It is an obvious and inherent feature of political standpoints that they are somewhat nebulous and subject to mission creep. This seems to be one reason why Donald Trump was elected US President after eight years of Obama mission creep. Too many ordinary voters felt left behind by the creep.
This is one reason why Jeremy Corbyn’s brief reign as UK Labour Party leader is so fascinating. He is an entirely unambiguous example of mission creep within a major political party. The party is supposedly founded on fairly pragmatic socialist principles, but Corbyn has shown us how little that really means. Part of the fascination is that many voters hardly seemed to notice. That is political mission creep working its creepy magic. Corbyn probably pushed it along too quickly, but not by much.
The EU is an example of large scale mission creep which has supposedly been planned for many decades. Yet there are good reasons to think it would have happened anyway due to the nature of the beast. From this perspective the planning merely eased the way for what was bound to happen anyway. EU fans are riding a process they cannot stop rather than one they control - so they mostly sit back and enjoy the ride.
The problem seems to be associated with the vague and misleading nature of political labels. There are no real boundaries between competing political standpoints. Socialist, conservative, social democrat, democratic socialist, fascist, communist and numerous variations may all have their book of words, but reality is too complex and unpredictable for a book of words. Political standpoints are diffuse with no real boundaries because they have to be, they have to adapt to events. Those events may cause one political standpoint to fuse into another but if the names remain the same the shift in emphasis isn’t necessarily obvious.
People vary and place a varying emphasis on even their own political position. A natural trend is for all political positions to drift and unfortunately for us there is only one possible direction for political drift. That direction is mission creep towards a more totalitarian centre simply because there is no other source of political gravity. The centre is shifting from UK to EU to UN but that seems to be the nature of modern political mission creep.
Political gravity leads many people to ride the beast and push for more and more totalitarian outcomes. This is what we saw during both Brexit and the coronavirus debacle – the nature of the beast.
Political gravity leads many people to ride the beast and push for more and more totalitarian outcomes. This is what we saw during both Brexit and the coronavirus debacle – the nature of the beast.
2 comments:
Good post. I think the idea of the "mandate" is in there as well. A party puts out a manifesto, keeping it pretty general because they want some wriggle-room to deal with events, and also because it is presumably the result of a committee getting their heads together and all the associated horse-trading. If they are elected, the convention is that they have a "mandate" to deliver it. Which basically means they can do whatever they think they can get away with, subject to their best brains relating it to the manifesto. I guess things are now so complicated, or are portrayed as being so complicated, that they can convince the public of anything.
Who, for example, gave Boris the permission to spend more than any Labour government because of corona? It's clear that governments are only restrained by shame, and they don't have much...
Sam - thanks and yes the mandate is in there as well.
"I guess things are now so complicated, or are portrayed as being so complicated, that they can convince the public of anything."
It's a coincidence but today I began working out a blog post on a similar issue. Things are complicated but there have been good ways to assess them which now seem to be shoved into the background. Simple distinctions between good and bad, honest and dishonest and so on. Much of it now too old fashioned to be used.
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