The Blogroll

One of the many reasons for reading this blog is the access it gives to other takes on the world – visual and textual (I’ve been thinking of adding a selection of podcasts). You can find these by scrolling down the right-hand column until you find “insights from other worlds”. I do keep this list updated and I’ve just added a new blog – called Aurelien – Trying to understand the world which comes from somone with my sort of background in government and academia but who has a much better grasp of geopolitics. His latest post is a diatribe against the “Professional and Managerial Class” (PMC) to whom I devoted a couple of posts earlier in the year. My feeling was that his post was a bit too self-indulgent – a bit of a rant – and needed a deeper analysis of both causes and options. But when I looked at some of his previous posts, it was to discover that he had, last year, provided just such a deeper analysis called Into the Waste-Land which included this section -

The risk now is that the political systems of many western states will begin to fall apart, and that nothing will replace them: anarchy in the popular sense of the term. It’s easy enough to see how this could happen. Public interest and trust in existing political systems is reducing all over the western world. In many countries, scarcely half the population bothers to vote, even in national elections. Parties still have differences between them, but these are often relatively minor, and do not correspond to the differences of opinion and interest within societies themselves. Although substantive issues of Left and Right are actually as salient as they ever were, the more important operational distinction in how people feel is between the minority (10-20% depending on the country) that benefits from the current neoliberal dispensation, or hopes to one day, and the rest, who do not benefit or fear no longer doing so.

There is no Excluded Party in any western country, although some parties, often labelled “extreme” of Left and Right do gather up protest votes. Moreover, in most political systems, the Excluded Party is split between several parties with superficially different orientations and objectives. So in France, much of the old Leftist vote has split in two ways: the middle-class has run off to the Greens, whilst the working class has gone to Le Pen’s National Assembly.

Yet in practice, it would be possible to take the working-class and lower-middle class vote among scattered parties of the Left, and the working-class vote now lost to the Right, and make a winning coalition from them.

The irony is that the Leaders of the Left cannot see this or, if they can, choose to do nothing because they find supporters of the Right common, uncouth and bigoted and have no wish to be associated with them.The further irony is that the views of the average RN voter and the views of the average Communist Party voter are actually not that far apart. It’s the leadership that is the problem.