The Politics of The Impossible
Post-truth, post-reason, post-real
For years, we’ve been encouraged to believe nonsense. The list of nonsenses in my lifetime is quite long and impressive — sub-prime, the non-existence of the Ozone Hole, M.A.D., the harmlessness of cigarettes, homeopathy, the benevolence of Brexit, and on and on and on — and now we’ve reached a kind of weird freefall of nonsense in which nothing is true and any opinion, however bombastically fascist or inverted, is somehow as good as a model based on extensive research. We live in a world of truthiness. Michael Gove wasn’t wrong in saying that people have had enough of experts. He was just wrong to celebrate it.
Our polity has been fed a diet of reassuring bullshit, celebrity sex and paranoid conspiracy by commercial media struggling to grab attention in the new online environment of short focus and single clicks. Governments are no less culpable, playing to the weird, chaotic spiralling of opinion, enthusiasm and loathing that our public sphere has become to further ideological agendas fraught with faith-based and often demonstrably false assertions of the last century rather than delivering evidence and reason and doing the job. We live in a world of starling swirls of conviction.
Stay with me. Some of you are going to hate the next bit. I’m not taking a pop, I’m giving a current example of faith over reason.
I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral problems a little while ago, but Rob Francis has done a more thorough job, and while I had some doubts when I was writing on 21st June about whether Corbyn might have a secret vote lurking in the interstices, I think it’s increasingly clear that he doesn’t. It’s not impossible that that could change, of course, if the Conservatives are kind enough to implode. But it doesn’t really look as if Theresa May is going to allow that. The new Prime Minister is to my eye a terrifying revenant channeling Margaret Thatcher and promising with brazen improbability and strange conviction to run a Tory right government for the benefit of the working class — but you could not call her a fool. And wow, can she play the camera and the room to evoke her spiritual predecessor.
It is not irrational or traitorous for someone within the Labour Party to have doubts about Corbyn as leader. It is, by every rational measure that I know of, the correct position. His policies are appealing, but his leadership appears to be very unlikely to make them real. It was all very well to speak of the opposition to him within the Parliamentary Labour Party as a Blairite wing when it was ten or twenty MPs. When the majority of the Shadow Cabinet have resigned from the front bench and one hundred and seventy two MPs say they have no confidence in the party leader, that is not a coup. It is a hurricane warning. When front benchers describe chaos and self-defeat; when the leader of a party voices his opposition to that party’s own policies; when a third of Labour’s own voters believe May is a better Prime Minister than Corbyn would be: that is not a coup. That is the long brown envelope of home truths being hand-delivered.
But it is also, by the logic of our new political reality, a series of reasons to believe the more fervently in Corbyn’s leadership. It is evidence of media bias, of a network of liars, of how wrong psephology is getting the new political landscape. This is the return of voluntarism, the almost Nietschean assertion of the power of political resolve to overcome practical reality.
The same mood infused the discussion of Brexit. The information about what a terrible, stupid idea it was; about what it would mean economically and to our standing in the world; about what it would do to the job market and who would suffer most… all of it was freely available. It wasn’t hard to find. That didn’t matter. Every countervaling factual argument was just another reason to vote Leave. Evidence was falsehood. Nuance was weakness. Faith was supreme.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. (T.E. Lawrence)
Our dreamers of the day are dangerous not because their dreams will be made real, but because they cannot, as those who supported the Brexit are rapidly discovering. It won’t release £350m each week into Britain; it will instead cost £270m. This was knowable beforehand, but politicians lied and Leave voters — even knowing how politics works now — chose to invest in that lie. They were tired of experts.
They didn’t come to that position randomly. We have for years been the subject of sophisticated denial industries working on behalf of all sorts of vested interests. A US study found that vast money pours into Climate Change scepticism from undisclosed sources while the stream from Exxon and the Koch brothers mysteriously vanishes. The net result is the appearance of an independent counter-opinion which is in reality anything but independent. That industry in turn takes its cue from tobacco and cancer. The link between how these tricks are done is not subtle.
Nothing is linear, of course. That’s not the only contributor to this mood: there’s Tony Blair in the late 90s background riding the tide of rising house prices and sub-prime funded prosperity, encouraging people to believe you could get rich by doing nothing. There’s the San Francisco academic Libertarian culture of the early web in which everyone could be published and the authority of text was suddenly democratised, and how well it dovetailed with anarcho-capitalist free market rhetoric to produce a notion of post-scarcity and free money: the free lunch I grew up knowing did not exist, but which was somehow on every street corner. There’s the transition from the American (or global neo-Liberal) Dream as a middle class suburban existence — perhaps now diminished because it proved unobtainable in the G. W. Bush Era as that middle was cut away — to an image of celebrity excess and lottery winnings which excuses the suffering of the 99% in exchange for a mostly illusory shot at membership of the 1%. And now here we are, at the rump end of that boom of expectation and deception, finding that the reality is as uncompromising as it always was. And we don’t like it.
As deception after deception is uncovered, of course we lose track of our respect for authoritative statements and expertise. And it culminates — in the UK — in the weird, twinned spectacles of the EU Referendum and the Labour Leadership race: in both cases, the literal interpretation of the rules became an issue goverened by overwhelming popular pressure. In the US, Donald Trump’s nomination is governed by the same madness, and there was more than a little of it around Clinton/Sanders as well. In all cases, reference to what was actually written about how business would be conducted was perceived as a kind of cheating. Text is suspect, belief is king. In the context of the referendum it’s now a truism that for Parliament to reject it would be undemocratic. The people have spoken. Put to one side the question of how democratic was a question asked and answered in a soup of lies and openly racist campaigning. Ignore even the simple matter that the referendum act for the EU vote was written quite clearly as non-binding. The fact is that we live in a representative democracy. We do not elect MPs and then require them to take a mandate from their constituency on every single issue. We empower them to make decisions on our behalf. It is not only their right but their responsibility to vote on Brexit, and if in their opinion it is a mistake they must vote it down. That this is potentially electoral self-destruction for many is, incidentally, simply not a legitimate ground for them to refuse that obligation. That is placing self-interest over the performance of the duty of government for which our system employs them. MPs are not constituency amenuenses. They are appointed decision-makers. If they are unwilling to decide, they should step down — and if we’re not willing to have them do so, we need to look again at how we do our democracy in the first place. But that’s not how it is. We’re in a loop of political petulance: we want things done for us, but we want them done exactly how we’d do them ourselves, and we’d like contradictory things, and we’d like them now.
What this boils down to is a quiet but very real constitutional crisis hidden behind the noise of collapsing traditional forms. We hover between support for conventional representative democracy we no longer trust, and direct democracy for which we lack the tools and preconditions. We do not have a culture of critical analysis and information-seeking that would allow our polity to make sound decisions based on evidence — and certainly our press does not provide us with an informed and reliable public sphere. At the same time, we register — correctly — that our politicians do not make decisions on that basis either. Rather, they are as ill-informed on many issues as those they represent — a tragically destructive legitimation. Our learned response is to smash through uncertainty and go with our gut — a course we have been taught by successive generations of politicians for whom it has been convenient that we should be biddable rather than informed, and by a collection of newspaper barons more interested, perhaps, in the power and influence they could acquire through ownership of the media than in the role of the press in forming and maintaining a functional democracy. Now we reach the end of that road: a polity that is ungovernable electing politicans who refuse to govern (2), and parliaments too cowardly to perform their actual function in the face of an electorate too angry to allow them to do so.
We need an end to nonsense. We need an end to the myth of simple truths and easy answers. We need to begin to re-envision our governance and rebuild trust in the institutions that implement our collective will by making them recognisably rational in their guiding principles and compassionate in the implementation thereof. We need also to recreate society as something in which one chooses to participate in order to create a country that works. If the country is broken, that is not because of immigration or external forces, but because we have allowed it to become so, or perhaps because we inherited from our late Victorian and early 20th Century constitutional builders so many fudges that will no longer stay fudged. Whatever the origin — and we must find out — the bill has come due. We must fix what is cracked and shattered, or fall apart. We must invest in the real.
