Category: Politics

Donald Trump and political nostalgia

11/9/2024

1235 words - 8 minute read

So Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. In 2016 when he became the 45th President I think few of us believed he’d become the 47th. But he has - and with a bigger majority than first time round.

How? Why?

For those on the left it’s tempting to reach for the ‘they just don’t get it’ card, referring to the undereducated rednecks who, with just a little bit more instruction (from us) would see the light and vote properly next time. It’s been a while since I went down that route myself, believing instead that the votes for Trump (or Orbán or whoever) signify something more and other than simple stupidity.

So the title of Rafael Behr’s article in the Guardian’s 6th November issue caught my attention: ‘Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand’. The title suggests that it’s not only the right that’s got it all wrong, but the left too. Promising. So what is it that we’ve got wrong?

The usual answer is that we don’t take Trump voters seriously enough, but Behr is on a different tack. He argues that the problem is nostalgia - nostalgia for an analogue age when politics was about ‘real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk … the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together.’

That’s all gone he says, and we must get used to a world in which ‘politics [is] played in digital mode’. And that means getting used to the ramifications of digital politics: where there is more polarisation and where ‘differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities.’

Behr is of course aware that correlation doesn’t mean causation, and that profound disagreement existed well before social media came on the scene. But it’s also plausible to say that ‘a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy.’

Behr claims that his article ‘isn’t an elegy for some pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’, but it’s hard to read it as anything other than that. And why not? Where’s the shame in yearning for enlightened public discourse in place of ‘elections as a cry of rage or exultant self-actualisation’?

But is this possible in an age of digital politics, an era in which deliberation seems to have given way to demagoguery?

Well a couple of days ago Stan Collymore, ex-footballer, ran an experiment in this vein. On his X account he posted his political principles as a ‘traditional Labour voter’ and then invited those who disagree with him to explain why. His tone of voice is itself unusual - and welcome:

‘in the spirit of amistad rather than name calling (we've all done it, politics is important and tribal after all), why do you vote Republican or MAGA, Reform or Conservative and what am I fundamentally missing in my world view that (certainly in the case of right of centre parties globally on the rise) I should consider?’

Collymore’s analogue-style invitation was well received: ‘The sort of post we need to see more of, Stan’, ‘Stan, this is a very reasonable post and request’, ‘Smart of you to look outside your knowledge base’, ‘I’m glad to see you take the approach of listening’, ‘Lovely post’, ‘Brilliant question. And well put’. And so on and so on. This is anecdotal evidence for a wish to debate and deliberate, of course, but evidence nonetheless.

One response in particular, from ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’, got me thinking about how far this analogue invitation might fare in a digital environment. It’s a lengthy and thoughtful response which amounts to a punchy endorsement of a broadly Reform programme. Part of the reply reads as follows:

‘We don’t give a damn about net zero and climate change. The climate has been changing since before the dinosaurs to cause the ice age and changing since then to melt it and reheat the planet. Only megalomaniacs think we should be trying to control temperature.

We don’t care about carbon emissions. CO2 is essential for plant life and an essential building block for things like coral. The more the merrier.’

One bit of this response is demonstrably false. CO2 is not a building block for coral. It’s true that the oceans absorb CO2 but that only makes them more acidic. As a result less calcification occurs which, according to the US National Science Foundation, makes it harder for skeletons - and therefore coral - to grow. In other words the exact opposite of what Cromwell’s Ghost says.

I used teach a theory of democracy called ‘deliberative democracy’, the nub of which is that decisions are made according to the ‘force of the better argument’. For it to work people need to be prepared to cede the point if they’ve been shown to be wrong. In matters of value this is obviously difficult to work through because there are often no standards by which to judge right and wrong.

In matters of fact, though, things should be easier. And a case in point is the mistake made by Cromwell’s Ghost regarding CO2 and coral. Would he be prepared to accept the correction? Would he be any less prepared to accept it in the digital world than in the analogue world? If he accepted it might it shift his attitude to climate change? Or has the idea of ‘alternative facts’ so taken root that what the US National Science Foundation says about CO2 and coral has as much weight as Net Zero Watch (the rebranded Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s best-known climate change denying agency)?

(I’ve written to Cromwell’s Ghost to ask if he’s prepared to accept the coral correction. If I hear from him I’ll report back. Update on 25 November 2024: two weeks later and I've not heard a word).

Why is this important, on the threshold of another four years of Donald Trump? Because - yes - I’m nostalgic. Nostalgic for a time when truth and falsity mattered, when disagreement invited dialogue rather than demagoguery.

So rather than avoid nostalgia we should embrace it, recognising the value of what we are nostalgic for - the regulative ideal of a ‘pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’ - while acknowledging how incredibly difficult it will be to recover that ideal in a world where the old-fashioned idea of rival interpretations subject to debate has given way to tub-thumping cris de coeur that brook no argument. (I've discussed elsewhere the need for, and challenges associated with, putting social media at the service of a dialogic politics of listening rather than sucking the lifeblood from it).

It’s hard not to agree with this paean to the capacity to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence:

‘One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly reevaluate assumptions. They make predictions based on various inputs, some of them unknown, and reevaluate based on what they got right and wrong. They trust people not because they're always right - no one is - but because if you're constantly seeking the truth it's easy to identify those who are doing the same.’

So who is this enlightened soul? Immanuel Kant? No, it’s JD Vance, the next vice-president of the United States, explaining how he decided that Donald Trump is not ‘cultural heroin’ after all, but the man best qualified to further the interests of the American people.

Deliberation doesn’t mean you always get what you want. And that’s actually part of the point.

Naomi klein's doppelganger

4/4/2024

928 words - 5 minute read

Naomi Klein has the knack of distilling big themes in striking book titles - No Logo, The Shock Doctrine - and for me at least every new Klein book is an 'event'. Her most recent one, Doppelganger, more than lives up to expectations, dealing as it does with the enormous topic of how the themes of left-wing progressive politics have been taken up so successfully by the populist right (at least that's my reading of the book's principal theme). The whole book is prompted by Klein's experience of an increasing confusion between her and what she calls 'Other Naomi', Naomi Wolf, probably best known for her 'Beauty Myth' book.

There was a time when the confusion might have been just a mild irritation, and politically unimportant in that in her Beauty Myth phase Naomi Wolf was widely regarded (rightly or wrongly) as a progressive feminist - like Naomi Klein. But the alarm bells began to ring when, as Klein puts it, 'Covid changed everything'. (And it did, in ways which the left has largely failed to come to terms with). Wolf began to be associated with COVID denialism, and the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movements - the last of which she linked (along with plenty of others) with conspiracy theories around elite control of the global population. At this point the two Naomis confusion became very troubling for Klein as people began to wonder what on earth had happened to her.

The question is: what had happened to Naomi Wolf? Her search for an answer led Klein down the rabbit hole in which the internet attention economy was working at full throttle - to Wolf's benefit. And the wilder the conspiracy theory the greater the attention. Thankfully, though, Klein doesn't put all this down to some personality problem in Wolf, or to her putative desire to maximise the monetisation of attention. She - rightly I think - signals the failure of the left to deal with the issues that preoccupy so many today, and that have been picked up by the right in its own grotesque fashion. These are: overweening state power (especially in the guise of surveillance), individual freedom, and security.

As Klein puts it: 'Issues we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces'. She commends Wolf's sense of strategy and writes, 'it's highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have left carelessly unattended'. Had we been 'too timid and obedient during the COVID era?' she asks, too ready to accept 'pandemic measures that offloaded so much onto individuals'.

Klein sketches the alternative road, conspicuously not followed by the left as it wholeheartedly went along with the measures mandated by governments' emergency measures around the world. What happened to the 'bigger-ticket investments in strengthening public schools, hospitals and transit systems' she asks? Of course these measures couldn't have been put in place overnight, which is why we must lay the blame for the current success of right-wing populism at the feet of the left which has so failed - over the last two decades at least - to put in the place the measures that would have undergirded a less prophylactic approach to the COVID pandemic.
(It's tempting to wonder how different things would have been, in the UK at least, had Brexit not got in the way of Jeremy Corbyn winning the 2019 election).

So, having articulated a response that focuses upstream on structure deficits rather than downstream on individual 'responsibility', it's disappointing to see Klein resort to a resetting of individual psychology as the solution to all this. In this vein she appeals to 'unselfing' as the route to a better, kinder world, in which we aim not to 'maximise the advantage in our lives ... but to maximise all of life'.

The positive aspect of this, for me at least, is the appeal to a universalist vocabulary that the left has largely abandoned in favour of a fissiparous identity politics that favours solipsism over solidarity, leading, as Klein puts it, to a 'splintering into smaller and smaller groups'. 'Splintering', she rightly says, 'is tantamount to surrender'. She acknowledges that, 'race, gender, sexual orientation, class and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts', but avers that we must 'build on a *shared* interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth' (my emphasis). Amen to that, but I'm not sure that 'unselfing' has sufficient heft to unravel the oligarchic powers with which we're confronted.

In this sense, Doppelganger ends not with a bang but a whimper - a sign, perhaps of the magnitude of the task confronting those on the left seeking to stem the right-wing populist tide. We won't manage this by name-calling, by being patronising, or by underestimating the concerns that propel this tide.

Because governments are indeed increasing surveillance, elites have indeed made obscene amounts of money out of masks and vaccinations, and people really do feel increasingly insecure as the welfare state is hollowed out by swivel-eyed small-state libertarians. Back in the day people would have turned to the left for solutions to these problems, but in the mirror world described by Klein it's those very same small-state libertarians who claim to hold the key to salvation. And people - too many people - believe them.

These are very real concerns and the left's failure to address them has left the field wide open to the right that presents itself as anti-system. Only in the Doppelganger world described by Klein can elites intent on securing the system and extending its influence present themselves as tearing it down, in favour - they say - of the class with precisely the most to lose from 'Making America (or Argentina, or Hungary, or the UK, or Spain or ...) Great Again'.

Ukraine - land for peace?

5/24/2022

538 words: 4-minute read

The war in Ukraine has been going on for just over three months and there’s no end in sight. Frustrated by Ukrainian resistance, Russia is focusing its efforts on the east and south of the country and it seems to be employing tactics used in Syria, laying waste to whatever gets in the way. The enormous civilian suffering is plain to see, and the collateral damage is spreading further and wider in the form of hikes in energy prices and world food shortages (especially for the poor). Somalia and Benin source 100% of imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Egypt 82%, Sudan and Lebanon 75%, and Libya 50%. As Tom Stevenson writes in the London Review of Books, 'The longer the war continues, the greater the certainty of hunger'.

In addition the geopolitical stakes have risen enormously with Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO after decades of neutrality. So the downsides of the conflict are obvious: clear and increasing local, regional and global instability. You’d have thought that everyone would be trying their hardest to end the war.

Against this backdrop the decision by western countries to supply Ukraine with ever-increasing amounts of weaponry at ever-increasing levels of sophistication is hard to understand, because this does nothing but prolong the war and the suffering and instability that goes with it. The defence is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and nations should be free to determine their own fate rather than have it determined by force of arms. Of course, but with sovereignty comes responsibility, and we should be asking what the responsible course of action is at this juncture. How should sovereign Ukraine act, now?

The answer is: land for peace. Long touted as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle needs to be dusted off and applied to the Ukraine war. It is absolutely clear that the war will not end by one or the other of the combatants achieving total victory, so compromise is in any case inevitable. Far more will be lost than gained by putting off what is going to happen anyway - more dead and wounded, more senseless destruction, more starvation, more energy poverty. All of this could be avoided by a responsible exercise of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

I hold not the smallest candle for Vladimir Putin, but well before the Ukraine conflict the West really should have paid closer attention to Russia’s concerns regarding its southern flank. It should have been made quite clear that the exercise of Ukrainian sovereignty did not include it joining NATO. Had it done so, the conflict would likely have been avoided. However, we are where we are: Putin’s plan has blown up in his face, thousands on both sides have been killed and wounded and we are all experiencing the collateral damage caused by the conflict - the poor and vulnerable, as ever, more than anyone. And the west must take its fair share of the blame - especially leftwing cosmopolitans who have somehow misplaced their objections to overweaning conceptions of national sovereignty, and are backing to the hilt Ukraine’s conception of what it means.

So let’s focus on stopping the war rather than punishing Russia - down to the last Ukrainian. Every extra weapon given to Ukraine delays the peace talks that will inevitably take place. Every day of delay is a day of more suffering and destruction. And the only people truly rubbing their hands with glee are Western arms manufacturers.

Que vaut la vie sans libertÉ?

2/14/2022

‘Que vaut la vie sans liberté?’ reads the placard. It wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of a revolutionary leftist in 1968 Paris, but it’s Nice 2022, and it’s the right not the left that’s flying the freedom banner.

During the pandemic the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer aternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.

As a result the word ‘libertarian’ has been completely appropriated by small-state liberals. At one time the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

What’s life without liberty? is a question the left has forgotten to ask. It needs to do so, quick, before the freedom train runs away for good.

What is to be done?

2/4/2022

935 words - 5 minute read

Politically, economically, socially and ecologically, the status quo is a disaster.

In times gone by the left would be demanding radical change and the overthrow of a corrupt and moribund system that thrives on inequality, doubles down on surveillance and corrals and infantalises entire populations in the name of a spurious ‘security’ that kills us in our tens of thousands and calls it a success.

But the left - the experimental, bold, emancipatory left - is hardly to be seen.

Unaccountably and indefensibly, it’s the right that flies the banner of rebellion. Of course their rebellion is disorganised, reactionary, short-sighted, founded on rumour or worse, and ends up strengthening the very forces it claims to oppose. But the lesson the left could draw is that they’re confrontational, disruptive, and visibly angry.

When the left does get onto the streets - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, the Sarah Everard vigil - it brings down the predictable wrath of the repressive state apparatus but fails to draw the appropriate conclusion: that progress through passive resistance is, right now, an illusion. As someone said recently, it’s all blah blah blah.

So the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the practice of revolt to the right. Stunned by the advances of the right in the culture wars, and allowing it complete control of the language that used to drive emancipatory politics - the language of freedom - the left’s feeble response has been to defend the status quo for all its worth.

In this sense the pandemic has been a disaster for the emancipatory left. Rather than oppose policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all. Sometimes, indeed, it asked for more of all these things.

This vacated a huge tract of political territory called ‘freedom’, and the right marched in. So it’s the right that’s in the streets, the right that attracts disadvantaged and disillusioned young people desperate for change, the right that is scandalous, subversive and countercultural.

Tragically, the word ‘libertarian’ has now been completely appropriated by small-state liberals, and even leftist commentators automatically elide libertarianism with right-wing politics. At one time the left would have fought tooth-and-nail to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

Maybe the left has given ground on freedom so it can double down it on its own unique calling card: equality? But no. Once again the pandemic has caught the left with its pants down. In the past two years the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while 160 million extra people have been plunged into poverty - defined as living on less the $5.5 a day. The left’s reaction? To flood change.org and 38degrees with toothless demands while, in a two-fingered simulacrum, the 100 richest people in the world ask to pay more taxes.

The right is everywhere the left should be. But instead of fighting for these spaces and recapturing the language of disruption and rebellion for itself, the left is static, sclerotic, like rabbits in the headlights of an onrushing car, frozen into immobility by its incapacity to think creatively about either the present or the future. Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a war of manoeuvre (physically overwhelming the state’s coercive apparatus) and a war of position (fighting it on the terrain of culture). Give the overwhelming physical power of the state he recommended a war of position. The left has taken him at his word and the result has been downward spiral of navel-gazing while the capitalist state leads us towards a disaster of species-destroying proportions.

If the emancipatory left stood for anything it was for universal liberation. But in its determination to champion special interests the left has completely lost sight of the universalist demands against which to hold the status quo to account. An example: better treatment for women in prison? Of course! But a univeralising emancipatory left would have one question and one recommendation.

The question: what does ‘better’ mean? It can't be ‘treat them like male prisoners’ because conditions in UK prisons are appalling. If it’s ‘treat them differently because they are women’ this is also music to the ears of defenders of the status quo, because it leaves 95% (the percentage occupied by men) of what is quaintly and absurdly called the prison ‘estate’ completely intact. Some universal standard for 'better' is needed, and it can't be deduced from the condition or experience of any one group, collective or protected category.

The left-libertarian recommendation: reduce the prison population by at least half (prison numbers in England and Wales have increased by 84% since 1990, from 44,975 to just under 83,000). And then turn the rest into schools (50% of the prison population is functionally illiterate).

Tactically inept and strategically naive, that’s where the left is right now, with every single move captured, appropriated and defanged by the very forces it’s trying to oppose.

So where now?

Maybe here.

And here.

political cross-dressing

9/21/2021

530 words: 4-minute read

Leftist progressive environmentalist George Monbiot is shocked that there are antivaxxers among his acquaintances. Something ‘weird’ is going on, he says, whereby the curiosity, scepticism and suspicion typical of people on the left has driven those selfsame people to adopt rightwing versions of this language, so much so that ‘some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon’.

He’s right, that’s weird.

He goes on, ‘The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc … Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it’.

Right again.

There’s more: ‘The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism’.

Monbiot is right about that too.

‘It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism’, he writes, ‘This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right’.

Absolutely.

He concludes: ‘Left and right political parties have swapped their language. Now the right talks about liberation and revolt. And the left talks about security and stability’.

Acute. Brilliant. A perfect summary of the confused and confusing state of ideological play in liberal-capitalist countries like the UK today.

What’s missing, though, is the recognition that the left has contributed to this state of affairs by allowing the right to arrogate to itself the language of freedom and liberation in the two key events of the past few years: Brexit and Covid.

By the time Covid turned up the Brexit battle was over, but the left hadn’t learned its lesson. Instead of debating, designing and exemplifying a left-libertarian approach to Covid it went full throttle for an ironclad lockdown, leaving the door marked ‘freedom and liberation’ wide open for the swivel-eyed right of assorted denialists and anti-vaxxers to walk right through.

And some on the left, as Monbiot recognises and bemoans, have followed them.

But the answer is not to accuse these leftists of ‘falling for’ false idols, of ‘succumbing’ to conspiracy, or of some fatal ‘confusion’ that can only be put right by attending to the high priests of correct leftist thinking.

The answer is to focus unerringly on that sweet spot where freedom AND security are located.

In the Covid case, this would have been to point out that a properly funded NHS and social care system, staffed by properly rewarded professionals (all this representing SECURITY), would have allowed family members to be present as their relatives passed away instead of dying lonely and isolated (representing FREEDOM). The left were all too ready to allow elderly people in care homes to be kept in segregated solitude for months on end - ‘collateral damage’ to be stoically accepted for the sake of an unwavering commitment to an uncompromising lockdown.

So yes, it’s weird that some of George Monbiot’s freedom-loving acquaintances have turned to the right. But this was never going to help.

where is the libertarian left?

4/5/2021

479 words; 4-minute read

It’s become a commonplace that Covid has amplified features and fissures in society that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged.

For instance there’s the importance of people who keep things going without us realising: shop workers, parcel deliverers, lorry drivers. If reward is a function of indispensability, we now know that these people are poorly rewarded. (Though the UK government’s 1% pay rise for nurses shows that recognition by no means leads directly to justice).

Then there’s the dispute over the role of experts, and attempts by populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to sideline them in favour of quack remedies or downright Covid denialism.

We always knew that wages are awarded in inverse proportion to a person’s usefulness to society and that populism is dangerous, but it took the glare of Covid to make these things unavoidably obvious.

But there’s another fissure that was barely visible pre-Covid yet which has come to define much of the reaction to the pandemic: the gulf between libertarians and authoritarians. Unfortunately, and with potentially disastrous post-Covid consequences, the libertarian position has been entirely dominated by the right, leaving the left defenceless as the capitalist state arrogates more and more power to itself under cover of Covid darkness.

Over the past twelve months it’s been something of a surprise to see how readily people on the political left have lined up behind disciplinary policies and practices that in normal times they’d have fought tooth and nail. Whether it’s increased police powers, enhanced surveillance, Covid passports or the criminalising of information, leftists have either waved through repressive measures or raised the stakes by suggesting how helpful even more repression would be. Voices on the left calling out these measures have been few and far between.

Most disturbing of all is the shock horror these same people display when a bill comes before parliament increasing police powers and curbing the right to protest. What, one wonders, did they expect? Politically literate leftists shouldn’t have to read Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben on states of exception to know that regimes will always take advantage of emergency to intensify their authority.

It’s taken Covid to bring both the outright and the naive disciplinarian left out of the woodwork, and as the Covid crisis draws to a close it may be too late to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle. It wouldn't be too bad if ceding a libertarian approach to Covid to the right had just left it in the hands of crazed denialists prepared to go to the wall for the right not to wear a mask. But actually it's made possible the government's truly scary Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, waved through in the wake of the softening up offered by Covid 'necessities'.

In sum there is huge gap where the left should have been designing, advocating and enacting a progressive libertarian approach to Covid, and the authoritarian capitalist state is gleefully sailing straight into it.

Notes from a cliff-edge