A new ideological era
The fragility of contemporary ideological groupings has become evident over the past few years; political thinking is in flux
by Michael Freeden
Seen through the prism of ideology, 21st- century Britain has undergone sea changes, even convulsions. Not long ago the grand ideologies — conservatism, liberalism, socialism — were predominant. Their messages were clear, their packaging simple and their beliefs comprehensive. They were disseminated not just through manifestos but through respectable books and newspapers, eloquent leaders, party machines and political movements. But major ideational developments have since taken place in contemporary societies, including the UK. In order to detect them we need to look past the conventional pejorative labelling of arguments as ‘ideological’ and examine more closely the ways in which ideologies are produced and disseminated.
Ideology has not entirely shed its stultifying connotations. These conjure up a superimposed and doctrinaire set of political ideas. This view associates ideology with oppression, dogmatism, closure, abstraction and distortion. There is still a tug-of-war between those who hold to such a Marxist-inspired understanding of ideology as monolithic and those who accept the multiplicity of ideologies in plural, complex societies. Of course, some voices deny the significance of ideas in political conduct, pointing instead to economic self-interest, pragmatism, or unreflective spur-of-the moment impulse. But it is indisputable that ideologies matter enormously in our political lives, in every sphere of social interaction and at varying levels of sophistication evident in political discussion, and that they can serve as sources of great inventiveness, reform and inspiration.
Ideologies display less internal coherence and more fragmentation, enabling the combination of ideological elements once ruled invalid
From political parties to local councils, neighbourhood support groups and pub conversations, we find people expressing preferences about their shared lives. We support, criticise, reject and dream about the collective arrangements of our society, and often of other societies as well. We invoke allegiances and hostilities towards them. In our imaginations we draw ideational maps — sophisticated or disjointed — of the social and political terrain we invariably need to navigate, and frequently stumble through, to make sense of our worlds. Just as Molière’s M. Jourdain discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life, we are not always aware that we think ideologically as a matter of course. Our diverse worlds increasingly confer subtler meanings on what ideologies are and do, above all as open and fluid competitions over the control of political language; for whoever controls the meanings of words holds society in an iron grip. As Humpty Dumpty famously replied to Alice’s query whether one can make words mean so many different things: “The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.”
Fragmenting ideologies
In Britain, however, that mastery is at stake. Political discourse and patterns of political thinking are in a state of rapid and unstable flux. The principles on which ideological alignments used to be made — nationalisation, or free trade, or respect for traditions and venerated institutions — are muted or eclipsed by the dearth of great causes and the absence of social visions of the kind that typified the humanist post-1948 welfare state or, by contrast, the free market and deregulation crusade associated with Margaret Thatcher. Instead, a shift has occurred towards concrete and often discrete concerns over health delivery, immigration, regional devolution, or climate change, all of which call into question the assumed separateness of older ideological families. Ideologies display less internal coherence and more fragmentation, enabling the combination of ideological elements once ruled invalid: Labour accepting the part-privatisation of national utilities; the Conservatives campaigning for populist measures that weaken their claim to be the voice of industry and enterprise; the Liberals espousing the protection of group identities, often in a difficult balance with individual rights. Ideologies have become amalgams of loosely clustered and detachable components — modular units that can be rearranged in multiple forms — while the boundaries separating one ideology from another have become more porous. That virtue of augmented adaptability is thus matched by the vice of increased volatility.
Many factors have contributed to the mutations now displayed by British ideologies: Labour attempting — and failing — to retrieve an older spirit of socialism, having previously captured most of the progressive middle ground; the Conservatives moving towards being a one-issue party bent on transforming socioeconomic grievances into a retrieval of an isolationist nationalism that mops up little Englandism. The ill-fitting first-past-the-post electoral system can no longer contain the tensions that it has often managed to deflect in the past. In the mid-20th century, British ideological configurations allowed for the semblance of consensus (however thin) on undoubtedly the country’s greatest domestic achievement: the welfare state. That was due to a policy overlap between the two main political blocs, even if their motives — social justice versus economic efficiency — differed. Since then, it has become glaringly obvious that the flipside of the electoral practice of ‘winner takes all’ is ‘loser takes nothing’.
In a multi-ideological society where the range of parliamentary representation through the democratic process is curtailed, and many voices cannot be heard properly, parties can function as internal coalitions of disparate ideas. But when factions break off, as happened when the Social Democratic Party was cobbled together from elements of Labour and the Liberals, their long-term future is imperilled. Under such conditions, ideologies survive by transcending party boundaries, exporting segments that are compatible with other political beliefs. Environmentalism is one such example; sensitivity to ethnic, gender and religious cultures — albeit still selective — is another; and a liberal constitutionalism respecting human rights has long been assimilated into progressive and centrist thinking.
The Brexit catalyst
Overshadowing all this, of course, is the Brexit furore and its profound impact on the 2019 election. Brexit engendered a fundamental clash of ideologies, but not just in the usual, more easily decodable, mould of past ideational conflicts. Ideologies are more than programmes of collective values to be sought or resisted. They are also conveyers of basic attitudes towards the political, embedded in diverse displays of human behaviour.
The elections were not in themselves won or lost over Brexit, which simply acted as a catalyst for a long-standing social and political malaise. As the emblematic channel of those projections, Brexit has laid bare the fragility of contemporary ideational groupings; it has revealed the demotic roots of political maps and commitments; it has highlighted the powerful emotional, indeed fantasmic, drives that underlie and often replace the rational argumentation over-optimistically associated with public debate; it has propelled to the fore the existential anxieties of dispossessed communities; and it has resurrected the hopes and fears concerning Britain’s role as a fast-diminishing power on the world, and now European, stage — step two of a process that commenced after Suez in 1956. Almost incidentally to its stated purpose of exiting the EU, the political impact of Brexit has changed our expectations of the nature of political language, shaking up many of the conventions of British political thinking.
Brexit illustrates the new precarity of ideological loyalties and the failing strength of the glue that keeps them together when their consumption is subject to new modes of ideological dissemination. Digitalisation and a transformation of the media and platforms that circulate political information (or, just as likely, blatant lies) have transfigured ideologies in peculiar ways. So-called digital democracy is nothing of the kind. It is merely the filtered manipulation of targeted audiences through political micro-messaging and, conversely, an outlet for scattered opinions that bypasses the former comprehensive span of ideologies and their broad public reach. In an era of electronic urgency and immediacy, no time is left to consider arguments, let alone savour their finer points. Ideologies are always simplifications of intricate views and beliefs, but their paring down to disjointed slogans instead of — rather than alongside — weighty political programmes turns elections into little more than a numbers game. True, most individuals possess, consciously or not, a road map of sorts offsetting such ideationally disembodied distillations, but their extraction requires the unhurried effort of slow cooking, not the digestive haste of tweeted fast food.
The ‘people’
The production of political views has undergone steady changes. Public political discourse is no longer the monopoly of the intelligentsia, or the well educated, or the hallowed urban habitats of the middle classes, nor does it reproduce their styles of articulation. The rise of the demotic has percolated into political language. One striking development has been the rise of a right-wing populism which, oddly, makes us more similar to many of our European neighbours. Yet the self-discovery of the ‘people’ as a potent political force is a novelty on the British ideological map, exposing fundamental fault lines in UK governance, whether constitutional, rhetorical or structural.
The constitutional issue faces the dilemma, now starkly thrust into public view, of a disruptive dualism between the revered parliamentary sovereignty of British politics and a newly comprehended popular sovereignty asserted by ordinary people who feel alienated from Westminster. The legal fiction of sovereignty as indivisible — insisted on by constitutional lawyers — simply belies the facts on the ground, while the de facto partially shared sovereignty with the EU was given short shrift by populists.
Brexit has laid bare the fragility of contemporary ideational groupings
But competing sovereignties, creating incompatible sources of ultimate legitimate authority, bode ill for a well-ordered polity, as the parliamentary stalemate for the past three years has demonstrated. This has been cashed out by appropriating the referendum as the essence of popular democracy, tellingly claiming the irreversible finality that general elections never attain. That finality goes against the grain of one of the greatest attractions of liberal democracy in the humanist, constitutional sense: the factoring in of time and change by revisiting, weighing and potentially altering political choices. Instead, the shallowness of the debate and the ignorance displayed on all sides of the 2016 referendum — the most important issue Britain has faced since the Second World War — undermined the democratic process rather than enhancing it. Even Rousseau, when making his case for the general will, added the crucial qualifier “properly informed”.
The rhetorical menace is the introduction of a totalism in ordinary political language that elides truth/falsehood boundaries, attempting to confer equal validity on all utterances. It is reflected in the online abuse and harassment of MPs and parliamentary candidates. Above all, it is evident in the dispiriting mantra of ‘the will of the people’.
This profoundly undemocratic concept has been used outrageously time and again by totalitarian regimes, but it is unacceptable in a multicultural and multi-ideological society. Yet we now find it employed in the UK to silence dissent by proclaiming the indivisibility of the people and even denouncing its ‘enemies’. Encouraged by the ‘loser takes nothing’ framing of our political choices, it marks a shift from a qualitative to a purely quantitative understanding of democracy. Even the mathematics, though, are false. In the 2016 referendum only 37.5% of those entitled to vote opted to leave the EU. That became 51.9% of those actually voting and was rapidly transformed by the magic of political self-deception into the 100% embedded in the notion of the ‘people’s will’. The result was a potent ideological tool culminating in the 2019 election victory of a conservatism heavily in thrall to populist rhetoric, anxious not to be seen to betray the public’s outwardly democratic moment in 2016. More disconcertingly, the phrase ‘will of the people’ was also adopted by senior Labour figures on the other side of the ideological spectrum.
Disenfranchisement
Within the two major parties, there has been a discernible reduction in tolerating internal diversity. Those who espouse ideological variety within their own parties are expelled or sidelined, not least because the parties cannot cope with the patchwork of ideological segmentation and rupture encircling them outside the narrower domain of party politics. In the case of Labour, the resurrection of a socialist agenda has been electorally costly, underscoring the deep ideological splits that have bedevilled the party for over a century, and threatening a new intraparty battle. But ideological complexity is rarely electorally marketable. More common is a flurry of banal core messages that mask tortuous ideological conundrums, leaving large swathes of people in every walk of political life ideologically disenfranchised. And let us not forget the staggering political inequality airbrushed out of the UK’s democratic credentials when, for example, the Liberal Democrats secured almost 3.7 million votes but obtained 11 parliamentary seats, while the Scottish National Party garnered just over a third of that figure yet walked away with over four times the number of MPs.
Another rhetorical ploy is the elevation of ‘frustration’ to key word status, both feeding on the unfulfilled craving for recognition by those who are marginalised and signalling a deep disaffection with the democratic ethos itself. Notably, when Brexiters railed against parliament and the courts for frustrating ‘the will of the people’, they expressed a dual exasperation: a visceral sense of delayed gratification induced by the cumbersome, yet justifiable, legalism and deliberative bottlenecks that prevented the future from happening instantly; and — leading to the December upheaval — a darker despair at being permanently mired in crippling hardship. The alienation and impatience these feelings generate is unsurprisingly directed at the political leadership, but they are exacerbated by the public displaying a vague sense of direct ownership of the democratic process of which they feel robbed, without always appreciating its conflicting and multi-ranging niceties. After all, democracy is built precisely on frustrating and assuaging the desire for immediacy through the measured deliberation of public affairs.
The structural development is a re-imaging of British society in which the established, though still crucial, cleavages of class and gender — once so central to mapping politics — have been attenuated, replaced by age (the elderly contra the young), region (the urban metropolises contra the small towns and villages) and national identity (being fearful or at ease about foreigners, particularly continental Europeans, and, on a different dimension, the growing demands from Scotland and Wales for recognition as distinct nation-states). Ethnicity and religion (excepting Northern Ireland) do not quite possess that political salience, for better or for worse.
Many of those divisions are converted into the populist language of distant and self-absorbed elites versus ‘ordinary people’. But here too lies a misconception. The battles waged by populists are mainly orchestrated by elites (UKIP, the Brexit Party), who assume the largely unspoken and often unknown views of the populace and superimpose their voices on the latter’s silence. Those confrontations continue to be internal to urban and savvy elites, either espousing forms of progressivism or forms of conservative parochialism. And then there is the latest version of the Irish question, revolving around boundaries on land and sea and ironically drawing in the EU as the indirect gravitational force on the UK’s doorstep.
Emotional appeal
The rejigging of appeals to the head, the heart and the gut in a fast-changing cultural environment epitomises the current state of British politics. Historically, both socialism and liberalism, in their many varieties, made chiefly intellectual cases for their principles, whether they be the rational affirmation of individual liberty, human rights and progress, or a confidence in the apparent historical inevitability of equality and collective solidarity. Yet neither were immune to the emotional underpinning of their beliefs. Liberals have always been passionate about rights and protection against harm; socialist fervour was directed against material deprivation and human exploitation. Conservatives too were emotionally committed, to stability over change and to national traditions, while arguing rationally for the economic efficiency of private enterprise. But in recent years, British politics has turned to invoking the guts and exacerbating the role of leadership, both positively and negatively. The decline of politics as a battle over ideas, values and visions has been accompanied by disenchantment with its prospects. It has become a disorganised, casual arena for giving vent to — instead of constructively airing — resentment and anger, morphing into vague delusions of taking back control.
In the north and the Midlands, crucially, the new Conservative MPs now fleetingly represent the mood of their electorates, not their social ideologies. Brexit became the fantasised pretext to express displeasure by voting against an incompetent and dogmatic Labour leader. It took the shape of removing hapless MPs whose fault was to stand in for an ailing political power that could not deliver. It was precisely in these traditional Labour heartlands that exasperation due to poverty, underemployment and hospital queues was the most acute. Those larger causes will not go away, despite the conspicuousness of climate change on the agenda of pressure groups and the young, but they require translation into more attractive language and appropriate strategies for imparting them.
In the longer run, two issues are particularly pressing. First, the ignored demos and its multiple grievances demand attention. If the public continue to be manipulated by new technologies of communication and blustering elites, they will find further ways to reassert themselves at the heart of politics. Brexit is — unsafely — out of the way, but the power of popular disruption and protest is not. Second, the proud, non-party tradition of humane liberalism that was Britain’s contribution to a civilised world, and which is now sadly underrepresented, needs to regroup and rediscover its voice.
This article first appeared in the RSA Journal Issue 4 2020
