Jeremy Corbyn, neither salesman nor leader
Jeremy Corbyn has galvanized the political debate among young voters, from Grime for Corbyn to the highest number of 18 to 24-year-olds turning out to an election in 25 years. This phenomenon has been well documented since the election result, but rarely is it attempted to understand the feelings and beliefs driving it.
David Foster Wallace, in his fascinating essay Up, Simba, while giving his thoughts on the current malaise of millennial politics via the campaign trail for John McCain’s unsuccessful 2000 Republican Presidential Campaign, makes the distinction between a great leader and a great salesman. There are of course similarities: both are persuasive, powerful in character and can “often get us to do things (buy things, agree to things) that we might not go for on our own” as Foster Wallace writes in his essay. However the difference — one that is an extremely important distinction in modern society — is the intention driving their persuasion. Always great salesmen are driven, at the core of their motives, by self-interest, whereas great leadership combines the great skills of a salesman with great character, and fosters a belief in that person’s intention.
This distinction, consciously or unconsciously, still remains an important judgment which is used to evaluate politicians. The Corbyn phenomenon becomes clearer when we address it with this distinction in mind.
Jeremy Corbyn is not a great salesman. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to call him an anti-salesman candidate. This is a fairly transparent characteristic of him — a significant portion of the appeal of his campaign was his straightforwardness and unpolished earnestness. This style is most startlingly (by design) contrasted with a Tony Blairesque campaign (the ultimate salesman). This anti-salesman plea to the public paradoxically struck a chord with large numbers of people (does this make him a good salesman?), especially among younger voters usually considered to be apathetic to politics. This is for good reason. An anti-salesman candidate appeared as an antidote to the prevailing distrust among these voters for politicians, which had been intensified by the expenses scandal and the tuition fees hike. Overriding this distrust though, was the growing resentment that politics had been blurred with sales, with PR, with advertising. It had become impossible to distinguish between a politician’s genuine belief and one that was merely used to appeal to voters. Politicians had become salesmen, campaigns indistinguishable from advertising campaigns, and ideas, policies and slogans were largely driven by their appeal to voters. Corbyn broke through this distrust and apathy by being believable. Not necessarily persuasive, or slick, or appealing, but by his intentions (correctly or incorrectly) striking many of us as honest and benevolent. Corbynistas are so fond of pointing out his background of campaigning for just causes because it stands as testament to his core motives.
This is what Corybn has represented to young voters more than anything — someone to believe in.
However, this charm operates as a double-edged sword. Corbyn lacks the intention and the skills of a salesman, and such distancing has helped reinvigorate politics among apathetic swathes of society. However, these very qualities also prevent him from being a great leader. Although salesman are not leaders, leaders must exhibit qualities of the salesman. Leaders must inspire us. They must be able to persuade us to believe and do things that we might not have necessarily done by ourselves. Now lots of politicians claim to be good (strong and stable) leaders, even against all available evidence. Younger voters are perceptive enough, and cynical enough, to see this as just another sales pitch most of the time. But all of us know good leadership, we’ve all experienced it at some point, from a good teacher to reading about a historical figure. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but Jeremy Corbyn does not exhibit good leadership. He can come across as weak — occasionally laughable — he lacks a powerful presence and his speeches can be poor to nonsensical. Corbyn rejected modern science when he proclaimed to an eager Glastonbury crowd that “there is only one planet, not even Donald Trump believes there’s another planet somewhere else.” This is not to attack his honesty, or his politics, or even his being a good bloke, but he lacks the peculiar leadership traits of someone who can inspire and persuade people who don’t agree with him. Without the ability to move his ideas beyond those who largely already agree with them, his policies are left to live or die. If your political leaning is to the left, then you are usually enthusiastic about him (or at least his policy direction), if your political leaning isn’t, then chances are you are not. This means he is successful with young voters and the older socialist left, while remaining uninspiring to many others.
This is why even those on the left, while taking on board the positives mentioned, must accept Jeremy Corbyn’s weaknesses. Many votes for Labour in the 2017 General Election were of course because of Jeremy, but many red votes were in spite of him. UKIPs collapse, Theresa May running “perhaps the worst campaign in recent political history” and Labour voters voting for Labour despite being anti-Corbyn, all improved the labour vote and show that Corbyn is a long way from winning an election. Moreover, the left still has so far to go in the ideological battle for hearts and minds in Britain, regardless of the election result. We still have a parliament (and large parts of the Labour party) committed to the core principles behind austerity, making cuts to public services and squeezing the income of the lowest. We have a public political framework dominated by neoliberal thinking, where taxes are a burden, state intervention is evil and inequality is accepted as inevitable. This is not a battle cry for a leader on the left to arise and single-handedly tackle all these problems. It’s simply demonstrating the enormity of the tasks ahead and highlighting the necessity of strong leadership.
I don’t want to underestimate the importance of Jeremy Corbyn’s rejection of being a political salesman. He has inspired an apathetic generation to invest time in politics, and to believe in something beyond spin and campaign management. But, we should also remember that, as David Foster Wallace was at pains to point out, “obviously, a real leader isn’t just somebody who has ideas you agree with”. The left needs more than just someone who has ideas they agree with. It needs leadership from the grass roots to parliament, and leadership that is able to build a socialist movement from a wide base of the population.
