Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
Obama.
‘People power’
‘One of the reasons I ran for president,’ Obama confided in a post-election address, ‘was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington.’ And yet now Obama and big business are the chummiest of chums. If we’re all so cynical about politicians now, what was it with all the hope that surrounded Obama’s election? I mean, I know a lot of it was about the fact that he was black. But people’s faith in him as a genuine political leader contrasted sharply with the words of Obama’s former White House social secretary Desirée Rogers, who told the Wall Street Journal’s magazine, ‘We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand’ (as Naomi Klein has noted, she got rapped over the knuckles for revealing the marketing behind the image). Advertising Age was able to explain more fully: ‘Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player’ (in a lovely irony, Coca-Cola bought a 40 per cent stake in Honest Tea in 2008). That captures it perfectly: the Obama brand is both too everyday and too authentic to look like a brand. And the Obama brand is both Main Street and street-cred: both ways of suggesting he’s down with the people. When in fact he’s really down with Wall Street.
Obama’s not alone. The Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner has promised to ‘give government back to the people’. The Tea Party’s adopted style is feet-on-the-ground populism. Back on this side of the pond, Gordon Brown promised to ‘put more power where it belongs – in the people’s hands’; Nick Clegg announced that the Liberal Democrats were ‘giving power to people and communities’; and David Cameron pledged to ‘restore real people power’ through a radical redistribution of power from Westminster to ‘the man and woman in the street’. ‘We are the radicals now,’ Cameron elaborated, in one of his many variations on this Alice-in-Wonderland theme, ‘breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power, from the state to citizens, politicians to people.’ Over the last decade, British politicians on all sides have been tuning in to ‘the wisdom of crowds’: the Labour Party had their ‘Big Conversation’ in 2003; in 2009 the Conservatives launched their own internet version in the form of a £1 million competition to come up with a ‘large-scale crowdsourcing platform’. After all, explained the then shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, ‘The collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts.’
I am heartily sick of having the people power thing sold to me all the time, of being told that this is a shiny new era of engagement with voters, the open scrutiny of decision makers, the public consultation, the citizens’ assembly, the parliament for minorities and the independent public inquiry. In his book The Life and Death of Democracy, the political scientist John Keane praises these new forms of ‘deep’, ‘direct’ or ‘monitory’ democracy: ‘All these devices have the effect of potentially bringing greater humility to the established model of party-led representative government and politics.’ After the expenses crisis that engulfed British MPs in 2009, the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor declared that ‘Our constitutional future is about to be rewritten, and it will be rewritten not by the politicians but by those whose servants they are.’ But far from enhancing the democratic representation of the British people, the expenses crisis resulted in a situation where no one in their right mind would choose to become an MP, other than a millionaire or a martyr.
Remember the 2010 election campaign, that ‘thrilling’, ‘electrifying’ and ‘transformative’ contest that ‘really caught people’s imaginations’ and ‘engaged them as never before’? What seemed at the time to be a bona fide, over-to-you affair was in fact the most stage-managed and hollow campaign there’s ever been. The machinery of actual democracy was replaced by the tokens of fake democracy. The traditional morning press conference, where leaders used to be challenged on the nitty-gritty of their manifestos, was abandoned. Instead there was man-of-the-people Nick Clegg’s first-name encounters with individual voters, ‘decent’ David Cameron’s all-night communion with ‘the bakers, the brewers, the fishermen landing their catches’, and Gordon Brown’s prostration before Gillian Duffy, a pensioner from Rochdale. Everything seemed so genuine; and yet one thing was missing: actual policies. The leaders ignored several huge elephants in the living room: Afghanistan, Iraq, climate change, and exactly how they would deal with deepening financial crisis. This was an X Factor campaign in which Nick Clegg enjoyed for a time the popularity of Joe McElderry, and Mrs Duffy had her fifteen minutes of being Susan Boyle. But we were left with the least legitimate and most covertly ideological government I’ve ever seen. I don’t want authenticity or humility in politics, I just want politicians to make a case for what they want to do.
It’s a cliché of modern politics that voters have become cynical, but the reality is that we bounce between cynicism and wild optimism, neglecting all-important critique. We may dismiss Cleggmania now as a passing fad, but if we don’t understand it we won’t be able to cure our ailing politics. The key to Clegg’s precipitous rise and fall was his lack of overt ideology. Those who liked him weren’t clear what the Lib Dems actually stood for, and when his star began to fall, he had no political principles to hold on to.
A lot of the people-power hype is associated with new technology. Democracy is no longer about tedious little details like manifestos and voting. It’s about whizz-bang online engagement and getting your hands on information. As Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign manager, puts it in his book The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything: ‘The power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us.’ In 2007, American presidential hopefuls took part in a democratic ‘experiment’ hosted by CNN and YouTube. Members of the public were to submit their videoed questions via the internet for the candidates to answer live. The presenter, Anderson Cooper, was excited. ‘This is something we’ve never done before,’ he said. ‘The candidates on this stage don’t know how it is going to work … and frankly we think that’s a good thing.’ The performance exemplified modern politicians’ enthusiasm for being subjected to regular bouts of techno-charged ‘direct democracy’. The Number 10 website in the UK is an elaborate portal for e-feedback. There’s a ‘Meet the PM’ section, webchats, blogs, a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, and e-petitions. Cameron has put forward a ‘revolutionary’ project to publish the ‘business plans’ of government departments online. The White House website boasts the Open Government Initiative, promoting ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative government’. ‘The Administration is empowering the public – through greater openness and new technologies – to influence the decisions that affect their lives.’ Each US government department has its own website, with its own feedback ‘opportunities’. I am tired of all this guff, all these polling consultants and web gurus coming up with meaningless do-gooding phrases. We are drowning in it, and the reality of just how represented we are politically is being ever more obscured. The Open Government Initiative was set up by Obama’s director of communications, Daniel Pfeiffer. There it is in a nutshell, with that weasel word ‘communications’: this ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative government’ is, quite literally, PR.
Jeffrey Levy, one of the architects of ‘Government 2.0’, has described in an article on the White House website how proud he is that even negative comments get posted on the site. ‘I think you gain credibility by showing you’re willing to take some criticism … we welcome everybody’s comments,’ he said. This sign of open government is shared by the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 2009, a twenty-five-year-old maths student, Mahmoud Vahidnia, captivated the world’s media when he upbraided Khamenei in person for being an inaccessible idol that nobody was allowed to criticise. Intriguingly, however, Vahidnia’s tirade was reproduced on Khamenei’s own website, along with the cleric’s calm response. ‘Don’t think that I’ll be unhappy to hear such statements,’ he said. ‘No, I would be unhappy if such statements are not made.’ I’m not implying that the US has the same democratic deficit as