Here we go again

Here we go again - another election day. Not the big one but how exciting it all is. Worth taking stock of party politics more generally during these strange times, but we still hit the old problem.

In a democracy we vote for X, we vote against Y, but the problem remains. One of the most deceptive aspects of the voting game is deliberately exaggerated differences between political parties, political actors, policies, media outlets.

The difference between one political standpoint and another. Exaggerated by giving them different names, exaggerated to a point where important similarities are obscured, not debated, not clarified as they should be.

For example, the difference between communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism and a number of other political isms. Or the difference between green hustlers, gender hustlers, race hustlers or general purpose hustlers.

As we know too well, players of the Great Game are keen to establish unique selling points, aspects of their brand, to seem better, newer, more fashionable, kinder, closer. Or dangerous, not to be trifled with, unhinged, approach with care. We see that on the fringes too. Not always on the fringes though.

Careful delineation of differences. Yet to an outsider the similarities matter at least as much as the differences. Maybe more. Differences often obscure more than they reveal such as imaginary positions on the imaginary left right spectrum of imaginary political opinion with imaginary consequences.

A more realistic spectrum could be devised to highlight the similarities. An alternative way to view the political game. Such as –

 

What was New Labour under Tony Blair? Socialist? Big Tent Socialist? Third Way Socialist? Happy Clappy Socialist? Fascist? To an outsider it is probably better to see Blair for what he was and ignore the traditional political labels. It usually is. New? Not really. A political hustler perhaps. Sometimes hustler, sometimes political, sometimes both. Never apolitical.

What are the Conservatives under Boris Johnson? Certainly not conservatives, not those who wish to conserve, those who know what is worth conserving. How about Socialists? Closer perhaps, but again, to an outsider it is probably better to see Boris and the Tories for what they are and ignore the traditional political labels. They take us nowhere.

Certainly the Boris regime is not conservative. Not fans of the free market, democrats or fans of limited liberal government. That would be the old version of liberal. The version which built, which preserved, which mostly disapproved of hustlers. Not always. It never is always in politics.

Perhaps we should ignore differences between Blair and Johnson. Blair pursued the political aims of the establishment intermingled with the demands of his own political career. He concentrated on selling those aspects which could be sold while avoiding those which could not. He was mostly hustler. Johnson is too.

Cesspit v Reality

A former veterans minister has hit out at the government as "the most distrustful, awful environment I've ever worked in".

Tory MP Johnny Mercer told Times Radio "almost nobody tells the truth," and election pledges had not been delivered...

"This is the most distrustful, awful environment I've ever worked in, in government. Almost nobody tells the truth is what I've worked out over the last 36 hours.

"I don't think anyone really can get on their high horse about trust and ethics and all the rest of it in politics, because as far as I'm concerned, most of it is a bit of a cesspit".

A cesspit? Surely that’s what we usually vote for. For example, what Boris and almost the entire body of MPs understand is the political aspect of the coronavirus pandemic. The UK government response was therefore primarily political and Parliamentary opposition has been primarily political.

Same political problem same political solution – be seen to do something plausible in a highly conspicuous manner. Don’t stop until no more blame is in the pipeline. Possibly not even then, but that’s another story.

The pandemic outcome in terms of deaths and economic damage was something Boris couldn’t affect except accidentally because all he understood was the political aspect. Government actions were determined by a major political minefield which Boris and all MPs understood. Instigate a constant high profile lockdown circus or take the blame – that was the situation as they understood it.

There was no decision to make – cesspit reality made it. Pandemic reality, all the data, graphs and scientific investigations – they had almost nothing to do with it. The science, such as it was, merely gave the government a measure of its huge political magnitude. Rapid mass vaccination gave a measure a political success, even triumph. That's what the cesspit looks for.

What we could learn as voters is that political reality is not reality as usually understood by those outside the cesspit. Here in the UK, the cesspit is a political game played between three teams – government, opposition and media. In the game perception is everything and reality of less than secondary importance.

One answer, and it does need an answer, may be more votes for independent representatives, particularly MPs. Party politics has become too political and insufficiently apolitical. The civil service was supposed to provide some kind of apolitical counterweight, but that rather shaky ideal has fallen into the cesspit for reasons which are only partially clear.

More than anything else in recent political history, the coronavirus debacle has highlighted a need for apolitical politics where genuine debate and genuine diversity of opinion have an important part to play. A large number of MPs, possibly most of them, should not even be members of the House of Commons. We know that but we persist in thinking that the other lot are the cesspit. That kind of thinking isn’t working.

Some portion of the population can be programmed

 

Quite long but covers a lot of ground from Dennis Prager's robustly conservative viewpoint. To my mind his robustness illustrates very well how feeble public debate has become and how often it tries to accommodate trends which should not be accommodated.

The comment used as a post title is made at about 28:28. Of course we can all be programmed, otherwise social cohesion wouldn’t work, yet voting maniac programmers into power is a very bad idea. Should be obvious but it’s not.

The professional simpleton

But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game.”

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

It seems obvious enough that we could divide the political arena into simple and complex rather than left and right. It would be much the same as a political and apolitical division where we acknowledge that political ideas are based on oversimplified pictures of reality.

Suppose we follow this idea and consider an imaginary political initiative designed to appeal to about 80% of the population. This would necessarily include a substantial number of people with little interest in abstract analysis. In other words our imaginary political initiative must be sold via a narrative so simple that it is likely to be impractical. Quite possibly stupid too. Passing national laws to influence the global climate for example.

Political initiatives designed for wide popular acceptance cannot easily acknowledge complex issues such as the do nothing option, practical boundaries or uncertainties. Otherwise mass acceptance is compromised because our imaginary political position is not simple enough. It is insufficiently misleading.

It gets worse though, because we attract political actors who are effectively professional simpletons. They are comfortable promoting hopelessly implausible but simple goals even if those goals are ridiculed by everyone who understands the rough edges of real life. Practical people don’t usually aspire to be professional simpletons. Apart from climate scientists. And epidemiologists.

Unless the political class has enough integrity to develop pragmatic politics and eschew the politics of the professional simpleton we have a problem. Unless voters vote against professional simpletons we have a problem.

We have a problem.

Empty café

Yesterday we whizzed off for our first proper walk since lockdown began. It was one of our shorter walks because we knew we’d be out of condition – and we were. We discovered that while toiling up a hill which barely counts as a hill. It's one we’d hardly have noticed not so long ago. It became much easier once we’d climbed to the top but then we remembered - that’s how it works with hills. After that it was grand to be out again absorbing the views. 

Later we noticed that one of our favourite cafes was open for takeaway service but the place was empty unfortunately. It would be tragic if it went under but who wants a takeaway coffee unless they are in a hurry? After a walk we prefer to sit and chat and watch the world go by. 

It would be a major step forward if government and ‘experts’ could bring themselves to admit how tiny the individual risk is so we may as well go back to how things were. We may as well go back now and show a touch of optimism for a change.

Fat chance but that seems to be one of the great political divides – pessimism versus optimism, political versus apolitical. Political pessimism is the curse of our age and isn’t all health and safety. We are where we are in the pandemic debacle because we are governed by pessimist politics and unrelenting propaganda persuaded us to be pessimistic. It’s still working – the café is empty.

Want even more pessimism? Just look at Keir Starmer.

Make it go away

Why do the establishment plus certain segments of the middle classes hate Donald Trump with such venom? Is it his policies, his actions, his manner or something else?

Presumably it is all of these things but in particular is seems to be his language. Trump knows how to speak the apolitical language of ordinary working people. The language of employment, living standards, traditional values and the adverse trends which are likely to impact those pragmatic concerns. That is to say he speaks the language of those who voted for him where the establishment speaks a purely political language. Trump is leading the long delayed battle between the apolitical and the political.

If we don’t speak or think of something does it go away? Of course it does. If we don’t talk about something within the public domain, where does it go? Where could it go but the sidelines? It fades away like the Cheshire Cat, sometimes disappearing altogether. This is the rationale behind political censorship, political correctness and political language generally – to make apolitical ideas go away.

Not thinking about witchcraft, not taking about it, not invoking it as the cause of natural disasters – these slow but inexorable changes made witchcraft go away. A desirable change we may say.

Honesty is much the same. Not thinking about honesty and what it is, not talking about it, not invoking it as a desirable ideal – these slow but inexorable changes are making honesty go away in the sense that it migrates to the boundaries of public discourse. As an ideal for public discourse it is being supplanted by other criteria. Clearly an undesirable change.

The key arena is the public domain where ideas circulate, grow, shrink, morph into other ideas, become fashionable, unfashionable in the endless evolutionary dance that is human discourse. As propagandists well know; if ideas are squeezed out of the public domain then in a crucially important sense they disappear.

The effect is similar to the decline of languages such as Cornish. As the number of people who speak Cornish declines, the language fades out of the public domain even within Cornwall. It doesn’t disappear completely but becomes increasingly sidelined. Similarly, as the number of people who speak apolitically declines, the language of apolitical discourse could fade from the public domain. It will not disappear but could become increasingly irrelevant.

What we may call the language of apolitical analysis has been going the same way in recent decades. As the number of people who analyse social and economic issues apolitically declines, apolitical analysis fades out of the public domain. It doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Apolitical analysis is the big one. Political classes including political dilettantes such as major celebrities almost always prefer the ease and security of fashionable political mantras over the difficulties and pitfalls of apolitical analysis. They always have. There is little point in addressing such people in apolitical language as they do not understand it, do not approve of it and refuse to answer apolitical speakers in their own language.

If the number of apolitical speakers declines, apolitical analysis will decline in importance but possibly not everywhere. In the developed world there are few major apolitical speakers in the public domain, but Donald Trump suggests there is an untapped demand for plain apolitical speaking. Maybe it will survive him, but an enormous effort will be made to ensure that it doesn’t. Orange man bad – make him go away. It seems to be that primitive.

A cornucopia of beans

Wandering through the political maze certainly doesn't do anything to cure a chap of rampant cynicism. For example, one of the biggest icebergs of political life is a hidden assumption that the future is tolerably predictable and policies can be made to work as planned. Our bean policy will lead to a cornucopia of beans – that kind of assumption. Unfortunately it is easy enough to point out the problem, but not so easy to eradicate it. Why is that?

It may be that all political faiths also require a concomitant faith in predictable futures, rosy futures where political schemes achieve fruition and good intentions reap their just rewards. The alternative seems to be a somewhat grimmer, apolitical attitude which accepts and even relishes the inevitable roles of uncertainty, luck and misfortune.

Unfortunately democracy has not evolved to acknowledge this distinction effectively. It seems designed to foster naive expectations that elected representatives will grasp the levers of power to confer predicable benefits on our collective future. We refer to those naive expectations as policies. Maybe it seems more dignified.

Yet the future, the hurly-burly of ever unfolding events remains largely unpredictable. The levers of power are not connected to a predictable future and quite often not connected to anything real as far as one can tell. Yet the traditional political game requires political parties to propose some kind of dubious policy alternative to counter the dubious policies the other lot are busy promoting.

This confrontational futility is what we constantly struggle to get out of, but the issue is not so much the confrontation itself as the inescapable necessity to confront in kind, to play the crystal ball game. The need to have a traditional political identity is the problem and from that there seems to be no democratic escape.

Political v Apolitical

Brexit and Trump seem to have stirred up a belated realisation that third-rate won’t do. Clinton was the answer to a question nobody asked, the EU is a mess and perhaps even Meryl Streep really is overrated.

One way or another we have to claw our way at least to second-rate. Trump and Brexit may not lead us there but business as usual was never a viable option. The great political illusion of a left/right spectrum has been criticised on numerous occasions, the trouble is it is just too convenient. Yet we need a far better handle on political realities than left versus right could ever muster.

It may be worthwhile to make a distinction between political and apolitical rather than flog the left/right illusion to death. That is to say our political death.

Political

A political outlook includes traditional left and much of the modern right, both of which make a moral god of government, devalue cultural achievements and see change as the predictable consequence of decisions.

Apolitical

An apolitical outlook sees the power of government as limited, values cultural achievements, and accepts the evolutionary and unpredictable nature of change.

The UK has seen a steady decline in the apolitical outlook as the function of government has come to be dominated by politics over pragmatism, being more concerned with what is politically correct or politically expedient over what works. This trend seems to correlate well with a rise in the professional politician wedded to an entirely political outlook. For the apolitical pragmatist there is no natural place in UK government nor in any of the main political parties.

Yet reactions to Brexit and Trump seem to betray a covert horror that an apolitical dragon is out there and awake, hungry for soft bodies. Things may be changing. Second-rate here we come.