Hazel: Correct again

I don't want to get into the habit of this, but it needs saying: Hazel Blears is absolutely correct again.

On George Moonbat:

"Being called a coward by someone who has never dared test his or her opinions, values and personal attributes at the ballot box is always something I find amusing. You don't get very far in politics without guts, and certainly not as far as the cabinet table. Monbiot has to my knowledge never stood for office. I might have had more respect for his views if he had followed in his family tradition of service to the Conservative party, rather than joining the "commentariat" - wielding great influence without accountability."

One of the best blog comments I've seen since I started writing stuff here was this one: "Philosophers have only interpretted the world. The point is to complain about it."

Tribalism and groupthink

This is a good post about the difference between the best sort of economists' thinking-out-loud, and politicians or journalists.

Does politics and journalism have to be like this though? Is there a way that both could be structured so that groupthink is chastised and tribalism is punished? Is there a way that it could become more conversational? Where apostacy is less of a sin and where lightly held - almost playful - views can be traded?

Surely a Parliament with hundreds of members reflecting diverse and creative thinking of the kind that Chris is asking for here would result in a very high quality of policy-making? The kind of 'distributed moral wisdom' that Prof McWalter mentioned (quite a while ago now.....)

What would need to change?

The Devil has the best tunes

Tom Freeman has a couple of nice aphorisms on his site today - here.

I like the libertarian, Keith Preston's view of democracy:

"An institution in which the whole is equal to the scum of the parts."

or H.L.Mencken's ....

"...a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

And de Tocqueville’s aside that...

“...an election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods.”

Misanthropy is always funnier than the alternatives - something that is slightly upsetting. Take one of the factors in 'Parkinson's Law' for example:

'An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals'

All good funny stuff, and all broadly in line with the less palatable extremes of crude public choice theory.

Then there's Colbert:

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing."

And while many of Machiavelli's best lines weren't distilled into aphorisms or were lost in translation, reading him is quite a laugh as well.

On Radio 4's News Quiz, Jeremy Hardy got lots of laughs when he said that "Capitalism is a nice idea in theory, but it will never work in practice." I wonder if he's ever been here before?

As a response, I will now change the sub-header of this blog from "Be reasonable - demand the possible" to "The road to hell is paved with bad intentions". But all of this just goes to show, once again, that if you want laughs, you should probably be looking elsewhere.

I used to work on a leftish magazine many years ago. The Xmas special issue had a jokes section, and unusually, all employees were consulted, including the reptiles in the ad department (yours truly). It became quite a bone of contention. My suggestions, and those of some of the blokes / blokier women (Post-Feminists) excited enough anxiety for a committee to be set up to vet each suggestion. As one sage commented, "this is no laughing matter."

I tell you solemnly, they have had their reward.

Here's a really good post from Will Davies about the problem of 'moral bragging'. If we didn't have a cultural cringe when people brag about how they've done something good, would it make us behave differently - and better?

Will suggests it may. As he says:

"Don't knock spin: people who choose to project a positive image of some form are typically obliged to at least partially live up to it (this is the same reason why Corporate Social Responsibility should not be dismissed too lightly)."

And that's the thing, isn't it? Personally, I don't believe - deep down - that people respond positively to a grouping (say, for example, a political party) telling the public that they are the good people and the other lot are mad, bad and wrong. Or even the milder version of it. I don't believe it works because something tells me it would backfire. I suspect most people I know would agree with me here.

BUT politicians do keep doing it. This is either because they don't know something that is obvious to myself and my mates, or it's because they know something that myself and my mates don't know. I'm kind of inclined to believe that the latter is true - though obviously, it's a fairly ropey rational process that leads to this conclusion. As Will says:

"Bizarrely enough, the spin politicians apply to their own lives is the direct inverse of the spin we apply to our own lives; while they play up their moral heroism and play down their aesthetic taste, we do quite the opposite."

And why don't we brag about our altruism for self-interested reasons? It's a bit like that thing Mrs T said about power: If you feel the need to tell someone you have it, you haven't got it. We know the one thing that would convince everyone that we are charlatans would be if we were to trumpet our little kindnesses and sacrifices.

Going back to that first quote though, there's something else:

1. Politician highlights their own virtues
2. Will is happy about this because politician is obliged to go some way towards living up to this heightened expectation. Politician rewarded with short-term 'bounce'
   
3. Politician eventually falls slightly short (whilst actually being quite a paragon by most people's standards)
4. Mass response: cynicism, idealism, disillusionment, nihilism etc etc

Would the same thing happen to ordinary people who started bragging about their nicenesses? Would a social reputation for 'dispenser of kindness' be effectively abolished in the same way as alchemy was? Because alchemists weren't abolished for the same reason that torch-bearers were. They didn't become obsolete. Their customers began to believe that it had never been service worth paying for in the first place.

So - on the one hand, I'd be inclined to tell Will to keep his virtues to himself. As one Yeshua Ben Joseph allegedly said:

"...when you give alms, do not have it trumpeted before you; this is what the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win men’s admiration. I tell you solemnly, they have had their reward. But when you give alms, your left hand must not know what your right is doing; your almsgiving must be secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you."

Matthew 6.

On the other hand, having being brought up as a Catholic, one of the few other things that stuck, perhaps, is a contempt for despair. The greatest sin of all. This may be the reason that Spiked Online (among other libertarian organs) gets so far up my nose. It's the utter impatience with the very idea of a positive human agency - that no situation is so bad that it won't be made worse by someone trying to improve it. Do-gooders, and nanny-staters, and so on.

Is this idiocy the result of kindness never being able to speak its name? Never being able to underline it's own importance?

Maybe. But, in conclusion, I have no answer to Will's question really. It's a good one though, isn't it?

Dead Witch - latest

This, over at GToR is really worth a look.

....for all the left’s remarkable resurgence, it still has no idea what it stands for. The post-industrial, post-cold war left remains, as this work incontrovertibly illustrates, a decidedly reactionary tendency, a loose bundle of issues and grievances having as much to do with one another as, well, as adjacent stories in a newspaper....

.... the newsprint theory of social progress – the creation of a progressive majority organized against a series of immanent, rightist wrongs, and sharing nothing so much as common heading, the obvious being obvious, that of the New York Times.

It does - for me - raise a bit of a question: How far was the liberal capitalist consensus - the one that has broadly engulfed even ultra-pristine organs such as My Very Own Labour Party (removes cap, stands up straight for a moment) - one that was the product of political devilment, and how far was it simply a consequence of the popular narrative?

I ask this because, I suspect, that many of these liberals are feeling a bit hard-done-by at the moment? After all, they - y'know - opposed the bail-out - y'know, deep down. And it was the fault of the government dontcha know?

Has the left failed to frame anything of a narrative because of a lack of a following wind? And will this all change - now that The Witch is Dead? Can we expect an end to this nonsense and a growing realisation that there is a need to develop an understanding of how collective action works and how it can be translated into a programme?

Is this the reason that Labour really needs at least one more term?

I think - and I hope - that a programme can only be developed once you have a following wind. I say this because I think we (the left) have one now for the first time in a long time. Just look at how Thatcherism developed as an example. It was sort-of serendipitous for them in many ways.

Mrs Thatcher only really stumbled on council house sales and privitisation largely by accident. Looking back now, it's hard to believe that it wasn't all hatched in the basement of the IEA in the early 1970s, but in reality, it wasn't in the 1979 manifesto, and only cast a pale shadow over the 1983 one....

The four issues main raised by Hazel Blears?

Sorry to go on about it, but I was wondering about Hazel Blears speech (yet again). Given the amount of heat that it’s generated, I thought I’d look at it again to see what all of the fuss was about.

So, via Matt Wardman’s site – where he’s posted the whole thing – I think – think – I’ve selected the bit that everyone objected to. And here it is:

I accept that our politics is in serious trouble, not only from falling levels of active participation in parties, in elections, and in voting, but also from the spreading corrosive cynicism which characterises political discourse: in the broadcast media, in the press, and in the rise of the political blog. ….

...let me say that we witnessing a dangerous corrosion in our political culture, on a scale much more profound than previous ages, and the role of the media must be examined in this context.

Famously, Tony Blair called the media a ‘feral beast’ in one of his last speeches as Prime Minister. But behind the eye-catching phrase was a serious and helpful analysis of a 24-hour broadcast media and shrinking and increasingly competitive newspaper market which demands more ‘impact’ from its reporting – not the reporting of facts to enable citizens to make sense of the world, but the translation of every political discussion into a row, every difficulty a crisis, every rocky patch for the Prime Minister the ‘worst week ever.’

The changing structure of the media is what drives this desire for ‘impact’ and the retreat from dispassionate reporting.And I would single out the rise of the commentariat as especially note-worthy. It is within living memory that journalists’ names started to appear in newspapers; before then, no name was attached to articles.

And in recent years commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting, to the point where commentators are viewed by some as every bit as important as elected politicians, with views as valid as Cabinet Ministers.

And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy.The commentariat operates without scrutiny or redress. They cannot be held to account for their views, even when they perform the most athletic and acrobatic of flip-flops in the space of a few weeks. I can understand when commentators disagree with each other; it’s when they disagree with themselves we should worry.

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of space and prominent for comment as people who have never stood for office.This brings me to the role of political bloggers. Perhaps because of the nature of the technology, there is a tendency for political blogs to have a ‘Samizdat’ style.

The most popular blogs are right-wing, ranging from the considered Tory views of Iain Dale, to the vicious nihilism of Guido Fawkes. There are some informative and entertaining political blogs, including those written by elected councillors. But mostly, political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.

Unless and until political blogging ‘adds value’ to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.

Now, the objections that I’ve come across, so far are…

1. Sowing cynicism: where are politicians in the list of culprits here?
2. Is it correct to say that ‘mostly’ political blogs are written with disdain for the political system and politicians?
3. Should political blogging ‘add value’ to our political culture?
4. Is it unkind to refer to Guido as vicious nihilist, and is it too kind to refer to Iain Dale* as ‘considered’?

Can I just check – are there any more issues that I’ve missed? Because if there aren't, then, for fuxake, what's the fuss about? I know that the speech also went on about career politicians, but somehow – apart from the fact that this may be seen as an entertaining pop at some of of New Labour’s sonnenkind, there wasn’t anything else anyone took objection to, was there?

If those four points are the controversial ones, I’d be happy to defend her on each of them. I’d only say that she could have....

1. ...said a bit more on point one to forestall some of the criticism (though there are about five much longer speeches in that one...
2. The perception (2) that all political bloggers (present company excepted) are a bunch of shrill shitheads may not be entirely correct, but it's a common one. As Chris said, ages ago, "....complaints that the blogosphere comprises shrill right-wingers rest upon seeing only an extreme of the bell-curve of bloggers."
3. challenged anyone who doesn't think that political blogging should add value to our political culture (3) to say why - phrase it as an open question - that would flummox the bastards...
4. ...and... well, we have the answer to that one, don't we?

So, come on! Is that what all of the fuss was about?

*My anti-virus software has taken a real objection to Iain's site by the way, throwing out all sorts of warnings. I could make a little joke about how perceptive it is but then I'd have to explain why Liberal Consipracy makes my browser crash as well. On second thoughts....

Will someone else set up this Facebook group pls?

Well, as it's a week for hope to actually triumph over expectation, maybe Dizzy is wrong here.

".....for the next few months the left-wing blogosphere in the UK will be jumping up and down, and generally getting excited about the possibility that the evil America will have universal healthcare, and that troops will be out of Afghanistan and Iraq very soon, so the world can have a big group hug.

They will then turn instantly when Obama has his first meeting with the DoD and the NSA and quietly says "oh fuck me backwards with a pickling fork now I understand why Jed Bartlett acted the way he did even though I didn't really believe it was like that". "

Now, I think that we can agree that what the blogosphere says isn't as important as all of that, apart from the fact that it does have the ability to disrupt, and set the tone to a certain extent.

But I do think that the Obama victory, along with the bloody awful situation he has inherited (boo!) and the accompanying transformation in the economic landscape - the total discrediting of Thatcherism (yay!!) - will have a noticeable impact upon public perceptions - at least the perceptions of those who make the most noise. No-one can now hold politicians directly responsible for a lot of things that they used to. It's plain that they are often almost powerless spectators - and that this in itself is part of the problem.

Also, the old truism - it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in: Politicians may be able to cash in a little on a lowering of public expectations.

I know I'm repeating myself here, but Hazel Blears was not only right to say what she said (I would say that because her theme has been mine since I set up this blog), but unlike me, she is saying it in a timely way. It was the right time to say the right thing. It may be too much to hope for (but it doesn't hurt to be optimistic...) but maybe we will even see the outbreak of some kind of wartime spirit - a reaction against those who talk collective action down, and a reaction against media nihilism. (OK - Obama and Glenrothes in one week - you have to excuse a bit of optimism...)

In the meantime, I can't find a group on Facebook called 'I have realistic expectations of President Obama and I'm not going to pretend to be disillusioned when he fails to feed all of the world's children and usher in an age of global peace.'

It's probably too long a title anyway, but you'd think someone would have set up a version of it somewhere?

Update: I just noticed this in Dizzy's comments: "NO ONE, expects Obama to introduce universal healthcare or withdraw troops from Iraq or Afghanistan tomorrow.

They just expect him to be a vast improvement on the incompetent, unprincipled, self-interested, belligerent clown he is replacing. Not such high expectations to live up to really." - Fair point, I think?

Competent critics. Useless for anything else.

Lenin (*snigger*) is talking about the whole problem of collective action, and the primacy of the market in it's claim to incentivise us all only by greed. There's quite a lot of it is very good stuff there - a very fluent explanation of the wastefulness and inconsistencies of market economics and it's illusions about the lack of planning involved.

The fluency of the diagnosis (and, as a summary, I thought it was genuinely impressive) is contrasted dramatically by the fantasy that is offered as a response:

"It is because of the fact that planning has been confined to individual units of capital, and conducted in the interests of a minority ruling class, that socialist planning has been proposed as a corrective. It involves, not the complete suppression of markets, but their active supercession. Markets are to be subordinated to imperatives arrived at democratically and implemented democratically. And because the limitations of representative democracy in the liberal capitalist state are obvious, because it can all too easily assume the regnant functions of capital (often simply by hiring capitalist managers and placing them in charge of recently nationalised institutions), socialist planning requires a different kind of polity. It has been called "workers' democracy" because it takes planning from the boardroom to the shop floor - elected workers' councils, deliberating under the advice of technical advisers who were previously subordinate to capital, take decisions in place of cabals of appointed executives and shareholders. Moreover, democratic organs built in each particular workplace are aggregated into local, regional and national structures, in which delegates are subject to instant recall. In such a scenario, there is a direct and continuous line of authority that exerts itself from the bottom up rather than the top down. For this reason, it has also been called 'direct democracy'."

It's a demand for universal role-playing done in an industrial context that is no longer recognisable. And then the kicker:

"It is impossible to imagine such a transformation, though simple and obviously just, taking place in a normal political situation. It is just as impossible to see it happening unless based on a powerful experience of solidarity and collective action. As a start, then, the experience of grassroots democracy would need to be routinised in workplaces across the country, in order to offset the pressures of competition, careerism and atomisation. Such is one of the many uses of trade unionism and rank-and-file organisation. The collective defense of jobs and living conditions against the inevitable attempts to force us to bear the costs of this crisis can be the basis for establishing such solidarity. Defying the logic of capital and the priorities of those who presently rule may be one crucial step in preparing us unruly natives for authentic self-government."

Note: "Normal political situation"? Then note 'impossible'. Then marvel at the energy that goes into this whole futile position. This explains a lot of the negativity of oppositional politics. The criticism makes sense as far as it goes. Its authors (and this is a collaborative effort, believe me) have often devoted a great deal of time to perfecting it because there was no point in developing the response to the problem beyond the few airy-fairy sweeping bits of idealism about workers councils.

This fluency of criticism precludes an involvement in the kind of experiments in collective action that are required to actually make things work. For all of the criticism about representative democracy, it is a good deal less granular and tricky to make work that the kind of dispersed direct-democracy model that is advocated here - something that it seems will just drop into place, as long as the political situation isn't normal.

With so little attention paid to the details of how co-ops (for example) can work outside a narrow band of well-trodden partnership models, we're left with a series of generalised offerings that all have get-outs - ones that can be explained by some sort of betrayal or other. Essential pre-conditions that can never be met. So we have....

• competition (what if people *are* competitive?)
• careerism (ditto)
• atomisation (has there been no reaction to oppressive 'community' or parochialism in recent years?)

We're offered ...

• trade unionism (presumably the current bloody-awful bureaucratic blend of brotherhood will be scrapped beforehand?)
• rank-and-file organisation (a traditional example of socialist cant. It reminds me of that gag about people who use the word 'community' liberally - they don't live in communities)

It's a bizarre post that points to a bizarre ideology. A determination to advocate something that can never happen in the sure knowledge that there will always be a get-out - a betrayer of some sort to blame. It's like the libertarians that argue for a rip-roaring free-market within a representative democracy. They know that their bluff will never be called.

I'd take the far-left seriously if it ever got involved in any kind of attempt to model workplace democracy, rank-and-file organisation or collective action. But I've never seen any evidence of this kind of hand-dirtying.

And it may sound like a cheap shot, but the hissy opportunistic and incompetent politics tells you everything you need to know about this perspective. These people want the world to be run by workers councils, and they couldn't arrange to make a round of sandwiches without tumbling into some nasty spat, inspired by microscopic differences of 'analysis' on global matters that they aren't equipped to deal with in the first place. It's an example of misdirection writ large.

Q: Have you an idea about how any form collective action can be improved somewhere nearby?
A: No. But I've got a fucking long essay about the impact of imperialism in somewhere you've never heard of - will that do instead?

Socialists have rarely achieved anything approximating to socialism by promoting socialist solutions. Promoting democratic solutions - ones based on a representative model of democracy - have, on the other hand, worked wonders, bringing huge material improvements to workers all over Western Europe over the past 60 years. In the UK, its architects were more often than not liberal democrats (Keynes Beveridge, Wilson, Jenkins). So why won't socialists get their hands dirty by experimenting around effective co-op models (for example), understanding deliberative democracy or making representation work?

Because it's not as easy - that's why. Grandstanding may get you laid for a while, but the SWP (and it's variations) never last long, never make a dent, and just waste everyone's time.

As Johnny Caspar put it, "yez fancy pants, all of yez"

(Cross-posted over at The Trots)

Political axis - a few alternatives

Lady Antonia Fraser was on the wireless yesterday, saying how surprised she was when her husband - Harold Pinter - was awarded the Nobel Prize a few years ago. She had assumed that his outspoken politics would get in the way.

I'm not sure what the most deluded assumption behind this statement is. Is it that Pinter's self-serving blend of idealism and cynicism (Will always points out that the two are indistinguishable) is courageous, or some kind of a career-limiting liability?

(update 29/7: Will has provided some detail in response here).

Is it that she believes that Pinter is some kind of thorn in the side to the establishment with his sclerotic ranting? Does Whitehall quiver under his rhetorical blows? Or does it notice them at all? Or - better still, does it look forward to them?

Perhaps she believes that he is a threat of any kind to anyone in power, and that they would normally seek to contain him by lobbying against the Nobel Prize?

And thinking about Pinter and his fellow-travellers, I have to admit a prejudice. I tend to automatically disagree with any argument that comes wrapped in idealistic or cynical packaging.

I'm saying this as a prelude to a question about the various political axis that I've seen pedalled in recent years as an alternative to the poles of left and right. Personally, I'm quite wedded to left / right, though they seem to becoming more and more fuzzy and unreliable.

The most common alternative is the alternative poles of 'libertarian' and 'authoritarian' - (generally as a cross-cutter to the left/right axis) - one that is championed by (amongst others) the Political Compass application. I have problems with this one, not least because of the fairly subjective notion of the two words. I draw the same conclusions about most of what passes for libertarianism these days that others drew in the 1980s about Lord Hailsham's 1970s Tory notion of 'an elective dictatorship'.

Hailsham curiously forgot all about this liberalism when Mrs Thatcher carried out the most sweeping acts of political centralisation that the British state has ever seen. David Davis can be expected to do the same if the Tories end up in power. Show me a self-styled libertarian and - nine times out of ten - I'll show you a closet Tory (and usually a right-wing outlier).

Other work on political axis includes one of the best political uses of the web that I've seen is the clever, late, Chris Lightfoot's opinion-plotting application. Chris chose a much more complex set of axis, but the resulting graphic is the most valuable output of the whole thing. It's very good because it tells us a great deal about democratic politics. The lessons include...

1. Almost no-one agrees with you about very much, even though you think they do


2. When politicians don't say what you'd like them to say, they are doing it for a damn good reason. They're not saying anything that many people agree with


3. If you think that unelected individuals should be able to directly influence legislation, then you should also know that you are arguing for a lifetime of utter repression.

The 'everyone agrees with me' fallacy is - I suspect - one of the biggest causes of disillusionment with government by the elected, and the perceived disconnection between politics and the general public. The recurring question is often 'why can't they do what we want them to do?' Sadly, the answer is that they often try to do exactly that - and they really shouldn't be doing so in the first place.

So, for most of the time writing this blog, I'd be prepared to advocate set of oppositions that ignore left and right for the most part, and concentrate on 'pro-direct democracy and pro-representative democracy axis.

I could back this up with the argument that illiberalism and a general retreat from social-democratic principles can be largely explained by the fact that elections are much less a measure of partisanship, and much more a complex set of auctions - the kind that Burke warned against. Thus the kind of triangulation that Shuggy touches on in this great post here. If politicians feel forced to trade specific policies with the tiny fraction of the electorate that have the outcome of the next election in their hands, the outcome will always be a more reactionary and authoritarian set of policies than those proposed by politicians who see themselves deliberating in the interest of the general will. For this reason, I've often argued, (and sometimes believe!!) that this is the almost only really relevant axis in the modern politics of a liberal democracy.

Other axis that I've seen recently include Marko Atilla Hoare's very flawed decent / indecent opposition. Chris Dillow has a much more interesting variation on the bland 'authoritarian / libertarian' opposition here with his cosmos v taxis opposition.

For me, returning to my original point, I'm beginning to suspect that the most important one is not the direct / representative split, but the opposition between idealist/cynics and those of us that cringe or weep every time we hear them.

For some reason, being a cynic / idealist appears to be very attractive to the popular culture of advanced democracies. As James Hamilton argued a while back, it certainly helps to get you laid. It gets you on the telly, and it is vary rare to find a satirist that doesn't dive into this pit.

Marcus Brigstock sometimes avoids it, much to his credit, and watching Have I Got News For You, I deceive myself that Paul Merton silently detests Ian Hislop for it. Its ubiquity, I suspect, led the likes of Bob Geldof and Bob Marshall-Andrews (both idealist / cynic pin-ups) to back David Davis recently. It appears to be the key motivator for Simon Jenkins, Rod Liddle and Steve and Martin Bell. It seems that you need to demonstrate a command of this particular nasty little art before you can get a job anchoring a news programme anywhere these days.

It makes for lazy journalism, self-righteous commentary and cheap comedy. If Trevor Griffiths were ever to revive his very good 'The Comedians', he could replace the old 'alternative comic / racist club comic' opposition with this one in an attempt to define a comedy that avoids the cheap shots and gotchas that often pass for satire.

None of this would be hugely damaging if it weren't for the fact that the idealist/cynic hegemony didn't make life so awkward and unattractive for elected politicians. The 'man in the white suit' commentator will inevitably eventually force representative democracy to recast itself as either a judicial or clerical function - not one that either proposes or revises in the way that legislatures are supposed to do. Judicial and clerical politicians can only follow - they can never lead. Henry Ford famously said that - if he'd just given his customers what they said they wanted, they would have all got slightly faster horses.

The only way to avoid ridicule or censure in such circumstances is to find a way of getting the lowest bidder to supply these nags to the general public. This is no minor transgression on the part of idealist/cynics. Making things difficult for elected politicians without doing the same to their rivals is the same as setting yourself up in direct opposition to representative democracy.

For this reason, I'm tempted to contact the good people at Political Compass to see if they would consider replacing the 'authoritarian / cynic' questions with ones that identify either idealism / cynicism or something that works out just how deluded you are about the fairness or usefulness of referendums and the need for politicians who are more 'mandatable'.

I suspect that either would be a good deal more useful than the 'authoritarian / libertarian' opposition.

David Davis

Neo-demagoguery. I wonder if he'll get any plaudits for this from 'liberals'?

I agree with Tom, by the way.

Reasons to be cheerful

Arthur Seaton: Abrasive irony and nihilism at its best.

I'm slightly torn on this one. On the one hand, I'm sort-of inclined to agree with Henry Porter here, commenting on the prevailing professional disdain and cynicism that characterises much of public life these days:

"My response ... is to ask what right have these people got to be so disappointed and world-weary? There is no sense that they have earned the privilege of this 'abrasive irony and nihilism'.

And I cannot escape the suspicion that the objects of their disdain - commonly politicians and celebrities who get into a scrape - may have done rather more with their lives and probably risked more than the wise guys in the TV studio or those who comment with truly jaw-dropping rudeness on the web. Weltschmerz and Cynic Inc have infected so much of the public discourse that you forget people are not like this. They are in the main more trusting, more hopeful, more resourceful and a lot kinder than is ever acknowledged in the public arena.

This could all be written off as a rather silly turn-of-the-century mood if the pessimism did not affect so much of our politics and our attitude to the huge problems we face, not just as a nation, but as a species. Speaking last week at the launch for Philippe Sands's book Torture Team, Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, mentioned in passing that he was an optimist. It was a striking admission, not just because the most senior judge in the land probably has every reason to view humanity with exasperation, but because so few people in public life will confess to optimism.

Optimism is held to be the preferred tipple of unrealistic fools; the optimist is still seen as Pangloss, the brave idiot in Candide who finds reasons to be cheerful as he is enslaved and faces execution. Voltaire casts him as the enemy of reason, a triumph of hope and faith over experience, if you like. Today, it is the other way round. The pessimists - the Panglooms - are the enemies of reason because they believe with a vigorous but untested faith that we are doomed and that nothing can be done. So they crumble into feckless nihilism.

The point about Bingham's optimism is that it has philosophical basis and is born out of a belief in reason, and the conviction that human beings can improve their lot if they believe in each other, the rule of law, and put aside fear and fear of failure to address the difficulties we have created."

On the other hand, Peter Ryley mounts a spirited defence of disrespect here, and I think that - if anything - he understates his case. So how can these two positions be reconciled?

Its actually quite simple. When Ian Hislop parades his ill-earned superiority over anyone who has ever actually done anything worthwhile in their lives, we can draw our own conclusions. Porter is right to remark that our debased market elevates useless turds like this in a fairly artificial way.

Hislop's main focus is political corruption, and he's jolly angry about it as well. Yet he lives in a country, and an age, where political corruption is no more than a residual sideshow. There is no comparison between Britain today and, say Italy, where almost every piece of legislation and judicial decision is bought and sold like so many kilos of Marscapone. Or Belgium, or even Ireland (though the latter is somewhat overstated IMHO).

And if you globalise this comparison, and anchor it in time, Hislop is probably in history's bottom 0.01% of the population as a 'victim of political corruption.'

This is not to say that we don't live in a corrupt age. We do. We are, daily, cheated by bureaucrats who take our money in taxes and do nothing of any value with large chunks of it while remaining unaccountable to anyone. We are cheated by the fund-managers who control what stock we do own in crude ways that damage our own interests.

We are cheated by the intellectual dwarves who claim that the massive disparities in wealth can be explained by our 'meritocracy' when, in reality, it can be explained by the simple formula: Wealthy parents nearly always equals wealthy children. We are cheated by a dishonest and lazy media, feeding us a low-grade Prolefeed that Big Brother would have killed for.

This previous paragraph could have quadrupled in length, but I think you get the picture.

The reason that Ian Hislop is a worthless little shit is because he is another cheat. He takes a seven-figure paycheck on the pretence that he somehow 'speaks truth unto power.' He is able to take the piss out of politicians because they are easy targets. They don't have the lawyers or the resources that their plutocratic rivals have. The old man had something to say about this, and it doesn't really need adding to.

Porter is right to be disappointed with his own cohorts - the paid commentariat. I can even understand his consternation with us rude bloggers - after all, no matter what we say, we really want to join that commentariat, that professional elite of critics, don't we?

But is he right to be pissed off with a wider, more incohate, public cynicism?

I think not. Most of us don't really aspire to actually run the country. I suppose I shouldn't include myself in that last sentence, but bear with me, will you? I think that the public probably understand that individual politicians aren't totally to blame for any recent ills in a way that our demagogic commentators don't. If this weren't the case, Labour wouldn't have even held on to 24% of the voters last week.

We don't really aspire to directly influence policy very much because we don't understand it, and wouldn't want the responsibility. As Chris has pointed out repeatedly, we make our best decisions in the same way that stockbrokers do - when our modus operandi is led by 'ironic detachment'.

We need no more get emotional about individual issues that don't directly effect us, or that we don't have a well-informed position on, than we need to get emotional about stock (if we were born lucky enough to own some, in lots of cases).

Part of me would love it if more of the electorate were able to leave the relatively nihilistic disdain for the forces that envelope them behind, and felt that they were in a position to change things themselves. But they don't, and the rate at which most people - those who live in that large pool - bleed into the much smaller pool of people who think that their opinions actually count for shit - is far too slow. If this process were to speed up, it would make sense to be annoyed about public cynicism. But it will only speed up when the people who compete with our elected politicians start to feel a similar heat, or a need to be accountable to the rest of us.

Everyone has their own magic bullets that would cure this, of course. Mine is political decentralisation and democratic socialism, and if you cast around the blogosphere, there are plenty of similar memebots churning out their own answers. None of them are perfect, of course.

But, in the meantime, a resentful and slightly contemptuous population will create a tide that is slowly lifting all boats - even if they do so by electing a shower of inbred clowns to run the country in 2010. After all, Things Can Only Get Better - like they have done in this country for the last century - regardless of who is temporarily in power.

Gadgie

On form.

Cutting a dash

I've found a nice white suit for sale.

I wonder, who could I buy it for? I wonder?

More on voting against.

Via PG, here's Right Next Time on The Libertarian Party going for the non-voter vote.

And then there's this.

Let me know. Am I being unfair here? Is this cloying cynicism deeply reactionary, or am I imagining it?

Voting against, not for.

For anyone interested in the way that the Internet is changing the way that political campaigning is done, the Stop Boris site is worth a look.

Here's the FAQ, and here are the downloadable posters. Some of them are quite good. And my Labour-voting soul hopes that the site will succeed in it's mission.

Some of London's voters (*ahem!*) will vote for the candidate of their choice with serious misgivings. But this illustrates an important difference between the huge majority of us - those who vote but don't stand for election ourselves - and those who do.

We can justify picking the 'least worst' candidate. Because of the growing cynicism in public life, we can expect more campaigns to look like this. Political parties, well-funded individual candidates, and even candidates with backing from a corner of the press no longer can necessarily regard their campaigning structures as assets. Often, the best way to destroy a candidate in the public mind is to promote them, because we are now supremely distrustful of promoters.

In 1997, in east London, we had to forbid some Labour campaigners from driving around with loudspeakers on top of their cars 'getting the vote out'. We knew that a lot of the Tory core vote was going to stay at home sulking. Any evidence of triumphalism would have poked them out and into the polling station.

There are no trust issues with the Stop Boris campaign. It can make anti-Boris points from both the left and the right. The site goes to great lengths to point out that it isn't a Ken-proxy. I'm sure most visitors suspect that it is just a well-done deniable Ken-proxy, whatever the site claims. It's Douglas Rushkoff's media-virus world of peer marketing.

So most voters will end up voting for the candidate we fear the least. Public debate is good at working out who we don't want to run the country. But it's crap at working out how to run the country. This is a point that I believe that anyone with a brain would have to agree with. But it is not a point that would be publicly affirmed by many politicians or paid commentators.

And as long as the broad tenor of public discourse continues with the pretence that we should all be given more of a say in policymaking, democracy will continue to decline as it has done in recent years.

Highgrounders

If you read Peter Riddell (in an otherwise reasonable piece) saying...

"... MPs should fully account, with receipts, for all the money they get (as journalists have to do for all items they charge)."

... did you ruin perfectly good leg-wear with a laughter-induced bladderful?

I know a great many journalists, and let me tell you now what they all know: Fiddling of expenses is a complex artform at which these reptiles excel. Most MPs that I know (and I also know a few), manage complex expenses in a way that will not bankrupt them - while not obviously dropping them in the shit either. It is also a complex artform that involves striking a balance between not having to spend the rest of your life detailing your tedious finances, and getting your operational bills paid.

If you are possessed of low cunning, a willingness to do as you're told, an imperviousness to low-level ridicule and a willingness to listen to endless cant squared, then you will make a good MP. But most MPs that I know would turn those attributes into a much larger salary elsewhere than the one they get in Westminster.

Yet MPs get written about in newspapers and weblogs. They get dissected. Their costs get examined in great detail. Yet they exercise very little other than formal power. A modern variation of Bagehot's dignified constitutional players.

On the other hand, newspapers influence public policy in a huge way. They invest less, influence more, and offer a lower quality of service than ever before. They generate a level of scrutiny that they never turn on themselves. And - outside of the PR industry - the reptiles concerned would struggle to earn a crust.

Pressure groups do the same - with even less integrity, if that were possible. And Think Tanks are a relatively new phenomenon, but they enjoy many of the benefits that hacks and lobbyists enjoy. Moral highground. No responsibilities. The joys of negativism. Full of bright ideas that everyone likes, but that no-one would implement if they had to be judged on the results.

And they get little by the way of scrutiny. Still, great oak trees from little acorns grow.

To read

Busy.

Elsewhere:

• The wrong kinds of catholics.
• John Pilger explained.
• Freedom vs happiness.

Bloggertarian Round Up

This is a round-up on the fallout from my original poke in the general direction of bloggertarianism a while back.

It’s been fairly exhausting. It’s even been bad tempered at times. But I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time in the comments boxes of others over the past few weeks. Regulars here will note that I'm generally not that rude to people normally, and I've slightly adjusted my normal tone in these threads. The reason for this is that one of the early postings featured a particularly obnoxious bloggertarian calling me all kinds of c*nt. And lots of angry libertarians weighed in supporting him in doing so - and some of them were very upset when I replied in kind. So I've conducted this argument on other people's terms.

A few commenters have raised the question with me about Citizens Income and ID Cards. I’ve not been ignoring it – I didn’t really get around to answering it until this week – in the comments here.

Here are some other threads in which the whole thing has been discussed: Feel free to pick up any loose ends in the comments here.

Easily the thickest bloggertarian that I’ve found anywhere is regular Liberal Conspiracy troll, Roger Thornhill. Now I’ve been accused (sometimes with a modicum of justification) of constructing Strawmen here. But Roger is the real deal. He is not capable of exhaling, it seems, without accusing someone of being a fascist.

You’ll find him here initially noting the discussion (I’m a sociofascist, apparently) and here as the first commenter under Devil’s Kitchen’s rant. Apparently I’m a “Left-Fibbernazi.” (WTF??). His site is called “Neue Arbeit Macht Frei” – New Labour Sets You Free … not!

Perhaps I’m investing too much in this, but this outlook is so comprehensively offensive and stupid that it does need pointing at repeatedly.

I understand the libertarian notion that taxation is theft and any state imposition – even from a liberal democracy – is on a continuum that leads to totalitarianism. I’d even acknowledge that these claims make you re-examine your own views about democracy in a sixth-form sort of way. But Roger takes all of this to a new level. His remarkable bit of photoshopping, and this gem:

“If you think New Labour is, erm, what is that term you used? … ‘a social democratic party in an age of network governance’…then you really need to look more carefully at what they are doing and also more carefully into your sources of fatuous newspeak.”

So a fairly respectable term in social science isn’t just questionable. It’s ‘newspeak’. It’s Orwellian.

In one of the many arguments this has led me into, I was thinking about why I’ve bothered with all of this. It certainly has caused lots of arguments. Here’s my explanation (cut and pasted from elsewhere):

I think that libertarianism is extraordinarily rife on weblogs and discussion forums in a way that it isn’t in any other sphere. I’m not alone in this observation either. Aside from people I’ve met through blogging, I’ve only ever met one person who describes themselves with any conviction as a libertarian in the way that I think I’ve been discussing the term here.

And because of this, I think that libertarianism has a gravitational pull on online discussions that makes those discussions less of a deliberative tool than they could be.

For this reason, I think that it needs challenging - which is what I’ve been doing.

What does the left-blogosphere really need?

Health warning: I blog as much to help me organise my own thoughts as I do to provide readers with worthwhile content. Many posts here are largely signposts to previous things that I've written. It also repeats - for the umpteenth time - things I've said before, so regulars here can skip this post. I understand that I could edit myself far more fiercely, and if anyone is daft enough to give me a book-advance, I will do. Until then...

Ashok – in the comments here – has picked up on my scepticism about the value of The Liberal Consipracy weblog. He’s asked for clarification, and - as a few good mates are LC contributors - I should provide it so as to avoid any misunderstandings:

I think that the basis upon which the LC site has been established is faulty. There appears to be a widespread view that the political right have stolen a march on the blogosphere, and that the left needs to do something to counteract this. I disagree, on a number of levels.

In the first place, I don’t believe that political blogging matters much in campaigning terms. Jag Singh of MessageSpace (in the comments here) informs me that his stats reveal a total of between 50,000 and 80,000 ‘absolute unique visitors’ to the highly visited ‘political blogs.’

I’m even sceptical about that figure – the blogs that I visit can get a unique user session from any one of four PCs that I have access to. I’m sure that many blog-addicts record more than one visit a day to particular sites on different machines.

So bloggers aren’t reaching large numbers of the public – and the small numbers that they are talking to are probably fairly politically entrenched in the first place. Blogs are not directly effecting elections very much.

Where they are having something of an impact is in their ability to give personal smears about politicians sufficient momentum in a way that the MSM can’t. Hopi Sen outlined how an asset like this can be very useful to the political right (see ‘Point Two: Focus on Personality’ – here).

And this is useful in the US, in the way that Howard Stern and Matt Drudge have proved useful assets to the Republicans. But this is not the case here. Our equivalents – Scallywag magazine in the 1990s, and Guido more recently – are not really that much of an asset to the Tories. In some cases, the Bloggertarians don’t claim to be such an asset – but that is largely beside the point. Sure, they may give legs to a few stories, but they also display the Conservative Party’s ‘id’ for all to see.

I would suggest that the Tories will not look upon the Bloggertarians with much more affection than many lefties reserve for the 57 varieties of Sparts that we had in the 1980s. The Bloggertarians may ultimately bring the greatest curse that it is possible to bring upon any political movement: A lively internal debate led by people who are plainly barking mad.

Another short-term benefit that right-wing bloggers are providing to the Tories is the wanton and willful way that some of them are attempting to sabotage public debate. There are obvious right-libertarian benefits for doing this (preferring markets to rational debate), and I’ve argued before that it’s one of Guido Fawkes’ main aims.

But this is something that newspapers do far more effectively. Bloggers may be increasing the number of spiteful Kremlinologists, but they only appear to be further exaggerating an existing phenomenon.

So, I don’t buy the dangers created by right-bloggers. They are – in some ways – a useful asset to us. A Petri-Dish that we can draw conclusions from.

Which brings me to the Liberal Conspiracy. I’ve blogged loads here about how weblogs could foster a more deliberative space (this subject has a tag here all to itself) that would improve the quality of democracy. But a largish-readership website that focuses significantly upon party-politics is not one of those sites.

Lots of low-ish readership blogs that aren't primarily about politics is - as far as I can see - where the real political blogosphere is. Not wishing to repeat myself, it's all in this post here (referring back to Ashok - where today's post started).

And finally, I'm not keen on the ingrained negativism of the Liberal Conspiracy site. It appears to adopt a fundamentally journalistic perspective. It is Against Bad Things, and For Good Things. It's the extension of the BBC anchorman's 'Man In The White Suit' complex. It has caught the same cold that liberal journalism seems to have done. I've posted on this as well before, so apologies for sending anyone who has got this far off to read another screed - but it saves repetition, doesn't it?

The only group-blog that I really like is the only one that will have me as a contributor - The Popinjays. This blog is often acerbic and not always hospitable to it's political opponents. But it is - as far as I can see (I expect a very bad-tempered email shortly correcting me on this) - agit-prop. It's contributors are uniformly for things rather than against them. It largely ignores Westminster gossip and it doesn't set itself up as an online home for assorted trolls. It doesn't seem to attempt to colonise any wider space in the way that LC, Crooked Timber and The Sharpener do. I particularly like the fact that I learn a fair bit from reading the comments.

At the Liberal Conspiracy - and many of the high-volume sites - I rarely learn very much. All you get to see is a range of fairly well-established positions being rehearsed in the most predicable way.

(This post was dashed off in a hurry, so apologies for any typos or poor drafting. On the one hand, I'm too busy for this now. On the other, I wanted to write this, and it is only courteous to Ashok that I should reply fairly sharply).

Update: Gracchi has picked this post up on Liberal Conspiracy (cross posted on his own site). There will be more comments there than here, I guess...

Ignore the 'fundis'

Dave Osler is on the Liberal Conspiracy (sorry, I can't help sniggering about that one - a bit like the preposterous and vaguely hubristic choice of 'Lenin' as a blogger identity) discussing the possibility of choosing The Green Party as the vehicle of destiny for ideologically ambitious lefties.

While I agree with Dave's conclusion ('stick with Labour'), his post contains a paragraph that sums up everything that makes me despair of most of the left.

Firstly, let me summarise what I'd regard as a sensible neo-Kautskyite ('ark at me!) position:

• Economic democracy will only be achieved by the maturation of liberal democracy
• When there is a tension between those who assert a general liberal position, and those who assert a democratic one, democratic socialists should should always side with the latter - secure in the knowledge that the democrats' illiberality is always overestimated
• Representative democracy is the highest form of liberal democracy. Any improvement towards this particular Burkean ideal deserves unreserved support. Any retreat from it should be opposed with every fibre.

With me so far? OK. Here is Dave's offending para:

"...historical experience shows that where Green parties do take off, they leave their radicalism well behind. The Realos take over from the Fundis, and the one-time soixante-huitard peaceniks end up cheerleading Nato bombing campaigns from the comfort of their ministerial limos."

The problem Dave seems to find is that the 'Realos' grow up. The Nato bombing campaigns (I suspect that he's objecting to the endorsement of some European Green big-wigs for the liberation of Kosovo?) could be shorthand for any compromise. They could be shorthand for the kind of compromises that anyone who has been elected has to make in order to represent the interests of the nation as a whole.

I would argue that - in order to defend liberties and to promote economic democracy - it is essential that political representatives should abandon the sloganeering and posturing that is designed for their own supporters and embrace the need to prove the quality of their judgement by addressing immediate problems. The individual issues are less important that the requirement that every democratic socialist has to be - first and foremost - a democrat.

More importantly, no democrat can ever chose to perform for the gallery of their activist base over the general public. Knocking on doors does not - in itself - entitle one to influence. The problem with the Green Party is not that the 'Realos' will always get into arguments with their purists. It is that purists are given house room at all in The Green Party.

Thankfully, there is a political logic that supports this. Parties that aren't able to ignore their activists suffer electorally as a consequence. In the 1980s, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy - with its attempts at mandating MPs and making them directly accountable to the swivel-eyed fruitcakes that turn up to every CLP meeting (and encouraging them to ignore those that didn't) - brought the party to the brink of destruction.

The Ulster Unionist Party was similarly traduced a few years ago by the constant recall of it's representatives by it's most obsessive activists. John Major's government found itself in a cleft-stick between it's need to run the country and appease the demands of Theresa Gorman in the mid-1990s. And - thankfully - the Tories must be starting to get worried about it's bloggertarians for similar reasons today.

Direct democracy kills political parties.

And when Dave cites the example of economic liberals regrouping in the 1950s to give birth to Thatcherism a quarter of a century later (he quite rightly approves of their strategy, if not their success) he argues that the left should go on a similar long march, promoting individual policies and values.

The Tory right didn't bang on about specific demands for all of that time though. They recognised that strategic value that reactionaries would draw from the advancement of economic liberalism. There are economic liberals who aren't reactionaries - but that didn't matter. The result was socially regressive.

Similarly, we on the left should recognise the instrumental value of advancing the highest principles of liberal democracy - particularly, the non-negotiable primacy of representative democracy. There are plenty of democrats that aren't socialists. But that doesn't matter. They are our allies. The result will be socially progressive.

The left will not succeed by promoting worker control or environmental prescriptions. We don't know how to apply the former with any success and we don't have any joint positions on the latter. If we want socialistic policies, we should simply promote democracy for now. The rest will fall into place of its own accord.