Living Backwards

We've been here before. Unfortunately.

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Take a random sample of a hundred western pundits writing about the western political system today, and you’ll find a fairly wide consensus that things are not going well. Depending on where the individual situates themselves politically, this could be because Our Liberal Democracy is threatened by “authoritarianism” or “populism” (sometimes curiously presented as the same thing), it could be because the system has been bought by the “globalist elite,” it could be because politicians are out of touch with the wishes and aspirations of ordinary people. Traditional political parties are collapsing and the political divisions between them are now hard to make out. Frightening echoes of the 1930s are everywhere. Et cetera. Given the very different diagnoses, it’s unsurprising that the potential solutions—where they are even offered—are very different. Yet almost nobody except those currently in power (and not even all of them) are actually prepared to defend the way the current system is working.

Is all this actually a surprise, though? Should it not have been anticipated at least a generation ago? Where does the pervasive sense of disappointment, anger and helplessness originate? Why do fringe parties and leaders rise, sometimes threaten to take power, sometimes even succeed, and then fade away? Is this a bug in the system or is it, as I will suggest, a feature, even if one that for decades people have refused to acknowledge? Several years ago, the right-wing theorist Patrick Deneen argued that Liberalism, which is the motor of our current political system, was a victim not of its failure, but of its success. Once Liberalism was allowed to become fully itself, it began to produce the social, economic and political wasteland we see around us. I think the same criticism could be made from the Left, not least because the lazy identity between Liberals and the Left assumed in some quarters ignores the fact that the Left has always been about the collective good, whereas Liberalism is at bottom nothing more than rationalised individual selfishness. Indeed, the Left has always argued that individuals cannot flourish anyway except in a properly organised and fairly managed society. So nothing that we see now should be a surprise. But how did we get here?

Let’s dispose first of the idea that the current situation was “planned,” or that it suits the ultra-rich who in some mysterious sense brought it about. (Yes, there were a certain number who wanted this situation, but wanting something doesn’t simply make it happen, as many children learn around Christmas.) The tremendous concentration of wealth in a tiny number of hands does not, in the end, benefit anyone very much. The rich have more money than they can spend, but they are generally loathed and detested, and they are not even very skilful at parlaying that wealth into political power, assuming that is what they want. A society collapsing around them can no longer provide them with the mundane requirements of everyday life: it’s hard to get cleaners and gardeners and chauffeurs and even helicopter pilots when they can’t afford to live nearby, and in most big cities restaurants close early, or don’t open every day because they can’t get staff, or because security is getting worse with unemployment and poverty increasing and reductions in local and national government services. In a deeply unequal society everybody, including the rich, suffers from worse health and lower life-expectancy. (I used to fantasise in the 1990s about an election slogan for the British Labour Party: “millionaires live longer under Labour!”) It’s not excluded that some of the ultra-rich (who are generally not that bright) may believe things are going swimmingly, and some of their paid hacks may write that it is so, but the real world isn’t like that.

But if the current situation wasn’t simply “planned,” but rather the result of a series of actions, variously stupid, ill-informed, greedy and ideologically-driven, sometimes at cross-purposes with each other, then that makes it both harder to get a grip on, and much harder to imagine a way out of. But can we first of all set out, quite simply, what is wrong with the political system today, and make some assessment about where the problems came from? It depends, obviously, what you think the purpose of politics actually is, or even if it has one, a subject I’ve touched on before. It’s traditional to invoke Aristotle at this point, who certainly thought that “politics” (the management of the community) had the purpose of maximising that community’s happiness and general good. The managers, or rulers, were like craftsmen designing laws and constitutions to make these outcomes possible, and modifying them when the need arose. And the important decisions were taken directly by citizens, in a way which would seem unnervingly radical and populist if it were practiced today. Oh, and speaking of today, the Chinese Communist Party certainly expresses its priorities in terms of the well-being of the population: it promises to do things, and it generally delivers.

Liberalism, famously, has no real ideology at all, and is essentially all about power. Now this argument will inevitably produce protests: I’m a Liberal and I’m a nice person, I’ve known Liberals who were kind to children and animals, What about John Rawls? The problem is that actually existing Liberalism, now that historical and ideological constraints have been removed, turns out to be just about personal power and wealth, pursued with sociopathic intensity, and supported by a political and economic order which rewards those who are most voracious and least scrupulous. Is anyone really surprised at the results?

However, my point here is not to aim yet another ritual kick at the flaccid decomposing corpse of Liberal political theory, but rather to ask what the practical consequences are for the way in which politics is actually conducted today. Let’s first stipulate that beyond the well known —isms and -ocracies there are in fact two basic kinds of political systems. The first is based on personal power, and even if ideology exists, it is secondary. Power comes from loyalty to, and favour of, the ruler or ruling elite, and is not necessarily related to proven ability. Likewise, this power can end abruptly at any time, so the main preoccupation of each actor is to extract the maximum benefit from his or her position in the time available. Whilst different actors may taken different sides on different questions, the fundamental motivation is always the acquisition and maintenance of personal power. At the beginning, this usually involves attaching yourself to a patron, who has a patron in turn, and then at a suitable moment betraying that patron, perhaps for your own benefit or perhaps to sign up with a more powerful figure. This first type of politics, then, can be considered one where personal ambition dominates everything. It is particularly typical of political systems in countries which are static or declining, or where the idea of economic growth has not even yet been popularised. The idea is to snatch as much of whatever power and wealth as may be available in the time you have.

So I’ve met policemen in Africa who are not paid, but whose job enables them to shake down citizens for money, some of which they pass up to the senior officer who got them their job, who passes it in turn … and so on. This is what happens in a static political system where economic growth is discouraged because it could create rival centres of power, and political competition is about securing privileged access to passive income streams. Similarly, I recall a former European Defence Attaché in Moscow in the 1990s, also accredited to some of the successor states of the Soviet Union, telling me of his visit to one of them and his meeting with the new Interior Minister, who was in an ebullient mood because the price for the job was usually ten thousand dollars, but he’d secured it for eight. Indeed, one of the problems in those days was trying to remind visiting western Ministers that the man (or more rarely woman) across the table from them was not actually the Interior Minister or Justice Minister in any sense they would recognise, but actually a delegate of Organised Crime making sure that the government didn’t do anything against their interests. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.

But before we start feeling superior, we should recall that much of Early Modern Europe worked like that. If the reign of Louis XIV is a bit exotic for some, consider that staple of English history, Henry VIII, who ruled through favourites, casting them aside when they became too powerful. As the story of Thomas Cromwell (superbly recounted by Hilary Mantell) shows clearly, power involved favour and closeness to the King, or to someone sufficiently close to be powerful, and from that power, money could be earned and a client network established. There’s a moment in one of Mantell’s books where it seems as though Henry may have died in a jousting accident, and Cromwell reflects that with luck he may just have enough time to reach one of the the Channel Ports and throw himself on the first ship, before—now without the King’s protection—his enemies have him arrested or murdered. (Cromwell, one feels, would have understood what it must have been like to work for Stalin.)

In such situations, where economic and social change of any kind seems anyway unthinkable, power is about power. Ideology may be a rhetorical factor (we think once again of 1984) but no more than that. In societies with rudimentary Parliaments, which themselves slowly became a separate source of power, constellations of collective interests did develop, like the Whigs and Tories of 18th Century England. However, this did not necessarily imply what we would now think of as ideology, because ideology presupposes either that the world may change, or that the world is in danger of change, and that change must be stopped. It’s not really until the French Revolution, and the Constituent Assembly of 1789, that the idea of actual deliberate social and political change really appears, and the divisions of that Assembly, which ran from the “Right” which was cautious about any change, to the “Left” which was very much in favour, are with us to this day. At that point, ideology begins to mean something practical.

Thus, ultimately, the development of the second type of political system. Instead of power being devolved from above, and being dependent on proximity to or approval of, those with the power, we have systems where interest groups within a society struggle among themselves for dominance. This does not necessarily imply the existence of a democratic system, though it tends to be associated historically with Republican ones. It may be as simple as a brutal struggle for power between families, but it may also contain an ideological component as with the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, supporting the Pope and the Emperor respectively, in Dante’s Florence, and indeed in many parts of medieval Italy. In such cases, whether in democracies or not, individual ambition is combined with, and may even occasionally be subordinated to, collective ambition and defence of collective interests.

The arrival of mass democracy meant that, in effect, political parties became relatively stable entities with identifiable ideologies, competing for power by mobilising different sections of the electorate to vote for them. Quite quickly (and very much contrary to the political concepts of Republicanism in Greece and Rome) this led to the development of a professional political class, organised into parties supported by a full-time staff. Some of these parties were remarkably stable and long-lived: the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, for example, was founded exactly one hundred and fifty years ago. In Britain and the United States, the first-past-the-post system has, until recently, given considerable stability to the political party system, and even in countries like France and Italy, where party structure and party discipline were looser, it was still possible to identify clear tendencies of “Left” “Right” and “Centre” until very recently. Needless to say, individual ambition, not to mention jealousy and hatred, were features of life even in those days—Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 Labour Government seems to have been full of people who could hardly bear to be in the same room as each other—but the old concept of the politician as a simple wandering entrepreneur seeking wealth and power wherever he or she could find it, seemed largely to have disappeared from western political systems with the rise of representative democracy and mass political parties. Seemed, anyway.

Thus, voting for an individual or a party implied for several generations that you knew at least roughly what you were getting, and that if your favoured candidate was elected, he or she would be one more voice and one more vote in a direction that you broadly favoured. For all the criticism of politics in the twentieth century—and there was plenty—there was also some sort of higher-level recognition that parties and their elected members stood for different things. So one of the final flourishes of the old Left in the UK was the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, designed to make working places for ordinary people less dangerous and unhealthy. The initiative was strongly supported by the Trades Unions, whose members of course benefited. Few of the Labour MPs who voted for the law themselves worked in dangerous or unhealthy conditions (though some had in their past) but it was then part of the ideology of the party to introduce laws to benefit ordinary people. How quaint that now seems.

There was therefore at least a loose connection between input and output. Governments could and did disappoint and even alienate their supporters, but on the whole support for the major parties in the West was pretty stable, and elections were often decided by small movements of support between the major parties, or, as often in the UK, towards a third. It was also possible to identify fairly stable continuing bases of support. In France, the Communist Party ruled many poorer areas, and many industrial towns and cities, in part because it acted as a kind of parallel government, and if you needed something done, you went to see the local PCF voluntary rep, who was probably a schoolteacher or a trades union official. Meanwhile, in Britain, you could usually tell within thirty seconds if you were in the presence of a Conservative voter: in most cases, the signs to look for were social, not political or ideological.

Moreover, there was some logic in the representation of the parties in national parliaments. Many deputies from the Left were former trades unionists or had worked in manual jobs. In the earlier twentieth century, many were self-educated. Although deputies of the Left became increasingly well-educated and middle-class, most of them had begun their lives in very ordinary circumstances, and not a few knew what poverty was from personal experience. Deputies of the Right might be small businessmen, lawyers, accountants, bankers and the like: often with a strong sense of the local community, and with a history of involvement in it. Their wives (since the majority were male) headed a kind of informal social mafia, around the local Church, voluntary work, local schools and charities. In both cases, deputies might come to national power quite late in life, sometimes after a political career at local level, and many were content to represent their voters without necessarily aspiring to positions of power.

It’s not a gross exaggeration, therefore, to say that political parties in about 1980 were still led and largely staffed by people who had Done Things, and who had at least a minimal experience of the outside world. Yet that model changed quite quickly and quite radically, to the point where today the narrowly professional politician with narrow and entirely personal objectives has become the rule. That would be a problem in any political system, but as we shall see it is especially a problem in a political system where, for decades, identifiable political parties did actually pursue identifiably different policies.

The change was brought about by several factors, including de-industrialistion and the decline of trades unions, the destruction of local communities and social networks, the massive expansion of higher education (sometimes just as a way of disguising unemployment) and the de-politicisation of politics and its transformation into a purely technical, managerial activity. Mr Blair, ahead of the game in this as other things, is understood to have spent some time debating whether to join the Labour or the Tory Party, and to have plumped for Labour on the basis that the career opportunities were better: something that would have seemed inconceivable even a decade before. Certainly, if Mr Blair was any kind of convinced Socialist no-one noticed it: there is no record of him ever having pronounced the word.

In the past, some sort of previous experience of life might have been a criterion for selection as a political candidate. But increasingly, it was difficult for people to have useful and relevant professional or personal experience in life, and selection committees of local activists and national bureaucrats who made these kinds of decisions were increasingly from the new credentialed but not really educated classes, who tended overwhelmingly to select people like themselves. All this had a series of very important consequences for the elected representatives, the nature of political parties, and the relationship between the electors and the elected. Let’s take those in turn.

Up to the 1980s, it was not uncommon for deputies to be known in the local community, often because they held local elected posts. (Even today, many French politicians retain a local political base as mayors.) Being locally popular, or becoming known in the community after living there a few years, was an established way of becoming a national-level candidate. This stopped progressively, as elections were fought much less on local issues, as TV and later Internet coverage tended to be defining, and as the sociology of both candidates and those who selected them changed. Thus, as part of the process of historical re-treading we’ll be describing, then being selected to fight a parliamentary seat, and retaining the support of your party, reverted much more to old-fashioned systems of patronage. You owed your seat to a small number of people to whom by extension you owed obedience, since they could easily disown you next time, or pour poison in the ears of media and Internet hacks.

Advancement in the party, once elected, has now become largely about personal loyalty, rather than ideological conviction, let alone competence. Showing yourself obedient, you might be placed in a position to keep watch on Ministers and officials from other tendencies, for example. As a result, writing sensibly about domestic politics has almost become impossible today, because the inherited analytical framework—Left, Right, Centre, radical, moderate—simply doesn’t apply any more. To identify somebody as a Jonesist, for example, is not to give them an ideological label any more than Manchester United is an ideological label: it just means they have pledged loyalty to Jones, will do whatever dirty work is required, and will rise and fall with that person, until, perhaps, they decide to transfer to another team. As I’ve suggested several times, the political system in many western countries now also resembles that of a one-party state, where the key skills are crawling, licking boots, identifying someone successful to follow and knowing when to change sides.

Whilst purely transactional loyalty to patrons remains a motivation for today’s politicians, there is no reason why they should feel any sense of loyalty to their party, let alone their country: it would be like expecting the crew of a pirate ship to show loyalty to their crew-mates. Today’s politician is a self-employed political entrepreneur, looking for the best returns on time and effort. But this does not necessarily mean that they want their party to do well, or even to win elections. Indeed, if the party leadership is held by another faction, it might very well be in their interests for the party to lose the election, and for that faction to be weakened, such that their long-term political position actually becomes stronger. Of course, if the party does nonetheless win, and that faction is strengthened, and they are offered a Ministerial position, they will naturally betray their own faction to accept it, since all loyalty these days is transactional.

And of course the point of accepting such a job would be for the benefits it brings, not to do things, because no government these days ever does anything. Rather, we have reverted to the system before the advent of mass parties, and what counts are the benefits you can extract from a position, especially when you leave government after a few years to “pursue other opportunities.” Because governments no longer seek to improve the lives of citizens, and do not even pretend to do so, there is no actual point in being a Minister, other than personal profit. Decades ago, your predecessor may have built motorways or public housing. These days, when the emphasis has shifted back to resource extraction again, you’ll be busy drawing up plans to privatise the road system to a company in which your spouse has major financial interests, before resigning from the government for a few years to take up a paid position with the same company. This is disgraceful, of course, but there’s nothing unusual or unprecedented about it. It’s just logical behaviour in a system of independent political entrepreneurship, where there is no hope for, or interest in, the future, and all you can do is ransack the present.

It resembles (as western politics is increasingly coming to resemble) politics in parts of Africa, where a job in government is an end in itself. You access resources, kick some upstairs to your patron, put your own people in positions of responsibility where they control the flow to you, and look round for a nice apartment in Paris. Admittedly, the African system is considerably more sophisticated and developed than ours, but we’re getting there. It’s otherwise impossible, for example, to understand how Keir Starmer could be Prime Minister of Britain. He’s confessed to having no real political views, and to not having a political program, it’s unclear why he even went into electoral politics at all, let alone became party leader, and he seems to have no traditional political skills of any kind. It only makes sense is if you assume that being Prime Minister is just a tick in the box, before going on into that strange world of failed and ex-national leaders, earning ridiculous sums of money for giving stupid lectures. Perhaps in the end, that’s what Starmer is about. And it’s striking that the resentment against him, and the desire to replace him, are entirely personal, and linked not to ideological differences, but rather to the threat he poses to his colleagues being able to retain power. Indeed, modern politicians no longer even make ideological promises they later intend to ignore. They simply make casual references to subjects, in the belief that that just talking about something will secure them a useful injection of publicity, and increase their standing within the party.

What does this do to political parties, then? Simply, it destroys them. Of course politics has always been a sewer of volatile jealousies, ambitions and hatreds, but at least in the past there was a degree of organisation. Governments did have arguments about policy, Ministers resigned or were sacked over points of principle, and titanic battles were fought within and between parties on ideological lines. But political parties today, lacking ideology and substituting for it a kind of gutless managerialism, are simply temporary containers for people who find it pragmatically convenient to work with each other. I don’t know what kind of metaphor would really express the full gruesomeness of the situation. The trading floor of a merchant bank for example? The Tuareg gangs of Northern Mali, robbing and smuggling, gaining and losing members, cooperating sometimes with the government sometimes with the Islamists?

This is why the problem in politics today is not the lack of Liberalism—a ludicrous idea—but its abundance. What we have today is what a pure Liberal political system looks like, finally shorn of its tedious requirements for deference to public opinion and to traditional ideas of community and common interest. A Liberal political system is one in which individuals compete for power and wealth by finding patrons and serving client-groups. It’s hard to see how you can have “parties” in the traditional sense in such an environment. The best you can hope for is a temporary and contingent alliance of individuals who decide that their interests overlap in certain areas. This is why “traditional” parties are collapsing: essentially because there’s nothing holding them together, and why, as with pirate ships or mercenary companies, a leader like Mr Starmer can be unseated by someone who is just more capable or more ruthless. It’s also why we see the advent of single-issue parties and parties essentially built round individuals. These developments themselves essentially follow the entrepreneurial model of politics. The most successful has been Mr Macron’s much-renamed personal party, which was organised essentially in the same way as a militia group in the DRC: follow me, and I will provide you with riches and power. Indeed, that’s really the only way in which political parties can now recruit.

Of course, not every plays the game in the same way, and political forces do emerge which still reflect old-fashioned ideas about ideology and activism. For a political culture that believes that everything is too difficult unless it makes the lives of ordinary people worse, this is a considerable challenge. Which of course is where the evil Giants Populism and Authoritarianism make their appearance. In this context, Populism is essentially synonymous with traditional concepts of “democracy,” and represents the tenuous survival of the idea that political parties in a democracy should try to be responsive to the wishes of the electorate. This is a threat to the current entrepreneurial system, which justifies completely ignoring the demands of the people by insisting on its own allegedly superior credentials to rule. The problem is that Confucian scholars, or even bureaucrats in the Prussian Second Empire were actually highly accomplished and generally pubic-spirited individuals, unlike the present crew of crooks and shysters.

Likewise, an authoritarian government is one which does things, rather than talking about why things cannot be done. To do things, of course, it is necessary to sometimes override the wishes of those whose interests would be prejudiced thereby. Governments used to behave like this routinely, but, now that they cringe before not merely the rich and powerful, but before anyone who makes a fuss in the media, they have essentially forgotten that governments are elected to govern. But the people haven’t, which is why politicians pursuing what were once considered mainstream policies, now re-coded as “authoritarian” or “extreme Right” are gaining popularity, because they promise to do things and sometimes actually do them. But then what point is there in a government that doesn’t do things anyway? A lot of people are asking this question, and understandably so.

Needless to say, the most obvious result of all of this is a widespread turning away from established political parties and an electorate which is fragmented and alienated. It is no longer possible to feel that a political party “represents” you or your interests, in any significant sense. The most you can hope for is that if you vote for this or that party, your pet cause stands a chance of being implemented. The result is that traditional political parties have been sacked and pillaged by special interest groups, who cooperate uneasily, like different militia factions, so long as there is power and money in prospect. The electorate thus faces a choice between political parties which are nothing but pragmatic alliances of convenience, putting out different and in many cases conflicting, messages, aimed at securing support from very different interest groups. The epitome is probably M. Mélenchon’s ramshackle movement which contains both groups pressing for more rights for homosexuals and groups who believe that homosexuals should be put to death. This is an extreme case, but it is representative, nonetheless of the way that political “parties” (if we can still use the word) are increasingly going. On the other side of the spectrum in France, the much-discussed Union of the Right, which will probably happen, will bring together a bewildering cocktail of groups ranging from secular centre-right sovereignists who distrust Brussels, to unapologetic extreme traditionalist Catholic obscurantists.

This is not what the people asked for, but modern political groupings, lacking a unifying ideology, are now so fragile that every little foible and sensitivity within them has to be respected just to keep the group together. In many European cities, for example, crime is a problem. Crime takes place disproportionately in immigrant areas, so any attempt to deal with it is a policy of the “extreme Right.” But the first victims of course are in the communities themselves, and they want more security. Sorry, comes the reply, you can’t have more security because that would stigmatise you and play into the hands of the “extreme Right.” You’ll just have to put up with it. And in several European countries, feminists have been telling women raped by members of ethnic minorities not to report the crime, to avoid “stigmatising” those communities. It’s not surprising that a number of Europe’s settled immigrant communities are moving sharply to the Right, although whether they will actually find any solace there is an open question.

As in so many areas, the triumph of Liberalism has not produced Progress, but Regress. For the last thirty years, at least, our western political systems have been moving backwards to the pre-democratic era, to a type of entrepreneurial political behaviour common before the age of universal suffrage and mass political parties. Liberalism, which eats away at everything from the inside, has hollowed out the political system, such that it is no more now than a sordid game played between unscrupulous and not very bright careerists. Liberal ideology denies that the very basis of modern politics—differences of class, wealth and power—even exists. For them, politics is about management: government is just one big HR department, where you can never find anyone to speak to, but which drowns you in incomprehensible rules written in Martian. If you had told someone in 1980 that, fifty years later, we would have a twenty-first century society with an eighteenth-century political culture, they would have laughed at you. Not a lot of people are laughing now.