Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
It’s the enemy that is driven by partisan intentions, they say. We are simply doing what works. This is not only a strategy, it’s a concealed strategy, and much more effective as a result. It’s politics – and big ideas – in hiding. I promised I’d identify the ten rules of ideology’s lying game; and the first rule is to claim to be ideology-free.
So my heart sank when I read that veteran firebrand Shirley Williams congratulating the 2010 coalition government on their pledge to ‘work together in the national interest’. ‘The generation I belong to, steeped in ideology and partisan commitment, is passing away,’ she wrote. ‘My own vision was one of equality and social justice advanced by state action. The new politics is pragmatic, innovative, suspicious of state power, and holds to values rather than dogmas.’ Williams commended a new spirit of ‘cooperation’ over ‘the safe, long-established confrontation’. I thought, come on Shirley, stick to your guns! Don’t dismiss political principle and party loyalty as aggressive tribalism; it’s what democracy is all about. Sure, we can all love each other and agree all the time, but that’s called totalitarianism. I want my politicians to make a case, to argue their position, to try to persuade me that their vision is best. I want frank and passionate argument, sharply divided debate, and clearly delineated alternatives. Post-ideological politics is being sold as ‘the new politics’, but I think it’s an empty scam.
Broadsheet think-pieces and intelligent magazines keep telling me that this is an age of big ideas – whether about new forms of political agency or technological revolution. In fact, those are empty rhetorical gestures, and big ideas are the great taboo of our times. This helps to explain why the initial optimism of the Arab Spring protests evaporated so quickly: in each country the overthrow of the existing order provided a genuinely exciting sense of freedom, but there was no clear vision of what kind of society the protesters wanted to put in its place. It also helps to explain the apparently nihilistic character of the English riots in August 2011, and the baffled attempts to understand them. The riots were political all right, even though it was branches of Foot Locker rather than town halls that were being attacked. They were about racism, economic inequality and the mismatch between austerity and consumerism. But overt ideology was absent from both the riots and the commentary, leaving everyone dissatisfied. There was a ‘March for the Alternative’ against public-spending cuts in Britain earlier that year, but what the alternative actually consisted of was not spelled out. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, which linked the fall of Communism with the solution of all the world’s problems, was rightly derided as cartoonish. But his claim that the triumph of liberal democracy signalled the end of the world’s big ideological battles has become the mainstream view.
Take a look beneath the hype, though, and it’s clear that it’s not just me who longs for good old-fashioned idealism. Just look at the Martin Luther King-esque rhetoric, the Che Guevara T-shirts and the shouts of ‘Yes we can’ that accompanied the election of Barack Obama in 2008. That political enthusiasm was touted as a sign of a new era, but it was actually really retro. And that’s why Obama has so far proved to be such a disappointment. Because while his campaign evoked a time when ideology was alive and well, his tenure has been pragmatic, centrist, anti-ideological. Progressive proposals – from closing Guantánamo to providing commitments on climate change – have been weakened or quietly shelved. The healthcare reforms in which liberals invested so much hope were watered down in the face of opposition from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Laissez-faire economics still rules Wall Street. This is not just about political compromise: it’s about moving beyond politics altogether. Left-wing critics lament Obama’s inaction; but his inaction, or rather his lack of a political project, is precisely his selling point. The psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow wrote in The Huffington Post in 2009 that it is ‘reassuring that President Obama is … for the most part capable of resisting the coercive grip of ideology … he has shown himself to be able to transcend the false dichotomies and polarities … that have traditionally divided us’. Obama has been described admiringly by an aide as a ‘devout non-ideologue’. But to me that’s not only a contradiction in terms, it’s a sign of a deep malaise.
When politicians are asked to explain why young people are so uninterested in politics these days, they invariably give the same answer. We are ‘out of touch’ with the new generation, they say. We need to ‘re-engage’. But re-engage how? Young people are a mystery, politicians think, with their masonic Facebook habits and specialised footwear. We must learn their strange ways. So time and again, this re-engagement is imagined in the form of X Factor-style face-offs, appearances on YouTube, and votes via text message. But the real reason why young people don’t turn out to vote is not that they have transformed themselves into an opaque new species. It’s perfectly straightforward and rational: now that there’s no difference between political parties, why on earth should they bother?
Our attitude to politics is in a muddle. Since we regard political division as something to be avoided, we do not identify the absence of political choice as a factor in voters’ disaffection. ‘They’re all the same’ is the refrain of bored non-voters; and yet we want sameness in the form of non-ideological politics. Although I’m always reading commentators hailing the return of ‘big ideas’ in politics, that isn’t going to happen if any real big ideas are dismissed as either hopelessly romantic or as dogma. You’re not supposed to believe in a politician who believes in anything. There isn’t much idealism in this Massachusetts senatorial address: ‘I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck.’
From the bland, managerial prime ministership of John Major in the 1990s to New Labour’s triangulations, from the hair-splitting policy distinctions of the 2004 Bush–Kerry election to Angela Merkel’s explicit desire to transcend party politics and be a ‘mother to the nation’, political principles have been abandoned in favour of a rush to the electoral centre. As if that mythical place exists anyway. Politicians, stop sniffing around, trying to second-guess the middle ground: lead us to your own promised land! Just look at how Israel’s political centre has shifted to the right in recent years. The political mood is up for grabs, so get off the fence! But – yawn – it’s cross-party cooperation that’s now applauded, with initiatives such as the Transpartisan Alliance and the Liberty Coalition springing up in the US. Senator Joe Lieberman wears his independence as a badge of honour, which is easy to do as independents are the fastest-growing group of voters in America. And since the expenses crisis in the UK a new generation of independent MPs has followed white-suited Martin Bell’s 1997 example. Party membership and loyalty are collapsing in ‘democracies’ around the world.
And people, if cooperation in politics is really overrated, not to mention dangerous, so too is pragmatism. In the UK there are more and more calls for MPs to spend time ‘on the ground’ in their constituencies, resolving boundary-wall disputes and getting zebra crossings repainted. That’s no way to start a revolution. And with the rise and rise of economics, the ultimate politics of pragmatism has evolved: politics as budget management. Policy decisions have been reframed as fiscal decisions, and everything is now given a monetary value in order to be deemed important, or even to exist at all: from the cost of prisoner reoffending to the economy, to the ‘bio-credits’ system which assigns financial value to endangered species (we can’t just save them for their own sake). I’m all for not wasting money, but it’s getting to the point where nothing in our public or private lives escapes monetary analysis: you can see this tendency in popular economics books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics or Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything. Even the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was at times, surreally, assessed via the fluctuations in BP’s share price. In the absence of political projects, the only way we have of articulating value is through price. What the writer and theorist Mark Fisher astutely refers to as ‘capitalist realism’ now stands in for political idealism. Politicians’ speeches are judged by the reaction of the markets, the hard-headed bottom line, imposing ‘realistic’ limits on politics as the art of the possible. But what could be more skittish or fantastical than the derivative-driven dreamworld of Wall Street and London’s Square Mile? And in a beautiful irony, despite politicians’ apparently down-to-earth references to ‘the public purse’, the use of audit to make the intangible real just spawns another, virtual reality: public servants routinely spend as much time representing their work – through