Politics | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank

(Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank.)

I’ve just read this book, but it was first published at the tail end of the Obama presidency. It articulates concerns I share and have attempted to express here a number of times: the growing invisibility of class as a social division (as compared to other divisions such as gender, sexuality etc), and the way that political parties on the political ‘left’ have ceased to identify with the interests of working class people and becoming instead the mouthpieces of the liberal professional class. Frank is writing specifically about the American Democratic party. This is ‘still a class party,’ he says. ‘In fact [Democracts] show admirable concern for the class they represent. It’s just that the class they care about doesn’t happen to be the same one that Truman, Roosevelt, and Bryan cared about.’*

Frank asks why the Democrats are ‘so bravely forthright on cultural issues’ [by which he means ‘culture wars’ issues such as abortion rights, transgender rights, gay marriage…] and yet ‘their leaders fold when confronted with matters of basic economic democracy. What is it about this set of issues that transforms Democrats into vacillating softies, convinced that the big social question [massive and increasing inequality of wealth] is beyond their control?’ He notes that the standard explanation for this is the power of money and the ability of moneyed interests to influence politicians through campaign finances etc, but he suggests that this is only part of it. He argues that there are ‘different hierarchies of power in America, and while oligarchy theory exposes one of them -the hierarchy of money- many of the Democrats’ failings arise from another hierarchy: one of merit, learning and status.’ He goes on to say that ‘We lampoon the Republican hierarchy of money with the phrase “the One Percent”; if we want to understand what has wrecked the Democratic Party as a populist alternative however, what we need to scrutinise is more like the Ten Percent, the people at the apex of the country’s hierarchy of professional status.’

He observes, ‘We always overlook the class interests of professionals because we have trouble thinking of professionals as a “class” in the first place…we think of them merely as “the best”. They are where they are because they are so smart…’ Ceding authority to professional experts is, he acknowledges, ‘tolerable to a certain degree -no one really objects to rules mandating that only trained pilots fly jetliners, for example…. But what happens when an entire category of experts stops thinking of itself as “social trustees”? What happens when they abuse their monopoly power? What happens when they start looking mainly after their own interests, which is to say, start acting as a class?’

Myself, I see this happening around me all the time. I don’t mean by this – and I don’t think Frank is saying this either- that the professional class is acting in its own interests knowngly and cynically. We human beings have a need to see ourselves as ‘the good guys’, and we rationalise our self-interest in various ways as being in the common good. What I see is liberal professional people telling each other, sometimes pretty stridently, that they are the real left, the real good guys (being as they are against sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia etc), asserting that their view of how the world should be run is simply correct (because they, after all, are the class of experts), and becoming increasingly hostile to the elements of their own working class that no longer accepts their authority. Like all powerful classes, they (and really I should say we because it is my own class I am talking about!) believe themselves to be both entitled and virtuous. One of the great things about being a highly educated elite which is against sexism, homophobia etc etc is that you can be pretty certain that the less educated, less intellectual part of the population will tend to subscribe to more old fashioned views than you do on gender, sexuality and so on, thereby making it rather easy for you (in spite of your privileged position) to claim the moral high ground. You just have to keep class off the agenda.

‘When the left party in a political system severs its bonds to working people,’ Frank observes, ‘-when it dedicates itself to the concerns fo the particular slice of high-achieving affluent people- issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.’ I have certainly noticed over my lifetime how the idea of social justice has gradually stopped being about reducing disparities of wealth, and has come to be about equal opportunities, about ensuring that everyone can make use of their talents. As Frank notes: ‘Another term for this understanding of equality is Meritocracy, which is one of the great defining faiths of the professional class.’ He quotes the journalist Chris Hayes** who writes:

The areas in which the left have mad the most significant progress -gay rights, inclusion of women in higher education, the end of de jure racial discrimination- are the battles it has fought for making the meritocracy more meritocratic. The areas in which it has suffered its worst defeats – collective action to provide universal public goods, mitigating rising income inequality- are those that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview.

The trouble with meritocracy, it seems to me, even if such a thing could ever be achieved (which is dubious given that successful meritocrats can easily ensure that their children get a head start in the supposedly meritocratic race), is that it has nothing to offer to people who are not especially talented or skilled: and after all, half of the population is by definition of average or below average ability. And this is the trouble even with the idea of meritocracy as a desirable political goal. A meritocratic culture is one that celebrates high achievers, that fetishises exeptional ability and exceptional attainment (Frank describes this very persuasively), and has no interest in those who are merely ordinary.

This fact may rebound on the ideology itself, though. Frank observes that, although the Democratic Party (like the British Labour party) consciously uncoupled itself from its old blue collar allegiances, it nevertheless assumed that it could continue to rely on blue collar votes because working class voters had nowhere else to go. Recent events, in the US and America, suggest that this assumption may be spectacularly wrong. As the musician Brian Eno observed: ‘There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.’

*Frank doesn’t discuss the British Labour Party at all, but its own transition is, in a way, even more striking, given that the much older Democratic Party has represented all kinds of interests over the years (including those of slaveowners and segregationists) but the Labour Party’s very name reflects its origins as a party specifically created to ensure that the interests of the working class were represented in Parliament.

**From Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy. (A book I have not read.)

The Epistocrats

I learnt a new word the other day: ‘epistocracy’. It means rule by experts.

It seems to me that -and I’m obviously painting with a very broad brush here- episocrats are already one of the two main ruling classes, the other being what I will call barons.

Barons derive their power from their position at the summits of pyramids of patronage. Historically barons controlled large estates and functioned as military leaders. In some countries (Myanmar, North Korea) these days the barons are generals, but elsewhere they may be bankers, industrialists, owners of media empires. If they are Russian, for some reason, we call them oligarchs.

Epistocrats derive their power from the utility and/or market value of their expertise. They are journalists, civil servants, academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, biomedical researchers, inventors, legislators. They manage things, they create and propagate new knowledge (including ideological constructs that function as knowledge), they run the government, the media and the judiciary. (And, coming from a family of doctors, lawyers and academics, I am very definitely a member of this class.)

For the purposes of argument, let’s call the rest of the population the Plebeians. They’re the ones who don’t sit at the top, or even near the top, of patronage pyramids, and don’t have the particular kind of expertise that would place them in the epistocracy, whether because they don’t have the specialist education required (it typically takes many years of schooling to create an epistocrat), or because they lack the ability to make use of such an education. (It’s a fact not often discussed, but we are not all born with the same intellectual faculties.)

While epistocrats know a lot and have been trained to think in complex ways, plebeians, without that training, probably rely more on heuristics such as religion, tradition,’common sense’, ‘what everyone thinks’, tribal loyalty of some kind, or reliance on trusted authority figures. (Having said that, I need to qualify it immediately by stressing that (a) there is no reason to assume that such heuristics are necessarily always inferior as a guide to action than expert judgement, and (b) members of the epistocracy also rely a great deal on heuristics of these kinds, including tribal loyalty, ‘what everyone thinks’ and submission to authority, perhaps much more than they realise. But all that’s for another discussion.)

I’ve thought for a long time that sooner or later there would be a reaction against the epistocracy, not only because it is a relatively privileged class, but because the hegemony of the epistocratic world view threatens and undermines more traditional sources of meaning. What first got me thinking about this was the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 80s and 90s, but it always seemed to me only a matter of time before something similar happened in other parts of the world. A successful uprising against the epistocracy formed the backdrop to my first novel, The Holy Machine, represented, admittedly somewhat simplistically, as a worldwide uprising of religious fundamentalisms of various kinds against science*.

But right now we are witnessing a real life revolt against the epistocracy in many parts of the planet. That really is what ‘populism’ is, isn’t it? A kind of politics that dismisses the intellectual frameworks within which politics have hitherto been practiced and appeals instead to those old heuristics such as religion, ‘common sense’, tribal loyalty.

To be accurate, what I am calling a revolt against the epistocracy is a revolt against a section of the epistocracy (for the revolt itself has epistocrats among its leaders.) But historically, a large part of the epistocracy has allied itself politically, at least to some degree, with the plebeians -the two groups had common interests in their struggles against the barons- and considered itself to be politically on or towards the ‘left’. For many epistocrats, I assume, such an alliance was more attractive than the alternative of being the intellectual handmaidens of the the barons. (It certainly is to me.) In my new novel America City, members of this left-leaning but privileged class are referred to as delicados.

But nowadays, this section of the epistocracy, the epistocratic left, the delicados, is the group that is now characterised by populists as the Liberal Elite, and their claim to be on the side of the plebeians is being called into question. I don’t know who wrote the following. It came to me from an aggressively populist source on twitter (‘I hate lefties… Can’t stand political correctness… Brexit…. Make America Great Again…’ etc etc) and while there are many respects in which it is unfair and dishonest, it seems to me to illustrate pretty well the kinds of charges that are laid, with at least some degree of justice, against the liberal epistocracy in Britain:

It’s a massive generalisation obviously, but, as I’ve said before, I think the liberal epistocracy has somewhat lost interest in the plebeians , preferring to direct its social conscience elsewhere. The tweets below, which I noticed and saved in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union seemed to me at the time to be symptomatic.

These two tweeters’ concern for their East European cleaners is of course perfectly understandable. These are people they know personally and are fond of, nothing wrong with that, and of course there is no justification for such people to be bullied in the streets. But the wail of ‘THIS HAS GOT TO STOP’ struck me as terribly revealing. It isn’t directed at anyone. It isn’t in the second person. It doesn’t even refer to the offenders in the third person, but rather to the xenophobia itself as if it was some kind of alien force that has appeared from nowhere.

Yet there had been widespread unease about the scale of immigration for some time. For instance, the Migration Observatory at Oxford University [2011] found that ‘the preference for reducing migration is a majority view among virtually all segments of British society’, including ethnic minority groups, although its prevalence was highest among white British people, poorer people, less educated people and older people. Another for instance, and a fact that no one seemes to remember: In the last Euro-elections in 2014, UKIP won more seats in the European Parliament than any other British party.

I suggest that liberal epistocrats (myself included) behaved as if all of this could be ignored because it wasn’t to our liking and we assumed that people like us had sufficient power to make it go away. And now we’re finding out that wasn’t so. A revolution is going on, not against the barons, but against us.

And it seems to me that, like many a threatened ruling class before it, many liberal epistocrats are failing to grasp the new situation, failing to see the political adjustments they need to make. Instead of recognising that their alliance with the plebeians is important and in urgent need of renewal -important to us, I mean, as well as to the plebeians- I see many liberal epistocrats turning on the plebeians with contempt and anger. Brexit voters are called ‘thick’. Trump voters are called ‘deplorable’. Both groups are dismissed as racist and sexist by people whose anti-sexist and anti-racist creditentials may indeed be shining, but whose own classism is increasingly apparent**. (The word ‘thick’ is particularly revealing, if you think about it. If it’s not okay to mock someone for being disabled, how is it okay to show contempt for someone for not being educated or not being bright?)

In the wake of the Brexit vote, voices could be heard among the epistocratic classes saying that this was simply the wrong result and that parliament should ignore it. (The referendum was ‘only consultative’, apparently, though no one ever seemed to mention this until the vote was counted!) I have come across liberal Americans saying that those who voted for Trump are so vile and unforgivable that they don’t even want to try and win them back. (Good luck on winning without any of them!) And there are even voices these days that say that ignorant and uneducated people should be deprived of a vote. I see, for instance, that a book by an American academic came out in 2016 (I have to admit I’ve not read it) which argued that democracy should be replaced by epistocracy in its literal sense: nations should be governed not by the representives of the people as a whole but, like Plato’s Republic. by the knowledgeable.

Well, there’s always been a strand among liberal and leftwing folk that thinks ordinary people must be told what to do for their own good. Lenin, for instance, introduced the idea of a ‘vanguard party’ of professional revolutionaries who would exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat on the proletariat’s behalf.

Of course, he thus created a new ruling class that (via Stalin, purges, famines and the gulag) transformed itself at length into the capitalist oligarchy we know today, having long since jettisoned any trace of the ideology which the vanguard party was formed to serve.

I think myself that’s the sort of thing that tends to happen when any group of people decide they can’t share power and that the world should be ruled exclusively by people like themselves. Either that, or they are crushed completely.

*My novel Marcher, and the short stories from which it evolved, also explored this theme.

**Two points here. (1) Given that attitudes now recognised as sexist and racist were mainstream a generation or two ago, it’s always going to be the case that the least educated part of the population will seem sexist and racist compared to the most educated part. This is actually quite convenient for members of better educated elites who would like to have both the moral high ground and the benefits of their privileged position. (2) It is perhaps not surprising that relatively well-to-do, educated elites might prefer to foreground social divisions like gender, race, sexual orientation, ability/disability, which cut across social classes, and pay less attention to social class itself. I recently heard the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University being questioned on the radio about her enormous salary. A harsh edge came into her voice and she barked back (from memory), ‘I hope the BBC isn’t suggesting that I don’t deserve the same salary as my male predecessor’. More comfortable to identify as a member of a disadvantaged gender, than as a member of a privileged class.

The smartsplaining voice

There’s a lot of talk these days about a growing contempt in the world for evidence, for experts, for reason itself. It’s a real concern. Not much hope for the future if decades of meticulous scientific work on climate change can all be tossed aside by know-nothing ‘common sense’. Not much hope for a decent society if obvious lies can be uncritically accepted as true, while facts are dismissed out of hand

But another kind of ugliness that’s been coming to the fore lately is the voice that says, in effect, we smart people know best, and those thick people should just shut up and wait to be told what’s good for them. Weary, angry, contemptuous: the smartsplaining voice, it might be called.

Clever educated people who are good at reasoning, should be careful not to assume that this alone makes them right.

I remember once in my social work days, visiting a barely literate client and her saying to me resentfully at the end: ‘I suppose you’re going to go away and write this all down, aren’t you?’ However reasonable I was, however conscientious, the fact remained that my interpretation of events was going to go on the record, and hers was not.

A few years later, after a change of job, I acquired a reading ticket for the Cambridge University Library, and had the habit for a while of sitting in the cafe over there to write. As I half-listened to the people at the tables around me, academics and students coming and going with their cups of coffee and tea, I noticed that I could go all day without even once hearing a regional accent of any kind, only the distinctive drawl of the British private school system.

There’s no question in my mind that every one of those people in the library would have been much better at rational argument and far better-informed than that former client of mine in her council house three miles away. But every one of their arguments, however beautifully constructed, would necessarily be based on their own experience and what they’d read, and I’ll bet that neither their experience nor their reading equipped them to know anything about that woman’s world. (This is true of me too, incidentally, although my former job afforded me small glimpses into it.)

So when some of them become politicians, or economists, or entrepreneurs, their judgements about the world, however carefully reasoned, will take almost no account at all of what that woman feels, what’s important to her, how she imbues her life with meaning. Their judgements will, on the other hand, be very amply informed by the needs of people like themselves, what’s important to them, what imbues their life with meaning.

And that makes me think that what may look like a revolt against reason itself, may be in fact be a revolt against a class that is very good at reasoning, and very good at explaining why the world ought to be run in a way that suits that very same class. Not revolt against reason as such, in other words, but revolt against reasoning that (however unintentionally) is rigged in favour of the reasoners. After all, if you’re good at reasoning, you’re good at rationalising too.

Which is why I think that members of that class, including me, would do better to think about what we’ve been excluding from our view of the world, than to dismiss whole groups of people as ignorant thugs.

End times?

Trump actually winning now seems rather likely, but even if he loses, the very fact that so many support him may be a sign that the checks and balances of the American political system have now been weakened so badly (and some would say deliberately) that it is only a matter of time before they cave in and crumble.

Sooner or later, empires do fall. When you live in one, its power seems so solid, its essential logic so unassailable, that it easy to imagine that it will go on for ever in the same familar way as it’s done all your life. But the algorithm is never perfect. Sooner or later, it either comes up against some external fact which its design didn’t anticipate, or is snarled up from within by its own unintended consequences.

The particular genius of Anglo-Saxon institutions, people sometimes say, is that they are both solid and flexible, allowing them to adjust to changing times without coming tumbling down. It’s pretty impressive that the US constitution has lasted since 1789, or that the British constitution has evolved more or less peacefully since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, but their survival has always depended on their legitimacy being generally accepted, even by people who, in other respects, disagree profoundly with one another. When I go out to vote, here in the UK, I’m always struck by the sight of the representatives of the various rival parties chatting amicably to one another outside the polling station, and even helping each other by telling each other the names of voters so they can tick them off on their lists. There are plenty of countries where members of rival parties are killing each other, torturing each other, locking each other up, countries where the loser in an election will promptly declare a foul, and begin a civil war. But those people chatting and joking outside my polling station demonstate to me that, whatever their political differences, they are still all players of a peaceful and orderly game whose rules they all accept.

But when something approaching half of the population believes that the whole system is rigged, and when serious contenders for office begin to argue not just that their opponents’ views are wrong or harmful, but that their opponents themselves are criminal, evil, illegitimate or traitorous then it seems to me that the game may nearly be up.

Hate-filled ignorant scum

I’ve been struck for some time by the increasing invisibility of working class people in Britain. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I’ve been struck by the increasing invisibility of class as a social division. The concerns of progressive-minded people have shifted away from class to other divisions -gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability/disability- to a degree that, as Owen Jones points out at the beginning of his important book, Chavs*, the kind of derogatory comment that would be completely unacceptable if applied to, say, an ethnic minority, or to women, or to people with disabilities, can now be quite openly made about people who are working class or poor. This was particularly evident to me in the wake of the Brexit referendum. I was very stuck, not only by the way that liberal middle-class Remain voters tended to characterise working-class Leave voters as ignorant, stupid, bigoted and racist, but also by their shock at being defeated. Many Remain voters, it seemed, only knew folk who voted Remain. There was a whole bloc of people out there, whose lives and opinions they knew almost nothing about.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s working class people were not invisible in the same way. The city I grew up in, Oxford, was at that time a major car-manufacturing town. Trade unions were powerful working-class organisations and, though I came from a middle-class and not particularly political background, in my teens I would have been able to name probably nine or ten trade union leaders in the same way that I could name senior government ministers. Changes since then have not abolished the working class, but fragmented it, disempowered it and rendered it invisible as a class to the point that some middle-class people, who clearly lead very sheltered lives, now speak of a classless society, or a post-class society, or of us ‘all being middle-class’ now.

The changes, described in Owen’s book, include, the dismantling of much of manufacturing industry, the attack, begun by Margaret Thatcher, on trade union power, and the deliberate policy of the Thatcher government, through the selling off of social housing, to encourage as many working class people as possible to begin to think of themselves as middle-class home owners, or at least to drive a wedge between them, and those that remained in social housing. The Labour Party, a party originally established with the precise purpose of ensuring that working class people were politically represented, was to carry on with this programme. Under New Labour, as Owen notes, the idea of emancipating the working class people morphed from improving conditions for the class as a whole, to helping individual working class people to become middle-class. The emphasis shifted from ‘equality’ to ‘equality of opportunity’. ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy’, Tony Blair said when he came to power, though the term ‘was not originally meant to describe a desirable society…[but] was meant to raise the alarm at what Britain could become’ (Chavs, p 96).

Not all working class people can become middle class. ‘If everyone became middle class, who would man the supermarket checkouts, empty the bins and answer the phones in call-in centres?’ (Chavs, p 250). And not everyone has the same aptitudes. But the shift of emphasis from improving the condition of a whole class, to helping people with the necessary abilities to leave that class and join the middle class, means that those who are left behind can be blamed for their own problems, and the poorest among them can be described in terms which, if applied to ethnic minorities rather than social classes, could have come straight from some 1930s Nazi tract:

‘…that sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkest corners of this country…good-for-nothing scroungers who have no morals, no compassion, no sense of responsibility and are incapable of feeling love or guilt’ (Carole Malone, News of the World, cited in Chavs, p 22)

One of the interesting points raised by Owen, and one which very much chimes with my own experience, is that denigration of working class people isn’t confined to the right-wing of British politics, but can also be found among liberal and even left-wing people. I read an article in the Guardian a few years ago, reporting on a poll which found that the middle class was now more ‘left-wing’ than the working class. And in the comment thread I came across the following, offered, as far as I could tell, without conscious irony:

… [The working class] consistently vote against their own interests. I have always imagined that the reason is that they think they are “middle-class” as was my own family’s delusion. However, I suspect that the real reason is that they are just hate-filled ignorant scum and we middle-class people should just say fuck them.

Hate-filled, ignorant scum. ‘One of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable…’ says Johann Hari (cited in Chavs, p 116) ‘[is] by acting as though they are defending immigrants from the “ignorant” white working class’. Indeed some commentators quite specifically contrast hard-working immigrants with lazy good-for-nothing British workers. Writing in the Times in 1994, Janet Daley (cited in Chavs, p 118-9) characterised British working-class people as a ‘self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population’ and contrasted them with the ‘religion, cultural dignity and… sense of family’ brought by people from ethnic minorities, who were only held back by the ‘mindless hatred of the indigenous working classes, who loathe them precisely for their cultural integrity… I fear long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing…detritus of the Industrial Revolution’.

* * *

I heard a lot of that kind of talk from Remainers in the aftermath of Brexit. But it seems to me that describing working class British people as ‘hate-filled ignorant scum’ and contrasting them unfavourably with immigrant workers was never exactly calculated to endear them to the European project.

*References are to the new 2016 edition of this book, published by Verso

Brexit Eeyores

As I mentioned before, I voted ‘remain’ in the UK’s recent referendum, but I am growing very tired of what now I think of as the Brexit Eeyores: the weary, ‘I know better’ voices predicting economic calamity, lamenting that a vote was ever held on a matter that ordinary people couldn’t be expected to understand, and dismissing ‘leave’ voters as some combination of ignorant, uneducated, racist, or gullible. I am sometimes reminded of white Rhodesians telling each other how they always knew the country would go to the dogs if the Africans were given the vote.

One can argue about the merits or otherwise of referendums, but if we were only allowed to vote on matters of which we possessed expert knowledge, then most of us wouldn’t be permitted to vote at all. General elections usually hinge on economic policy and the management of public services, after all, both of which are highly complex and technical matters. The fact is that, in a democracy, those who possess expertise have to persuade the rest of us that they understand what our concerns are, and have a plan that will help to address them. You can’t just say, ‘we know better than you do what’s good for you, so do as you’re told.’

The key thing here is that, even though all the established political parties, almost all economists, and the great majority of business leaders, supported the ‘remain’ cause, the majority of the electorate decided to ignore them. That’s quite a consensus to go against! Why did it happen? Presumably it is because that wide range of eminent people failed to convince 17,000,000 voters that their concerns were being heard or being addressed. Dismissing those seventeen million voters as thick, or racist or gullible dupes will not help them with that feeling of not being heard. And if that feeling isn’t addressed, we really are in for some difficult times.

As I say, I’m not an expert but here is one of the best analyses I’ve read recently of what’s going on behind the Brexit vote here and the rise of the likes of Donald Trump.

Meritocracy

I was interested in this article asking whether meritocracy in the UK is a sham. I live in Cambridge and for a time I used go and write in the Cambridge University Library (I was eligible for a library card at the time as a member of staff of Cambridge’s other, marginally less famous, university: Anglia Ruskin). I got into the habit of working in the cafe there -I find a background hum of voices more conducive to writing than absolute silence- and I can tell you that I could go all day without seeing a single black face, or hearing a single regional accent. There’d be some foreigners, but the British people in there, students and academics, were almost all white and almost all spoke with the distinctive accent, somehow both languid and gushing, of the English private school system. (I myself was no exception btw: I too am white, I too went to private school.) That tells you quite a lot, I think, about the extent to which we live in a meritocracy!

What we do live in, though, is a society which sees being a meritocracy as a desireable goal, a society which, when it talks about equality, talks about equality of opportunity, about removing the obstacles that prevent gifted people from poor backgrounds from achieving their potential. There’s not a lot of talk about people whose talents are not exceptional, people who are not especially bright, people who are of average or below average ability, even though this group, by definition, includes more than half of the population.

Equality of opportunity is desireable, but it’s not sufficient, a point made in the article by the former Labour leader, Ed Milliband (someone who I never thought I’d look back on with some degree of nostalgia!). A meritocracy, per se, would not necessarily be good society. In fact, thinking about it now, I’d go as far as to say that, if I was designing a society in which the power of an elite was to be permenantly entrenched, I’d make it a meritocracy, and give it an excellent universal educational system, designed to ensure that anyone with above average ability, from whatever background, could be identified from an early age and channelled to a position in society commensurate with those abilities. That way the elite could be constantly strengthened, because it would continously co-opt the most able and continuously deprive therest of the population of those who would otherwise have been their natural leaders.

Or am I being unfair? I suppose that what would moderate such a society, and make it more humane, would be that the elite would contain many people who had memories of, and family connections with, the rest of society, whereas the more stratified system we have now means that many people (including some of those I overheard in the University library) may never really have known anyone from outside of their own class.

The Party is Over

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses (Juvenal, c100 CE: Satire 10.77-81)

A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous and power-hungry leaders (Mike Lofgren, The Party is Over, 2012 CE)

I haven’t even finished reading this book yet, and I may well have more to say about it later. It is packed with sharp, pithily expressed and extremely scary observations about the break-down of the American political system and its corruption by corporate money. A Republican who worked as a staffer in Congress for nearly 30 years, Lofgren is pretty scathing about the Democrats, but his most bitter attacks (at least so far) are directed against his own party which he describes as becoming less and less like a political party and more like ‘an apocalyptic cult’.

What he really exposes is a kind of doublespeak in which strident claims to be defending something – the constitution, liberty, democracy, the national interest- are used to conceal attacks on that same object. ‘Let us now dispose,’ Lofgren writes, for instance, ‘ of the quaint notion that the present-day Republican Party is conservative.’ He defines the GOP, as it now exists, as a ‘radical right-wing party’, which doesn’t really conserve and protect anything, for all that it invokes the memory of a romanticised past, but seeks to completely transform society in the interests of the very wealthy* using whatever means possible and with a kind of Leninist ruthlessness.

The American political system works in a very different way from the British one, but there is much here that is familiar to a British reader all the same. For instance:

The GOP reflexively scorns so-called elites (by which it means educated, critical thinkers) to mask the way it is utterly beholden to the true American elite.

I am particularly struck by Lofgren’s observation that the current Republican Party deliberately seeks to undermine the credibility of government itself:

Should Republicans succeed in preventing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s favorability rating among the American people. In such a scenario the party that presents itself as programmatically against government – i.e., the Republican Party – will come out the relative winner.

Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.

A UK parallel is the relentless attack on the quality of public services, which is always ostensibly in the name of making them better, but which in fact reduces the standing of the services themselves. But we also have a culture of cynicism about politicians and government in general, and I’ve long thought that (for instance) leftish comedians should be more aware of whose interests such routine and unfocused cynicism actually serves.

*Interesting fact: according to Lofgren under Eisenhower’s Republican presidency in the 50s, the top rate of income tax in the US was 91%. Even the new leadership of the British Labour Party, characterised by many as unelectably left-wing, only proposes a top rate of 50%.

Freedom is slavery

Politics is a rough business everywhere but, from this side of the Atlantic, the tone of political discourse in the US can sometimes look particularly ugly. One of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, was the suggestion by Senator Rand Paul that a right to free health care is equivalent to a belief in slavery. The quote in question was the following:

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.

I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

(If you think this must be some crude spoof, by the way, here is a clip of him saying it.)

By way of information to US readers, we have a free National Health Service here in the UK, meaning that everyone has a right to healthcare, and my mother and my maternal grandfather both worked for it as doctors. They were not forced to be doctors, and they were not forced as doctors to work for the state. They were paid well enough to lead prosperous middle class lifestyle. They were free to resign whenever they wanted. They could go and work for private healthcare agencies, if they prefered, or for themselves. There’s absolutely no sense at all in which their condition could be described as slavery, or indeed as different in any fundamental way to the condition of anyone else who works for an organisation of any kind. When you think what slavery actually means (and the Senator represents the former slave state of Kentucky, so he should know), the very comparison is obscene.

You might say that US politics is not my business. But actually it is because the US is a global superpower, and what happens in the US matters everywhere, and perhaps especially in the UK, where there is a common cultural heritage, and no language barrier to filter us from its blast. However I freely admit I know very little about the personalities involved, and almost nothing about Senator Paul. So here are a couple of questions.

Is Senator Paul an extremely stupid man, so lacking in curiosity that he hasn’t bothered to look into the many free health services around the world, and so lacking in imagination that he can’t figure out for himself how such a service might work without breaking down doctors’ doors?

Or is he cynical and mendacious man, who in order to serve his own political ends, tries to besmirch something that, whatever its snags, is basically benign (a community agreeing to club together to provide healthcare for everyone) by equating it with something that is evil and foul?

Echoing in the back of my mind are the slogans of George Orwell’s Oceania: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Not an exact parallel of course, but what Orwell was warning about was the misuse of language to destroy our capacity to think.

Invisible electors

One thing that strikes me about the results of the UK election is the arbitary relationship between the number of seats won by each party, and their proportion of the popular vote. The Scottish National Party is now the 3rd largest party in the UK parliament, with 56 seats, but it did this on the basis of 1.5 million votes, while the Lib Dems, with 2.4 million votes, only got 8 seats. Even more bizarrely, the largest Northern Ireland party, the DUP, also won 8 seats, but did so with only 184,000 votes (the same number of seats as the Lib Dems, but less than a tenth of their votes). Meanwhile the Green Party, with eight times as many votes as the DUP, came out of the process with only one seat.

Suffering a brief attack of geekery, I’ve just done the sums (see table below). If seats were awarded proportionally, the Greens would have won 25 seats, the SNP 31, and the Lib Dems 52. The most spectacular difference, though, would have been that UKIP, with 12.6% of the popular vote, would have won 82 parliamentary seats, as opposed to the single seat which it actually won*.

I can’t say that I’m personally sorry that this particular outfit has not got those 82 seats. But, all the same, I can’t help thinking that the lack of relationship between votes cast and MPs elected is one of the causes of cynicism about the democratic process.

What we have at the moment is a system which rewards parties that have concentrated powerbases in particular geographical areas (like the DUP and the SNP, but also Labour and Conservatives, with their heartlands respectively in the big industrial cities and the leafy suburbs and shires). But it punishes parties whose support is more widely and thinly distributed across the country, and so grossly misrepresents the relative strength of opinion in the country in general, to the point where whole swathes of electors are rendered virtually invisible.

The fact that the SNP won all but three seats in Scotland, for instance, gives the impression that the whole of Scotland is fervently nationalist, though in fact the SNP only won half the Scottish votes, leaving the unionist half of Scotland almost completely unrepresented. (And who would have thought, from the coverage of the result that the disgraced and humiliated Lib Dems actually won 900,000 more UK votes than the proud and triumphant SNP?)

A proportional system would still, just, have yielded a right-of-centre majority, based on the popular vote in this election, with Conservatives, UKIP, DUP and UUP between them winning 329 seats, but it would have been a smaller and much more precarious majority than the one the Conservatives won on their own under the first-past-the-post system. There are lots of downsides of PR, but surely the benefit would be that there would be less triumphalism, fewer spurious claims to have the backing of “the people”, and a more transparent process of negotation between parties that represent the enormous diversity of views that actually exist?

Of course, these figures assume that everyone would still vote for the same party under a PR system. In fact, supporters of smaller parties often decide to vote tactically for parties they think likely to win. My guess is that under a PR system, the Green Party would actually have won quite a lot more* than 25 seats, because a lot of potential Green voters voted Labour this time round. No doubt this would be true of UKIP sympathisers too, many of whom probably voted Conservative for similar reasons.