The Centrists are at it again

It takes a Centrist to know one – and it’s only recently I’ve taken to attacking the bunch amongst whom I myself could, until recently, be counted. You can recognise them by their cliches, buzzwords and slogans. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is a good example – a centrist think-tank which boasts that its 

researchers, communicators, and policy experts create tangible progressive 

change, and turn bold ideas into common sense realities. 

Note the words – “progressive change”, “bold ideas”, “common sense” and “realities”. It has just launched an

IPPR Decade of National Renewal Programme whose objective is to help the government speed up growth in living standards and close the wide gaps between regions; to restart the engine of social mobility between and within generations; to make Britain a healthier and safer country; and to phase out the country’s dependence on carbon. It will convene discussion on ideas, politics and policy to bring new thinking to old problems, and old wisdom to new ones.

and describes these in a curious pamphlet which exhorts the new government 

to understand

1. how the world is changing - then use that to change the country.

2. that it’s not good enough just to blame the previous government, blame their out-of-date ideas – then introduce your own

3. a string of modest but strategic policies can add up to transformation.

4. maintaining a voter coalition is not the same as building one.

5. “transformative governments” enact reforms that subsequent ones accept.

and looks back at the Atlee, Blair and Thatcher experiences to justify such 

apparent “lessons” – drawing on a book by Phil Tinline The Death of Consensus 

– 100 years of British political nightmares (2022)

World War III is very close

I have always had mixed feelings about George Galloway – supporting him for his opposition to the appalling Iraq War and the power of his argument to the US Senate and his support for marginalised people but hesitating over some of his more outrageous performances. It was the Novara channel which posed the reasonable question recently about Who is the real George Galloway?

He’s been presenting the Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS) for several years (it’s now at its 396^th episode) and Twitter duly carried its latest excerpt which alerted me to the unbelievable fact that bomb Russian Biden has apparently given the green light to Ukraine to use use long-range missiles to bomb Russian cities

And the UK will, as usual, fall in line with the US madness. Indeed a site called The Gray Zone has just revealed a scheme to keep Ukraine fighting – despite the terrible losses it has been suffering.

Project Alchemy was founded on the personal orders of Lt. General Charlie Stickland, who is charged with “planning, executing and integrating UK led joint and multinational overseas military operations” as the head of Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters. Stickland boasts in leaked communications that his family “come from a long line of pirates and buccaneers.” In his email signature, the general identifies himself as an “LGBTQ+ Advocate” in rainbow-colored text. Stickland and his assistant, Maj. Ed Harris, did not answer The Grayzone’s calls to their personal phones, nor did they respond to detailed questions submitted to them through WhatsApp.

Stickland convened the first meeting of Project Alchemy’s on February 26, 2022, just days after Russian troops made their initial foray into Ukraine. According to minutes of the gathering, “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech” was on hand to produce a “grand strategy options paper.” 

The paper consisted of a series of proposals for the British government to “defeat Putin in Ukraine and set the conditions for the reshaping of an open international order of the future.” Throughout the document, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting” was described as London’s “main effort” in the conflict.

In an email to British military apparatchiks dated March 3 2022, Stickland described Alchemy’s paper as the result of “some mischief I’ve been up to” with “a group of ‘sideways thinkers.’” He expressed satisfaction that “this has been seen by all sorts of people,” including senior British government and military officials, “and landed well.”

The paper can be viewed on the Gray Zone site but is attached here
 

Snippets

 I started this post wanting to write about Charles Handy (who turned 92 in the summer) but then, typically, got sidetracked by other writers such as management’s Henry Mintzberg, anthropologist/journalist Gillian Tett and exec coach Andy Cragg. I’ve referred to Handy’s work several times since this post in 2017; celebrated a few years later one his most recent books 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges (2020) with a post which tried to summarise each of the letters; and saluted him recently with 3 posts

• https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-salute-to-exemplary-man.html 

• https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/10/charles-handy-part-ii.html 

• https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-little-bit-of-history.html 

I’ve been a fan since the mid 1970s when he published the first edition of
Understanding Organisations whose 4th edition appeared in 1993 including a 

“Guide to Further Reading” which offered a 60 page section with guidance to 

useful texts for each of what became its 12 chapters
At the time he was developing the UK’s first management development 

programme and subsequently gained fame as a combination of management 

guru and spiritual guide - with frequent appearances on BBC’s “Thought for 

the Day”.
Henry Mintzberg has also retired and is now 85 but has just produced a 

fascinating book which draws on his extensive experience of studying companies 

to offer a very unusual perspective which makes extensive use of diagrams. 

It’s Understanding Organizations - Finally (2023)

Gillian Tett is the odd woman out as an anthropologist and puts it rather nicely 

in her 2021 book “Anthro-Vision – how anthropology can explain business and life”

 - “We need lateral vision. That is what anthropology can impart: anthro-vision” 

which is very much what this “Peripheral Vision” tries to do.

This book has a simple aim – to show that the ideas emanating from a discipline that many people think (wrongly) studies only the “exotic” are vital for the modern world. The reason is that anthropology is an intellectual framework that enables you to see around corners, spot what is hidden in plain sight, gain empathy for others, and fresh insight on problems. This framework is needed more than ever now as we grapple with climate change, pandemics, racism, social media run amok, artificial intelligence, financial turmoil, and political conflict.

I know this from my own career: as this book explains, since I left Tajikistan, I have worked as a journalist and used my anthropology training to foresee and understand the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Donald Trump, the 2020 pandemic, the surge in sustainable investing, and the digital economy. But this book also explains how anthropology is (and has been) valuable for business executives, investors, policy makers, economists, techies, financiers, doctors, lawyers, and accountants (yes, really). These ideas are as useful in making sense of an Amazon warehouse as in an Amazon jungle.

Why? Many of the tools we have been using to navigate the world are simply not working well. In recent years we have seen economic forecasts misfire, political polls turn out to be wrong, financial models fail, tech innovations turn dangerous, and consumer surveys mislead. These problems have not arisen because those tools are wrong or useless.

They are not. The problem is such tools are incomplete; they are used without an awareness of culture and context, created with a sense of tunnel vision, and built assuming that the world can be neatly bounded or captured by a single set of parameters. This might work well when the world is so stable that the past is a good guide to the future. But it does not when we live in a world of flux, or what Western military experts describe as “VUCA,” short for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” Nor when we face “black swans” (to cite Nassim Nicholas Taleb), “radical uncertainty” (as the economists Mervyn King and John Kay say), and an “uncharted” future (to quote Margaret Heffernan)

Other recommended texts
The Hungry Spirit – beyond capitalism; the quest for purpose in the modern world 

Charles Handy (1998)
Myself and other matters Charles Handy (2008)
The Change Mindset – the psychology of leading and thriving in an uncertain world 

Andy Craggs (2022)

Evil Returns

I don’t like giving the orangutan any coverage but can’t ignore Trump’s reelection in the US – how on earth did a felon and rapist manage to convince so many Americans?? Michael Roberts is one of my favourite bloggers and has a good account here

As the FT put it: “In the end, it wasn’t even close. A presidential 

election long forecast to dance on a knife’s edge very quickly turned 

out to be a rout for Donald Trump.” Trump polled 73.4m votes or 50% 

of the those who voted, while Harris polled 60m or 47.7% of the vote. 

Third party candidates mustered just 1.6%. Trump’s 4.3m lead was more 

than Biden had in 2020, or Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016 (in fact - 

as of 13 Nov - Trump had 3.2 million more votes than Harris).
Trump’s vote did not rest on small margins in a handful of swing states, as was the 

case when he won in 2016. Instead, he gained support across the electoral map in 

states both red (Republican) and blue (Democrat). Even in his birthplace of 

New York state, one of the bluest strongholds in the country, Trump winnowed a 

23-point gap down to 11.

The biggest caveat to Trump’s voting victory is that contrary to the usual hype of a 

‘massive voter turnout’, fewer Americans eligible to vote bothered to do so compared 

to 2020. Then over 158m voted, this time the vote was down to 143m. The 

voter turnout of those eligible fell to 58.2% from the high of 65.9% in 2020. 

Around 40% of Americans registered to vote did not do so. And the number of 

Americans who failed to register rose to 19m from 12m in 2020. So, although 

Trump got 51% of those who voted, he actually got only 28% support of Americans 

of voting age. Three out of four Americans did not vote for Trump. The real 

winner of the election was (yet again) the ‘no vote’ party. Indeed, Trump polled 

fewer votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. But Harris lost around 11m votes compared 

to Biden in 2020.

An interesting article has a sceptical look at some of the conventional 

explanations 

Donald Trump has won, and most shockingly, he won the popular vote. Unlike in 

2016, which could be explained as a rejection of Hillary Clinton concentrated in 

the crucial mid-western states, this year he won convincingly. He has increased 

his share of the vote, as a percentage of the overall national popular vote, in each 

of the three elections he has run.
One explanation for Trump’s victory is an across-the-board collapse in turnout 

and increased apathy caused by an unpopular presidency, an uninspiring president 

and an ideologically spent brand of liberalism. There is some merit to this, but 

on closer inspection, it’s not why Kamala Harris lost.
First, it’s important to note that counting votes in the United States takes a 

very long time. By the time it’s all said and done, it’s quite likely Trump received 

more votes in 2024 than he did in the record turnout 2020 election, probably 

millions more votes.

The second flaw in this idea is that the turnout change wasn’t uniform, nor was the 

change in voting behavior. In most swing states, turnout was actually up from 2020, 

setting records. In the states that decided the election, Democrats got their base 

voters to the polls and had the electorate they needed to win (and even did win in 

many cases in the Senate and down the rest of the ballot). The problem was she 

lost on persuasion: many voters who chose Joe Biden four years ago and even voted 

for other Democrats this year chose Donald Trump.
However, problems with persuasion weren’t the only issue: Democratic turnout did, 

in fact, collapse in the less competitive states, especially in blue states. 

This is a unique shift in voting behavior nationally and can’t be explained obviously 

by most existing theories of the electorate.
Another explanation is that Democrats have become the party of college-educated 

voters exclusively, and shed working-class voters, especially working-class voters 

of color. There is some truth to this, especially over the long term. But this 

explanation is also flawed. Trump did better consistently with every demographic 

almost everywhere in the country, including college-educated white people and 

women. While these numbers were more pronounced with young voters, Latinos 

and men, it was only slight. Most highly-educated areas that had swung consistently 

against Republicans in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 moved back toward Trump this 

year. His victory was not with any one demographic. It was total.
As with any massive election loss, recriminations have been swift, and factions 

inside the Democratic party are jockeying to make their narrative about the 

election the conventional wisdom that shapes the future of the party, while 

Republicans are claiming a sweeping mandate for reshaping society in a darker, 

more authoritarian way. However, conventional ideological explanations also don’t 

stand up to scrutiny.
One of the most common centrist takes has been: Democrats have become too 

progressive and “woke” on social issues and obsessed with identity politics, and 

Democratic staffers and consultants live in a bubble and speak in alienating ways 

that have made them seem radical and off-putting to the median voter. 

The solution is a relentless focus on bread-and-butter issues and moderating, 

mostly ignoring culture war issues, besides abortion, and aggressively playing up 

moderate and bipartisan bona fides.
It seems quite likely this narrative will win out among Democrats. It has already 

been expressed by elected officials and influential Democratic pundits. The key 

problem with this narrative is that while it may have had merit in 2020 or 2022, 

the Democratic party has, over the last few years, aggressively purged “woke”

-sounding language from their messaging and policies from their agenda. 

The Harris campaign was almost monomaniacally focused on projecting moderation 

and bipartisanship and on basic, kitchen-table economic issues. 

They relentlessly hunted the median voter with targeted messaging. 

They ran the campaign the popularists wanted, and lost.
This theory is also belied by the fact that the most well-known progressive and 

radical politicians mostly did better than Harris. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also 

won more votes than Harris. Understanding why thousands of people might vote 

for Trump and an avowed democratic socialist and vocal supporter of “woke” 

causes like trans rights is a key to understanding the election.
Progressives see the flaws with the centrist analysis and also have an explanation, 

typified by Bernie Sanders: Democrats lost by abandoning the working class and 

unions. Like the centrist narrative, it is an outdated explanation that was once 

true and may be true on a generational scale but is inadequate to capture what 

happened in this specific election fully. While Democrats have, over the last 

50 years, shifted away from unions and redistributive politics, allowing inequality 

to grow, and this is the correct explanation for Clinton’s loss in 2016, it doesn’t 

quite fit here. Joe Biden actually did shift to the left on economic issues after 

winning the primary in 2020, largely due to the mass movement that formed around 

the Sanders campaign. And while, in the past, this may have been lip service, the 

Biden administration, for all its shortcomings, did follow through in real, measurable

 ways. Income inequality, the central theme of the progressive movement in the 

2010s, decreased under Biden. The poorest workers were better off. 

Biden also pursued aggressive pro-labor and pro-consumer policy through the 

executive branch. Biden was the first president to walk a picket line, and put 

political capital on the line to bail out union pension funds.
For many years, it was easy to explain why workers would leave the Democrats: 

they were making less money and losing rights. But, while the Biden administration 

should have been far more assertive in redistribution and class-war policy on 

ideological and moral grounds, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that workers moved 

right because of an ideologically neoliberal or austerity-focused policy. 

Though Democrats have mostly abandoned class as a mode of communication, 

and struggled to name an enemy and construct a compelling economic narrative, 

the material explanation for Harris losing votes among the working class and union 

members doesn’t hold as it may have in the past.
The right has its own explanation, seeing a sweeping mandate for the culture war. 

But Republican candidates who made their campaigns into referenda on culture war 

issues have uniformly lost or underperformed, in the past, and also this year. 

Trump is the only candidate who ran aggressively on the persecution of trans 

people, for example, and also did better than the partisan baseline.
And the idea that this is why voters flocked to Trump is just not compelling. 

Fifty-four percent of voters thought Trump was “too extreme”, 65% were 

pro-choice, and, even on immigration, 56% of voters supported a pathway to 

citizenship rather than mass deportations. Millions of voters voted for Trump 

at the top of the ticket and Democrats down-ballot to check his unpopular agenda. 

It would be a mistake to think Trump has a mandate to remake society in a 

hard-right, socially conservative image.
So why did people vote for Trump? Most voters still actively dislike him personally 

(53% of voters had an unfavorable opinion of him) and most of his policies. 

The obvious explanation is that people trust him more to handle the economy. 

Although voters didn’t like his presidency, they felt like they were better off four 

years ago. This is true, but also so obviously true as to be facile. 

More interesting is why, materially, voters trust him more to handle the economy.

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare 

state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety 

net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy 

changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, 

Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, 

extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers 

from the American government.
Despite the trauma and death of Covid and the isolation of lockdowns, from late 

2020 to early 2021, Americans briefly experienced the freedom of social democracy. 

They had enough liquid money to plan long term and make spending decisions for 

their own pleasure rather than just to survive. They had the labor protections to 

look for the jobs they wanted rather than feel stuck in the jobs they had. 

At the end of Trump’s term, the American standard of living and the amount of 

economic security and freedom Americans had was higher than when it started, 

and, with the loss of this expanded welfare state, it was worse when Biden left 

office, despite his real policy wins for workers and unions. 

This is why voters view Trump as a better shepherd of the economy.

The American journalist/historian, Thomas Frank, (also the editor of the 
Baffler) is perhaps the best person to consult about all this. He anticipated 
the first Trump victory in 2016 – not least in an early book What’s the Matter 
with Kansas? How Conservatives won the heart of America (2004) and had just 
written this piece -
Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas 
where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing 
movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right 
framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult 
our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution 
or the war on Christmas.
This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul 
of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not 
long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking 
officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were 
very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for 
Donald Trump.
My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the 
Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. 
Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade 
and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those 
manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches 
about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind 
them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. 
When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was 
making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,
” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom 
everybody admired.
Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now 
here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination 
visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of 
which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the 
Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the 
vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull 
over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there 
by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, 
with Democrats.
By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek 
his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation 
— the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together 
my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”
I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose 
banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show a little gratitude and build him 
the biggest, most expensive, most innovative presidential library of them all. 
But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.
It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into 
the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the 
working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely 
works out. They could have gone from boasting about Dick Cheney’s endorsement 
to becoming a version of Mr. Cheney themselves, and it still wouldn’t have been 
enough. A party of the left that identifies with people like Mr. Cheney is a 
contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually 
have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and 
manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. 
Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the 
voters Mr. Trump has stolen away. Kamala Harris had the skills: She spoke powerfully 
at the Democratic convention about a woman’s right to choose and Mr. Trump’s 
unfitness for high office. Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted 
the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation 
about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking 
to me personally.
At the same time, the convention featured lots of saber-rattling speeches hailing 
America’s awesome war-making abilities. The administration’s achievements on 
antitrust were barely mentioned. There was even a presentation by the governor 
of Illinois, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, in which he boasted of being a real 
billionaire, not a fake one like Donald Trump supposedly is, and the assembled 
Democrats cheered their heads off for this fortunate son. Then, once Ms. Harris’s 
campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another 
billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. 
He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. 
From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-
immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved 
at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.
Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump’s persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was 
censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. 
He was an “American Bad Ass,” in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits 
would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as 
though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.
Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The 
Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by 
now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. 
Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise 
anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. 
Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.
I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt 
that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever 
turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march 
on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their 
social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.
Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to 
rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, 
inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. 
It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. 
It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the 
cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming
-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well
-meaning professionals.
That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the 
voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take 
the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.
Further Reading
Listen, Liberal – or whatever happened to the party of the people? Thomas Frank (2016)