No Left Turn

Workers and Peasants we are not.

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That sighing sound you may have heard across and even beyond the continent of Europe in the first week of July, was a collective release of breath by the European Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), now that political disaster had been averted, and that things would carry on pretty much as they had for the last quarter of a century or so. In France, the dreaded takeover by the extreme Right had not occurred, the uniformed militias that the media was quite sure were hidden away somewhere did not appear in the streets, and no attempt was made to storm the National Assembly or the Elysée Palace. And to cap it all, a few days before, the British had elected a notionally leftist Labour government, led by a colourless technocrat with the charisma of a wet paper towel. Far from the mass descent into fascism that had been feared, Europe now seemed to be moving, if anything, gently to the Left. Jobs had been saved, op-eds could still be commissioned, TV appearances had been safeguarded, and the PMC could open a bottle of champagne and depart on holiday, mopping the sweat off their brows with relief.

Except it wasn’t really like that, of course. In this essay I’ll begin begin by briefly explaining what really happened in each case, and then use that as a way into discussing the current configuration mismatch between political parties and electorates in most western countries, and also how to understand the new grammar of the distribution of power in modern political systems. Because I have a kind of engineering approach to politics, I’m going to talk in terms of forces, structures and processes, rather than ideologies and personalities, and in terms which you could probably turn into diagrams if you were so inclined.

Let’s begin with the British case. The results of the 2024 election on 4 July seemed spectacular enough. The Labour Party gained 209 seats, for a total of 411, whereas the Conservatives lost 244 seats. The other parties had less than 100 seats between them. The Labour Party therefore has an unassailable majority, and can effectively do what it likes. Moreover, the “extreme Right” Reform Party won only five seats. So a great swing to the Left? No. The actual vote share of the Labour Party, at less than 34%, was only slightly greater than its share of the vote in 2019, but it now had two thirds of all the seats. How could this possibly be?

Well, it has to do with the structures and processes of British politics. Elections are rarely fought directly between Left and Right. What happens is that a party will be in power for a while, some of its supporters will lose interest or patience and, at the next elections, they will find a third party to vote for. Typically, this will reduce the vote of the incumbent major party by enough that outcumbent major party wins many seats. The most extraordinary example of this happening in modern British politics was in the General Election of 1983, when the Conservative Party won a smashing victory—comparable with the results on 4 July—even though its share of the vote actually went down compared to 1979. What happened was that, after the General Election defeat that year, the Labour Party effectively split, and a group of right-wing MPs defected to form a new party, standing against the official Labour Party in many seats, and making common cause with the traditional Third Party, the Liberals. The effect was predictable: the new third force won only a small number of seats itself, but it split the anti-Tory vote, such that many safe Labour seats fell to the Conservatives. The story until 1997, was the slow recovery of the dominance of the Labour Party as the main opposition, while the Conservatives remained in government with ever-reducing majorities, as the vote against them was still split. Yet at the same time, opinion polls showed clearly that public opinion as a whole was moving steadily to the Left.

Something similar happened this time. As pundits correctly said the morning after, “Labour didn’t win, the Conservatives lost.” Conservative voters turned to the Liberal Democrats (who massively increased their representation) and to the Reform Party, which won almost fifteen per cent of the vote (more than the Liberal Democrats). The Reform Party candidates hardly won any seats, but, by taking support away from the Conservatives, they allowed Labour to come through. And the Nationalist vote in Scotland collapsed, after the failure of the Independence referendum and any number of scandals, and those seats (many of which had small majorities anyway) went back to Labour.

OK, let’s look across the Channel. Here, the barbarians were surely beaten back. Predictions that the “extreme Right” National Assembly (RN) party would win more seats than anyone else, forcing Mr Macron to invite their leader to form a government, were dashed. (I never believed this anyway, and said so.) More than that, the ramshackle leftist New Popular Front coalition wound up with the most seats, followed by Macron’s own shaky coalition, with the RN in third place. Civilisation was saved, the Thalys would continue to run to Brussels for lunch, the same faces would appear on TV and there would be no controls on immigration, so cleaning ladies would be easy to find. So France didn’t “turn right,” and in fact the long fight-back against the forces of darkness in Europe had begun.

Not. For a start, the RN and its allies won a higher percentage of the vote—37%—than any other group, which should have brought them somewhere around 210-220 seats, and made them by some measure the largest group. So what happened? Well, it all has to do with the structures and processes of French politics. Voting takes place in two rounds, and only those candidates with more than 12,5% of the of the registered electorate go through to the second round. In the past, most competitions were between the stronger party of the Left and the stronger party of the Right, and these two survivors tried to persuade supporters of the unsuccessful parties to vote for them. On this occasion, though, the NFP and the Macronists, for all that they were bitter enemies, negotiated to stand some of their candidates down to give the other a better chance, thus keeping the RN out. This worked, but only just: in many constituencies the RN came only a few percentage points behind the winner. Although this was, laughably enough, defined as the construction of a “Republican Front,” it was in reality a cynical attempt to hang on to power and status by the political forces that have dominated for the last few decades. (Macron’s band were the big winners here.) It’s been calculated that these manoeuvres cost the RN anything up to 100 seats, and thus deprived them of the chance to form a government. And once the new Assembly met for the first time, the established parties, voting in improbable coalitions, managed to prevent the RN from getting any posts of responsibility.

I’m not going to go further into the details here, fascinating as they are for politics geeks: rather, I want to use these two elections to argue a number of propositions about the structure of politics in the West today, and why it isn’t how we think it is. I want to start with the question of the relationship (or lack of it) between voters and parties, and then move on to questions of how to understand where power lies in an increasingly homogeneous political world, where parties largely share the same ideologies.

Like everything else in a Liberal society, elections are seen through the lens of commerce: contract law, and supply and demand. In effect, parties seek contracts with voters to perform certain services in return for being voted into power, and voters choose parties depending on how much they will feel they benefit from their election. In turn, the actual outcome of elections is perceived as a kind of supply and demand curve. Political parties “supply” policies, mostly to do with things like rates of taxation, and voters “buy” these policies according to their “demands” for measures that they benefit from. At some point the two curves intersect, and there we have the results of the election, and consequently the formation of a government. It is assumed that political parties, rather like companies, have limited volition of their own, and act in response to market signals, while trying to preserve their existing customer base. It is also assumed that there is a fundamental coherence between parties and the electorate, so that changes in representation in parliament are faithful reflections of changes in the views of the electorate. Thus the argument that this July Britain “turned to the Left,” (it didn’t) and that the “extreme Right” breakthrough in France didn’t happen (it did.)

Something everybody except political scientists and political pundits knows is that, in fact, voters often support one party or another for reasons that have little to do with their electoral programme, particularly the detail of it. In the end, the electorate can only choose between actually existing parties and policies, and may in the event decide to vote for or against a party for reasons that have nothing to do with its programme. Liberal political theory assumes that political parties, like companies in the private sector, respond to market demands, such that if there is a new or increased demand for some policy, then either new parties will arise, or existing parties will modify their supply.

This model is fantastically removed from reality, but like many such models, it has been very powerful, because it is so simple. We can see how, in an extreme example taken from recent British politics. In 2015, only a handful of British voters supported parties firmly determined to exit the EU. In 2019, nearly half did so. What on earth had happened to change so many peoples’ minds so quickly? Nothing, of course. In 2015, neither of the major parties was proposing to exit the EU. By 2019 it was the major plank of the Conservative Party manifesto, while the Labour Party was resigned to it happening. But to repeat, you can only choose between existing parties with their existing policies.

So in most elections in Europe, the underlying assumption of a congruence between supply and demand of policies simply doesn’t hold. (And of course factors other than policies enter into political choices —personalities for example— but that’s too complicated for political scientists.) If the policy preferences of voters, and the policy proposals of parties, are not arranged in neat progressive relationships that can be compared with each other, then any real-world outcome will appear strange on the face of it. (Maybe mathematicians among you can think of a way of expressing this graphically.) So if we take the recent French elections, then (rare) enquiries into what voters thought, as opposed to which parry they might vote for, showed that their major concerns were things like the cost of living, immigration, education and insecurity. Since none of the establishment parties even talked about such subjects except to wave hands and issue moral lectures, much of the electorate either stayed at home or voted for the RN. Whilst some of the RN’s policies (typical of those of centre-Right parties of a generation ago) had their own appeal, the major incentive to vote RN was Change: “get the bastards out” being the informal motto of many of Europe’s discontented voters. This is voting as punishment, using the only weapon the people have to hasten the destruction of a system that is incapable of real change. There is an argument, to which I am sympathetic, that if a political system is exhausted, it is better that it die quickly, with the least collateral damage.

Of course tactical voting is as old as elections, and electorates often have a more sophisticated approach to voting than political scientists can easily understand. Likewise, as in France recently, the parties themselves can conspire among themselves to produce an outcome that the voters don’t want. So we can conclude I think that, except for political systems in which literally every shade of belief is somehow represented, election results at all levels are unlikely to give a reliable picture of opinion in the country as a whole.

In any case, what do political parties even represent? Where do they come from? The straightforward Liberal political theory argument is that they represent economic interests, or at least competition to promote those interests. (Many Marxists seem to have the same view.) But any pragmatic survey of voters shows this to be untrue, or at best a gross over-simplification. In many countries, there is a substantial working-class vote for parties of the Right, whose policies in practice disproportionately benefit the better-off. And there is a parallel, but usually smaller, vote for parties of the Left among the educated middle class, whose economic interests might better be served by voting for the Right. So whatever is at play here goes beyond just the bank balance. And even in western states with long-established political systems, we see the presence of political parties that have no dominant economic ideology. Thus, the present British House of Commons contains no less than fourteen political parties or representatives (a record). These include Scottish and Welsh nationalists, a party that wants an independent United Ireland, one that’s not sure, and no less than three that compete for the votes of those that don’t. Since the collapse in the Scottish Nationalist vote played a large part in bringing the Labour government to power, these kinds of motivations for voting are hard to ignore. Even in the West, therefore, people vote in particular ways for a whole set of different reasons.

Outside western Europe and North America, of course, things have always been so. Political parties do not arise spontaneously: they have to be organised around some principle. Usually, this is based on identity: religious, ethnic, linguistic or very often a mixture of the three. Nationalist parties may look nostalgically back to a time of independence, eagerly forward to a time of independence or greedily at  parts of other independent countries to which they think they are entitled. Thus, the endless, exhausting comedy of the West’s attempts to create “multi-ethnic” political parties in Bosnia after 1995, in a society where ethnicity had been the basic means of political identification.

So what do elections mean? The technocratic PMC approach, which prizes form and process over content and meaning, which mistakes Powerpoint slides and Action Plans for reality, naturally loves elections, with all their opportunities for detailed statistical analysis and  the construction of labyrinthine rules. It goes so far as to equate elections (or at least elections judged to be “free and fair”) with democracy, in spite of the common-sense observation that it is obviously possible have elections without democracy (and arguably possible to have democracy without elections.) At best, elections are a transmission mechanism, designed to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in the composition of an institution capable of making laws, and the generation of a government. But something has gone wrong with the gearing in recent years: the electorate finds that the controls have no effect on the machine any more, which just does as it wants.

We arrive, therefore at questions of terminology, since I have not yet tried to even define “democracy.” (I would add that control of the vocabulary of politics often equates to the partial or even total control of the political process itself. The more hegemonic is the control of the political vocabulary, the more total is the control over the wider political system.) Now I am not going to waste a lot of time discussing technical definitions of “democracy:” I am going to assume that this audience, at least, would accept that in practice democracy is a system in which government is responsive to the wishes of the people. That is a minimum condition, but I would add, as a good socialist, that the system should also try, as far as possible, to ensure that the interests of everyone are taken account of in the making of policy. You will see that such a characterisation of democracy, which is about ends, has nothing in common with the PMC fixation with democracy as means: just a series of technical procedures. But this latter definition does, of course, enable the western political class to ignore or disparage the actual results of elections it doesn’t like, often on dubious technical grounds, and independently of whether the result reflects the wishes of the people. So some kinds of results are not allowed, some kinds of political parties should be banned, and some types of political expression should be forbidden. Only then can democracy be safeguarded.

Much of this, as I say, revolves around terminology. For example, there is an (entirely artificial) contrast made these days in the PMC-adajcent media between “democratic” and “authoritarian” governments, although it’s not clear how the two terms are supposed to relate to each other. Likewise, “authoritarian” governments are often described as “populist”, to de-legitimise them even further. And that is the point, of course: control of vocabulary used, and what that vocabulary is supposed to mean, confers power on whoever does the controlling.

Now let’s unpack some words. For a start, it’s now clear, I think, that “democracy” as understood by today’s western political class is a set of procedures which they control, and use as rules for disputing power with each other, and which, almost by definition, exclude ordinary people from having much influence. So these other concepts are best understood as real or potential threats to this attempted hegemonic control.  Now “populist” comes from the Latin word for “people,” and so is not a bad synonym for “democracy” in the sense that I use the term. So a populist government is one that tries to do what the people as a whole want, and a populist politician is one who argues that this should be so. Likewise, an “authoritarian” government is one that exercises the authority that comes from clearly acting according to the expressed wishes of the people, including against structures of power and influence that try to prevent the government doing what the people want.

Thus, the opposite of “populism” is not democracy. If anything, it could be described as unpopularism, or simply elitism. In reality, of course, it is impossible for a Liberal political system to be anything but elitist. One of its basic tenets has always been that ordinary people are ignorant and even stupid, so their betters need to make the decisions. (Almost by definition, “popular” political ideas are wrong.) The role of ordinary people is thus simply to choose which of the elite competing political teams should be given the contract to run the country, after which the teams themselves should be allowed to get on with it. After all, having chosen a lawyer to represent you in a personal injury case, you do not then seek to tell the lawyer how to do it. So the elites chosen for the contract to run the country do not expect to be bothered by ordinary people telling them what to do and how.

Now of course the idea of rule by elites goes back a very long way. But what’s striking is that, whereas in the past these elites—Plato’s Guardians, the Chinese scholars, the Church, the Communist Party the despised “experts” of the twentieth century—justified their status by study, selection, experience and in some cases revelation, modern elites achieve their status purely through ambition and assertion. In other words, there are no actual qualifications for being part of todays’s ruling elite except wanting to be, and succeeding. Even elites cast aside by history—such as the traditional aristocracy—could at least muster a rational-sounding justification for their status. That is not the case today. At most, modern elites wave credentials at you.

This explains, I think, the nervousness and defensiveness of today’s rulers. It explains their solidarity with each other, and also their contempt for you and me. They are a group which considers itself fitted to rule because of the correctness of its ideas, but cannot explain coherently why its ideas are correct, or even really where they come from. Thus, the common observation that the structure of today’s politics is no longer Left versus Right, but Elite versus People, or In-Group versus Out-Group. Now notice that I am talking about “structure” here, not ideology. The Left-Right distinction will continue to be fundamental for as long as society has disparities of wealth and power, but it is not what politics today is about in the sense of the forces being exerted in the struggle for power. At most, Left and Right function as labels and insults, because the warring elite factions do not see themselves in competition over ideology, but just power, like the Party in 1984, to which I return once again in a moment. These labels, especially when preceded by the word “extreme” are useful in de-credibilising forces in society that the elites are afraid of. They act as slogans telling people to what to think: this week, any criticism of the Olympic Games opening ceremony on 26 July has been dismissed as coming from the “extreme Right,” and is therefore automatically to be disregarded.

In some countries, more specific ideologies are also invoked by those with control of the discourse. The grand classic, of course, is “fascism,” which had lost any real meaning by 1936, as Orwell observed, but which remains something that nobody wants to be accused of. Such is the ignorance of the French elites, for example, that some seem genuinely to have thought that the Vichy regime of 1940-42 was a “fascist” state to which the RN wanted France to return. Since Vichy was traditionalist, reactionary, elitist, backward-looking, aristocratic, based around the trinity of Church, Army and Family, and since fascist parties in France (which did exist then), were populist, modernist, mass parties excited by technology and scornful of traditional hierarchies, standards of education among French elites must be even lower than I thought they were. Or maybe they are just lying.

They are certainly lying about Republicanism, the other idea which has to be “defended” against the RN. For here, Republicanism, with its universalism, its secularism, its doctrine of rights and citizenship and its liberty, equality and fraternity, has effectively been abandoned by the French elites themselves. Their incoherent successor ideology is a mishmash of technocratic rule from Brussels, sneering distaste for the idea of popular sovereignty, the replacement of community and universal rights by communitarian and different rights for different groups, and the return of religion as a force in politics. Ironically, this has left the RN as the one large-scale defender of traditional Republican principles, which accounts for some of its success.

It is for this reason that I believe we need to analyse politics in the West today through the grammar of power and not the grammar of ideology, and look at the forces at work, not the labels that are used. This is why, here and in occasional comments on the (indispensable) Naked Capitalism site, I have tried to popularise the use of the term “The Party” to  describe the new western political elite, and I see that others have had the same idea. The importance of the term is that the Party in 1984 has no ideology, although it claims to and the Outer Party is obliged to believe it does.. The Inner Party is only interested in power (“the purpose of power is power” says O’Brien.) That is pretty much the approach of the Liberal governing elite in the West today: Liberalism, after all, doesn’t really have an ideology itself, other than the organised struggle for power and wealth according to complex rules.

However, it’s important to realise that by “Party” here we do not only mean organised political groupings of professional politicians and their advisers, and the “Inner Party” is not just the most important political figures. For, given that there is really only one Party these days, that of the elites, we must look to models of one-party states to understand the direction in which western political systems are moving. Thus, to take a current example, the ousting of Biden and his replacement by Harris in the US was not just the doing of the “most powerful” figures in the Democratic Party.

Part of the problem lies in the traditional Liberal concept of the separation of powers. Here, because government is considered a threat to freedom, especially economic freedom, it is important to weaken it, by having each component—executive, legislature, judiciary—able to act as a check on the others. But this is a typical Liberal distinction of form, which ignores the reality of substance. For a start, in Westminster political systems the executive is the executive because it controls parliament. And then somebody has to appoint the judges. In reality, though, it’s more than that. Historically, these three branches were personned by much the same people, who had often been to school or university together, had family and marriage connections, socialised among themselves, and shared a common view of the world. When critics in Britain used to talk about the Establishment, this was what they meant.

Most countries are like this, at least to a degree, but  the tendency has become much more pronounced in recent years. Whereas until the last generation or so there were power centres outside the Establishment (trades unions, mass political parties, even parts of the media) these have now been dismantled, and in their place we have a clone army of politicians, NGOs, journalists, pundits, consultants, political operators, but also judges, government officials, development agencies and even leaders of the police, the military and the intelligence services, who have been through the same formation, studied the same subjects at the same universities, all know each other and very largely think the same way. They have disputes and they struggle for power, but they do so among themselves, and they join forces to resist outside pressures. This is why it's unnecessary to suppose conspiracies. Development agency officials, for example, share very much the same fundamental view of the world as personnel in other parts of government, and will sympathise with and try to support, the same individuals and groups as the foreign ministry, or even the intelligence agencies.

This is how we should understand the concept of the Inner Party. Rather than a parliamentary party expanding to take over other organisations, the Party is a total system, and representation in parliament is only one of its manifestations. (After all, in the Soviet Union, there was formal separation of powers also.) Whilst the dominance of the Inner Party will never be total, it does manage to exert a great deal of influence over the political process, but also the media, the NGO community, and all of the areas where government patronage counts, ranging from art galleries to public enquiries. And its members move from sector to sector, as in any one-party state. It is not, to repeat, held together by any real ideology, but rather shares a series of Liberal-state assumptions about politics, society and the economy which it has absorbed during its education, and which are reinforced and enforced by its social and professional interactions. The Inner Party considers itself and its ideas as virtuous and its opponents not only as wrong, but as morally wicked, and finds expression of its shared assumptions useful as a way of camouflaging the naked struggle for power and providing an acceptable rationale for internal purges. But the real issue is Power.

This explains two things. First, mere overt power and wealth does not necessarily qualify you for membership of the Inner Party. The millionaire owner of an events management company with  commissions to organise political events is still a contractor, who takes orders rather than giving them. The ambitious young Ministerial adviser promised a chance at a parliamentary seat is still in the Outer Party (which one can roughly identify with the PMC) but is on the way to promotion. But a major donor, media proprietor or financier close to one political party may be a member of the Inner Party in good standing, because they actually have power and influence.

Second, the essential question is whether you want to be inside or outside. Just wanting to get inside is not enough, of course, but it is a precondition. In spite of its differences, the Inner Party closes ranks against outsiders, because in the end, the Notional Right and the Notional Left have more in common than they have things that separate them. This is why it has been very clarifying to watch the scramble of the established political parties in France to defend themselves against the possibility of the RN acquiring real influence. They have shamelessly cut deals and voted together to keep the interlopers out.

So what we can see in France (and I think the same thing is starting elsewhere) is an explicit admission by the establishment parties that the political system has been transformed. It’s turned into an elite oligarchy while no-one was paying attention, and those who don’t like it can get stuffed. The majority of people have only to do what they are told. The bluntest statement of this new arrogance came, interestingly from Jean-Luc (“where is my mouth so I can put my foot in it”) Mélenchon, adored leader of La France Insoumise in an interview with foreign journalists. He’s given up, he says, on the kind of people who live in the areas that voted for the RN. LFI offered them a higher minimum wage, and they still voted for the RN instead, because obviously all these people who live in the countryside and small towns are obsessed by racial hatred. They just need to be written off. In future, LFI will concentrate on the “new France” of the immigrant communities and the young, good-thinking Liberal middle classes. And Mélenchon’s lieutenants have been bombarding social media with sneering posts about the kind of people who might vote for the RN. (There are a lot of French words that translate roughly as “peasant.”) Of course the immigrant communities are not the passive electoral cannon-fodder that LFI assume: they have their own ideology and their own leaders, and in due course they will eat Mélenchon and his party alive, as they have done in other countries. Already, the strains over Gaza are becoming critical.

In the end, though, ordinary people do not want to be written off, nor are they ready to be insulted into voting as the elites want. They are perfectly aware that power is now disproportionately held by a smug and self-satisfied urban Liberal elite who no longer even pretend to care about the interests of ordinary people. And if they cannot get satisfaction from conventional political parties, they will get it from elsewhere, irrespective of whether PMC journalists decide to characterise this, in hushed and ominous tones as a “move to the Right.”

It wasn’t so long ago that half of the French political system, like many other European political parties, used to sing the Internationale: that great and moving secular hymn dating from the Paris Commune. “Ouvriers et paysans nous sommes” began one of the verses “Workers and Peasants are We.” You won’t find them singing that any more. Workers and peasants, your elites don’t need you. Just shove off and don’t make any fuss about it.