waffle about “beyond Left and Right” and being “post-ideological” have created a world in which the intellectual discipline provided by ideology is no longer available to help people think in an organised fashion. The result is that people think in a disorganised fashion, alienated intellectually from each other, and either act randomly on the basis of feeling and instinct (as may be the case with the bloke shot in the US last week) or grab onto any half-coherent passing system of thought, like a shipwrecked mariner clutching a piece of driftwood. Much political action today, from last week’s protests, to the Casseurs who infiltrated the Gilets jaunes to recent political assassinations, seems less about ideology than the lack of one, and the desperate attempt by the ideologically-challenged to create an ersatz ideology out of action itself . (We may recall that insofar as genuine fascism ever had its own ideology, it was pretty close to that.) And of course such ideologies (or if you prefer, belief systems) as people do have now tend to be mutually exclusive, so that even people with quite similar interests have no common language and concepts for talking to each other.

The great lie in the argument since the 1980s that you can replace ideology by technocratic managerialism is, of course, that managerialism depends entirely on political context for its meaning. A Soviet factory manager in 1935 and an MBA running a manufacturing company today (let’s grant there are still some) are only superficially similar. The lack of ideology in today’s ruling class, or even of interest in it, produces people with no firm principles, and no beliefs that go beyond tired performative clichés. When power is the only motivating factor, and when much of that power is acquired and held only by defeating others, there is no chance of any group solidarity developing, and that is the essential reason for the fragility of our present system. No-one is going to die, or even make personal sacrifices, for the European Growth and Stability Pact, or for the right of people to use the toilets of their choice, even though they may happily persecute others. But of course even very fragile systems can endure for long periods of time until something arrives to push them over.

The second prerequisite is community, and community creates organisations naturally. The village, the workshop, the extended family, the factory, the church or temple, even the office, create communities whose members have overlapping interests. Communities have, or tend to develop, common ways of thinking and loyalty to others. It’s not an accident that the birth of modern politics is associated with the coffee-houses of the eighteenth century and the factories and mines of the nineteenth. And that is why the current fetish for “working from home” is so dangerous.

The kind of industrial struggles that led to the modern state and to democracy developed around communities, often themselves based around factories or mines. As late as the 1980s, that dynamic was still operating. The British Miners’ Strike of 1984 was finally defeated (largely because of its incompetent leadership) but it nonetheless demonstrated that communities were still capable of putting up bitter resistance in the days when there were communities. What was impressive was the total mobilisation of each community, and all its accoutrements of schools, church halls and shops. The Grauniad, in the days when it was a newspaper, covered this extensively: the women collectively managing daily life while the men were on picket duty. (I suppose these days a journalist would sneer at the women who didn’t realise that their enemies were not the employers and the government but their own husbands.)

Real communities have mostly gone now, and it turns out that online ones aren’t the same. They can often mobilise against some unfortunate person or idea, but doing anything positive is much more difficult. They largely depend on actually existing communities for their practical effectiveness. So without ideology and organisation, without genuine communities, it’s hard to see how ordinary people can mount an effective challenge to the decrepit systems that rule us. The result is a situation which as far as I know is unique in history: a feeble, frightened and ineffective political system, confronted with a population lacking the intellectual and material resources to bring about change. So two questions arise: what will happen, and is there some way that the worst can be prevented? Since I have a reputation in some quarters for pessimism, and since people sometimes ask me to write about solutions, let me say firstly that the worst is by no means certain, and secondly that there are possible ways of preventing, or attenuating, it anyway.

The currently-fashionable fear among our ruling class, widely and unthinkingly accepted, is of a mass movement sweeping some “populist” or even “fascist” leader or “extreme Right” party into power. The scenario is, of course, the umpteenth iteration of the idea that the common people can’t actually be trusted to vote, and are easily led astray by demagogues who talk about subjects people are actually interested in. So it’s just worth pointing out, once again, that this scenario, which goes back at least as far as Plato, basically doesn’t happen. “Mobs” do not in practice sweep “demagogues” into power. And since fascism is the nightmare du jour, let’s just remind ourselves that the vast majority of the fascist groupings from the 1920s to the 1940s were spectacularly unsuccessful in taking power, and the two that did, in Italy and Germany, were each the product of very special circumstances and sordid political manoeuvres. Far more likely, in fact, is a process of continual stasis and slow disintegration of political systems.

Is there something that can be done? Broadly speaking, the answer is “yes,” but with a qualification. Today’s political parties are top-down, elite-driven organisations that reflect the interests of their leaders. Creating rival parties, based more around popular interests, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in practice it is likely to reproduce the elite top-down system we have today, whatever its initial good intentions, as Robert Michels showed a century ago. Yet the origins of most political parties are, in fact, bottom up, and that requires precisely the communities, organisation and (broadly defined) ideology, that neoliberalism has assiduously been destroying. Is there a solution to this conundrum?

Let’s begin by recognising that groups engage in political actions of all kinds because of self-interest. Now, that may sound shocking, because surely politics should be concerned with higher ideals of justice, truth, democracy, the rule of law and so forth? Well, if you have the time and leisure to worry about abstractions maybe, just as if you have the time and leisure to go on performative demonstrations. But the origins of political groupings and their most important struggles, lie elsewhere. In Britain, the first trades unionists demanded humane working hours and a living wage. In France the Radicals and Socialists waged a decades-long bitter struggle to get education out of the hands of the reactionary Church and to inculcate democratic principles. These, and many other movements, required organisation and commitment by ordinary people, and the willingness to sink ideological differences. But today’s political systems are built on obsessive cultivation of difference and confrontation, exacerbated by the Internet, certainly, but stemming from contemporary conceptions of politics itself.

Now in theory, existing parties of the Notional Left, as well as new parties being formed, should have the solution. After all, is not “inclusivity” the watchword of the day? In fact, any serious effort to force the political elite to take account of the people’s wishes should, as a general rule, do the exact opposite of what has been done since Clinton, Blair, Hollande, and, in caricatural form, by Mélenchon. Why? Because you have to take account of actual common interests, not ascriptive, identity-based ones. Modern politics on the Notional Left consists of Identity Entrepreneurs identifying target populations, and convincing them that they are unhappy, exploited and repressed, and that there is no prospect of their situation improving, so give me the money and vote for me. And new political parties and independent thinkers (some on the genuine Left) have felt obliged to mouth such nonsense to avoid a visit from the Thought Police.

The trouble is that ordinary people are’t convinced. There is no way that, for example, the University Principal, esteemed academic and TV personality, and the immigrant woman who cleans her office at night can be said to have the same interests. But the Principal and her journalist and political adviser husband clearly do, just like the cleaning lady and her husband who stacks boxes in the supermarket. And in fact ordinary people are well aware of this.

One useful and widespread indication is that immigrant populations are moving steadily to the Right politically. Partly this reflects social systems in the countries of origin, partly it reflects the abandonment of the Left’s traditional role of welcoming and integrating immigrants, but partly also it reflects the traditional desire of immigrant communities to integrate, to do well and to have a better life for themselves and their children. All the parties of the Notional Left in France, for example, tell immigrants that they live in a hell on earth, where they are subject to endless discrimination, bigotry, hatred and police violence. (Curiously they don’t suggest that immigrants should leave: that would take part of their client base away.) But many immigrants, in France as elsewhere, are tired of being treated as eternal victims. Daily experience shows this very well: the state school system in France is collapsing and, in a bitter historical irony, parents who can afford to, send their children to private schools run by the Church. Recently, Muslim parents have started to do the same in surprising numbers. Or take the case of curfews for minors introduced in some crime-ridden French cities with a heavy immigrant population, to screams of discrimination and Islamophobia from the Notional Left. Well, it turns out that these measures have been very popular with immigrant families, who now have the relief of knowing that their fifteen-year old son isn’t out selling drugs.

This should surprise no-one. People know what their interests are, and can define them far better than elite politicians can. And they are aware that their interests often overlap with those of other groups. This is why we need to get away from ascriptive and largely phantom identity groups, and towards the search for common interests. Of course, these interests won’t be identical, which is why my favourite image is of a Venn diagram. What is necessary is that people identify areas of common interest and work together. Consider, for example, an area of a city which has been overwhelmed by Air B’nB. Local traders as diverse as hairdressers, garage proprietors, dry cleaners and hardware shops face closure as the number of permanent residents falls. The streets are deluged with rubbish and the nights are often disfigured by parties. The local post office may close for lack of business. Crime has risen as it does in all tourist areas. It’s a familiar story. If you try hard enough you can disaggregate those impacted into competing identity groups, but if the interests of the immigrant assistant in the dry cleaner’s and the white proprietor of a vintage whisky store are not identical, they certainly overlap quite a bit. And collective action in such contexts does not require a complicated ideology, but rather a simple recognition of common interest.

I’m not a political theorist, and I don’t have a political programme to offer. But remember that if the objective is to change the behaviour of governments, then what succeeds is precise, sustained and targeted pressure with clear objectives, conducted by people with a defined set of common interests. It’s worked in the past, it can work now, if we can only stop being obsessed with days of action, performative demonstrations and carving the population up into smaller and smaller warring groups. I’m not so sure we need new groupings or political parties, which by definition promote exclusion and competition. Ironically, given the state we’re in, the Liberal concept of the pursuit of rational self-interest by individuals might for once be part of the way forward.