This is Not Normal. William Davies
trust: law or economics?13 Its legitimacy rested on establishing relatively clear boundaries between the two, separating the terrain of finance from that of politics, with central banks serving as the mediators between the two.
The Keynesian model of the state, which prospered for nearly thirty years after the Second World War, was developed with the explicit aim of reining in finance and bringing it under the authority of national sovereign law. With this established, the liberal state had the autonomy to manufacture the conditions of social cohesion, which it did through the provision of an expanding welfare state, free education and progressive taxation. From the 1970s onwards, however, the neoliberal project has been to aggressively reverse this hierarchy, so that states are brought instead under the ‘disciplining’ authority of financial markets. Law-makers must increasingly consider their actions, not in terms of their commitment to voters or social cohesion, but in terms of how they will be judged by bond traders and currency speculators.14 The crisis that began in 2008 represented not the end of this principle, but its most shocking affirmation.
Neoliberal reforms involved privatising, marketising and outsourcing services that had originally been created and provided by the Keynesian state on a civic basis, rather than as a matter of economic efficiency. David Harvey has referred to this as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, seeing as it exploits an inheritance of public and civic goods.15 However, we might also view it as a type of ‘accumulation by distrust’, in that new opportunities for profit are created by casting doubt on the vocation and judgement of public service professionals. Lucrative opportunities open up for auditors and consultants, to evaluate, rate and rank schools, hospitals, councils, and even nations, according to how well they deliver ‘value for money’.
Distrust and audit culture work in a vicious circle, generating a spiral of surveillance and paranoia. Once suspicions are cast on others – be they public officials, teachers or other members of our community – no amount of data will be sufficient to alleviate them. The platform economy drives this into everyday life. Reputation and recommendations systems were originally unveiled with the promise of establishing trust between strangers, for instance on eBay. But Airbnb is now increasingly plagued by the phenomenon of sellers installing secret cameras around their homes, to seek additional proof of a buyer’s honesty.
The authority of language is downgraded in the process. Throughout its history, liberalism has relied on public institutions and procedures to bolster the credibility of public speech. The ideal of ‘the public record’, a central pillar of how facts are established and shared, assumes that public figures will be held to account and constrained by their own words. Modern science has developed exact procedures through which to measure, record and share evidence. But as neoliberalism has unleashed wave upon wave of rating, ranking, evaluation and audit processes (often conducted without transparency), publicly established facts are no longer in a position of authority. Science itself becomes judged according to calculations of financial return. It was precisely the threat that money posed to truth (and not some philosophical deconstruction) that prompted the diagnosis of ‘postmodernism’ in the 1970s.16
Much of what is labelled ‘populism’ is really a longing for some version of the state that predated neoliberal reforms. The Brexit mantra of ‘take back control’ may have been a dog-whistle about border control and immigration, but the appeal to national sovereignty, which clearly strikes such a chord with the baby-boomer generation, works partly because this age group can remember a time when the state was in command of its own economy and able to deliver social security to its own citizens. This gets refracted via the ugly nostalgia for cultural and ethnic homogeneity, and is exploited for political gain by politicians willing to toy with this nostalgia.
Liberal democracies have continued to hold elections, fought mostly by political parties that long predate neoliberalism. But they have witnessed declining levels of participation, particularly from around 1990 onwards, and especially among the working class and the young.17 In Britain, voter turn-out was over 77 per cent in the 1992 general election, but was under 60 per cent in 2005 (and under 40 per cent among under-twenty-fives). The rising autonomy – nay, sovereignty – of finance since the 1970s has been accompanied by a not unreasonable feeling that democratic institutions aren’t really where power lies, and that politicians must therefore be in it for money or fame. A vicious circle ensues, in which voters become ever more cynical about politics and public service, and therefore ever more reliant on markets, debt and audit to undergird social life.
Neoliberalism is a system that progressively devours the conditions of social trust and converts it into revenue streams. The common attribute of credit derivatives, digital platforms and contemporary democracy is that, behind the publicly visible institutional face and the various promises and commitments on offer, there lies a hidden logic of calculation, which is ultimately in command. Institutions become a kind of cosmetic veneer, mere ritual, behind which sit financial and algorithmic machinations. Political cynicism is the logical outcome of a system that views public life as a resource to be extracted from, rather than as the stage on which justice and truth will be established. The sense that public life is now a sham, and the yearning for this to be called out (if necessary by a maniac), lie at the heart of the political movements that shook the world in 2016.
After Liberalism
The events of 2016–20, recounted in this book, are evidence of what happens as neoliberal rationality penetrates the most cherished institutions of liberalism, in particular, parliamentary democracy, party politics and the public sphere of newspapers and broadcasters. The effects are unpredictable and unstable, indeed not always recognisable as ‘neoliberal’ at all. Alienation from representative democracy, and distrust in the media, had been brewing for many years, as multiple surveys have confirmed. Nationalists certainly exploit these feelings of powerlessness and resentment. But as the institutions and credibility of liberalism crumble, something new fills the void. Evidence and examples of this ‘something’ are scattered throughout the essays contained here.
Under the neoliberal conditions I’ve described, all action becomes dictated by a single question; the same question, incidentally, that Donald Trump fixates on: what will this do for my ratings? How many clicks, views and likes will it provoke? How much attention will it command? How much approval will it win? As Michel Feher has persuasively argued, neoliberals might have promised a society built around entrepreneurship and self-invention, but in practice they authorised a society of perpetual audit and rating.18 Whether it be the social media platform or the credit scoring technology (and the two are now converging), individuals constantly feel the force of rating in their everyday lives. Everything becomes about PR, a kind of perpetual performance of the kind of personality that is like-able and creditable.
We can now see the consequences of this all around us. Political leadership becomes a matter of celebrity and audience ‘engagement’. Figures such as Johnson and Trump, who can draw attention towards them, driving up clicks and ratings, become a crucial asset to political parties. They also become a valued piece of ‘content’ for platforms and media agencies, producing new alliances between the media, political parties and ultimately the state. The business ‘synergies’ between the Trump White House and Fox News, co-producing a constant stream of political reality television, are palpable.19 Johnson’s relationship with the media, especially the newspapers that are read by the same ageing demographic that votes Conservative, has a similar dynamic. Despite their very different demeanours, Johnson and Trump both have a public status as reality television stars or stand-up comedians: they offer a genre of content that fuses entertainment with news.
Britain’s media, and especially its newspapers, have played an active political role for many years in cultivating hostility towards immigrants, the European Union and the welfare state. Its biases are not news. But in the wake of Brexit, and imbued with the logic of the news ‘feed’ or ‘stream’, news outlets became permanent campaigns, working primarily towards ‘up rating’ one set of politicians and political content, and ‘down rating’ another. Strategic misrepresentation of others (both favourable and unfavourable) is how politics is conducted, not just by professional spin doctors, but by politicians, journalists and ordinary social media users. Far from seeking to report events, or hold power ‘to account’, news media