Those Clever Romans – the tactical Playbook of the Corporate Elites

That’s half a dozen posts I’ve done in a row on the apparent increased divisiveness in our societies – without any real attempt at either explanation or prescription. Indeed the blog’s focus on political frustration can be traced back to the first mention of the pending election in Bulgaria at the beginning of April. The posts since then have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims to be the falsehoods they are

- a better vision of democracy needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries – initially at a municipal level to demonstrate their benefits

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues - which governments currently seem incapable of even attempting to deal with

- using citizen juries

- governments, in other words, should govern

So let me try to pull the posts together by questioning the way the media has placed the issue of political polarisation on the agenda. It’s clear that social media have increased the rancour of the tone of conversations - - certainly since Twitter started in 2006.

But can we really blame the social media for the strong and sustained political divisions? The fact that 70% of US Republican party members still cannot accept the validity of Jo Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential elections certainly indicates not just a very significant shift in the US political mood but a major question about the resilience and legitimacy of that country’s basic political system. This may or may not be part of “American exceptionalism” but is certainly very serious.

But the wider populist backlash against elite rule is part of something much deeper – and was there for anyone with any sensitivity to see some 20 years ago. I don’t profess to have any particular skills of foresight but in 2001 I drafted a short note which forms the first seven pages of this longer paper (written a decade later). I summarised the basic message at the time thus

·       The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1980 was an effective system for the West.

·       It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

·       deindustrialisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and unions

·       a thought system has developed which justifies corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company

·       All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world

·       People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

·       Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

·       Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

·       It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

·       Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

·       But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

·       as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

·       We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

·       to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed) 

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – 5 years ago. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just 20 years but probably at least 50 years – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. Some may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the border restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with a problem – which runs like this –

-       Deny the problem

-       Rubbish the critics

-       Blame the victim

-       Marginalise the issue – concede a little by suggesting that the problem was caused by “just a few bad pennies”

-       set up an Inquiry

-       But ensure (by its composition and direction) that it goes nowhere

-       Compartmentalise the responsibility – to confuse

-       Sacrifice a few lambs

-       Bring on the games and spectacle

-       clowns and jesters

-       Feed the dogs with scraps

-       Starve any programme conceded of serious funds

-       Take the credit for any eventual concession that there was indeed a problem

Suggested Background Reading

We are so  swamped with books these days that someone like me can offer only what catches his eye. But the OECD, Lakoff and Tarrow are significant sources which should be taken seriously!

Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020) Executive summary of recent important book Innovate Citizen Participation and new democratic institutions - catching the Deliberative Wave which tries to help the global elite make sense of the latest challenge to their rule

Macron’s Grand Debat; useful article about the French approach

citizen jury experience (2016) german; rather academic

Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent, the fight for freedom Raoul Martinez (2016) Fascinating book which starts from the proposition that the current failure of our social systems must lead us to question our foundational beliefs

Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)  Too much of the discussion on democracy is conducted by anglo-saxon political scientists. Here an Italian sociologist makes the connection to the social movement literature

The New Machiavelli – how to wield power in the modern world ; Jonathan Powell (2011) Tony Bliar’s Chief of Staff does some musing about the government class thinking

Moral politics – how conservatives and liberals think; George Lakoff (1996) an important psychologist sets out our tribal thinking

Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition – first in 1994) one of the key writers in this field

Metaphors we live By  George Lakoff (1980) our very words betray us

Populist – and proud of it

Since 2011, I’ve blogged about populism four or five times – mainly in a neutral definitional way. But a combination last week of a couple of articles in The Guardian and Open Democracy with my reading of R Eatwell and M Goodwin’s recent little Pelican book National Populism – the revolt against liberal democracy; (2017) got me into surfing mode on the subject and to some disturbing thoughts……

Let me start with how I saw things at the end of a couple of days

- Talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”

- Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe 
- as a professional and intellectual discipline, Political Science has adopted a rather disdainful view of democracy and a “scientist” approach to its methodology - marginalising those few academics with serious interests in notions of the “public good” being embedded in government programmes

- The US tradition of populism has never died - whereas the European tradition is sceptical at best (with the exception of the French whose celebration of revolt seems part of their DNA)

- But the younger contemporary American academics seem to have lost their sense of history and have produced rather aggressive celebrations of liberalism (Y Mounk)

The reader should now be warned that the next few paras represent a rather jaundiced take on academia…. As a social “scientist”, I have long had a healthy skepticism about the overconfident claims of particularly economists – and have even been known (as long ago as 2010) to challenge the political scientists for hiding their heads in the sand. Not for nothing is Social Sciences as Sorcery; Stanislaw Andreski (1972) one of my favourite books – and I was delighted to be able to download it in full yesterday……

2008, of course, should have been the death knell for economics since it had succumbed some decades earlier to a highly-simplified and unrealistic model of the economy which was then starkly revealed in all its nakedness…..Steve Keen was one of the first economists to break ranks very publicly way back in 2001 and to set out an alternative - Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned.
This coincided with economics students in Paris objecting to the homogeneity of syllabi and reaching out to others – creating in the next 15 years a movement which has become global

This is a good presentation on the issues (from 2012) and I am now reading an excellent little Penguin book The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins (2017) from their experience of stirring things up on the Manchester University economics programme. The book’s sub-title says it all!

Dani Rodrik is one of the few economists with a global reputation to support them (Ha-Yoon Chang is another) and indeed published an important book recently reviewing the state of economics - Economics Rules – the rights and the wrongs of the dismal science; (2016) which was nicely reviewed here

The Financial Times recently reviewed several other such books - so the situation is not beyond repair but we have to be realistic. Academic economists have invested a lifetime’s reputation and energy in offering the courses they do - and neither can nor will easily offer programmes to satisfy future student demands for relevance and pluralism….. chances are that the next cohort will be more pliable... 

Academic Political Science  may not have quite the same level of pressure to change as in Economics but increasing questions are nonetheless being asked of it about the implications of the populist zeitgeist for the celebration of liberal democracy which masquerades as political science departments of US universities.

So what does all this mean for the present anguishing over populism?

I graduated in the 1960s as a “Labour” populist – although I never expressed it quite like that! I was schooled in the writings of RH Tawney, Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire, Saul Alinsky, Peter Marris and Martin Ryan; and inspired at various times by such distinctive and competing Labourites as Nye Bevan, John Strachey, GDH Cole, Hugh Gaitskell; RHS Crossman, Tony Crosland and John Mackintosh. The result of such a mish-mash was a pragmatic centralist with an anarchist streak…..I was one of the contributors to the famous 1975 Red Paper on Scotland and had sympathies with the alternative economic strategy and the Lucas Plan

And, despite the senior position I had reached in the 80s, I remained committed to ensuring that that the ordinary, decent citizen’s voice and collective efforts were respected and encouraged. I may not have been a Bennite but I respected the man.

I left the UK in late 1990 and therefore never knew New Labour and its insidious contribution to the current cynicism about politics – Neil Kinnock may have been the Labour Leader but John Smith was the solid leader-in-waiting…From 1978-1990 the articles of the maverick Marxism Today journal plotted the various ideas absorbing the British Left during that critical period. Gordon Brown even contributed a piece (in late 1989) which indicated if not populism a strong ideological flavor..

And Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, and always has been an ideologue – not a populist. But the fascinating 2017 British Labour Party Manifesto also has a strong populist streak…It’s a pity that so few of the chattering political and economic classes in Britain have yet been able to produce books which pick up the analysis from the point we had reached 30 years ago before New Labour seduced and traduced the Labour tradition….

Populism Resource

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-road-tosomewhere.html

http://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/controlling-masses.html

http://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/we-need-to-talk-aboutpower.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2016/11/populism-what-is-it.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/02/collapse-of-honourable-profession.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-is-populism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/04/populism.html

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/guardian-populism-europe-cas-mudde-hillary-clinton-immigration-tony-blair

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/for-a-left-populism-mouffe-review

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-donald-trump-democracy

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/08/29/book-review-for-a-left-populism-by-chantal-mouffe/

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/populism-without-the-people/

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/

https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-populist-explosion/ John Judis (2016)

http://counterpoint.uk.com/publications/

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/07/20/populism-socialism-mcgovernism/

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/10/28/the-promise-of-populism/

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/bib111bLSE.pdf

"The Road to….Somewhere"

This 2017 book may use the same metaphor and evince the same interest as Snyder’s in the causes of the political alienation and turbulence of the past two decades but, otherwise, could not be more different in its scope and style. And its essential focus on the UK is only a small part of the difference.

Both books deal with the populist upsurge against mainstream politics but this one’s is a serious effort to understand why social democratic voters have deserted the party in droves since the early 2000s. And his treatment of European populism shows a firm grasp of the European scene…

David Goodhart was a leftist Think-Tanker who – in 2004 (before the “Polish plumber” became famous) - wrote an essay that earned him notoriety and no little ostracism in New Labour circles .

In “Too Diverse?”, he argued that there was a trade-off between increased diversity, through mass immigration, and social solidarity, in the form of the welfare state. Goodhart said that for citizens willingly to hand some of their hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they needed to feel a basic level of affinity with those others. He argued that in the homogenous societies of old that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. But in the highly mixed societies of today, such fellow-feeling was strained.

He went on to write The British Dream – successes and failures of post-war immigration (2013) and last year produced The Road to Somewhere – the new tribes shaping British politics which I find the most insightful analysis of contemporary British society I’ve read…..Such books tend to be written by economists, political scientists or journalists – people like Will Hutton, John Kay or David Marquand – and do not convey the same depth of familiarity with the thoughts of the average citizen as Goodhart.

Goodhart argues that the key faultline in Britain and elsewhere now separates those who come from Somewhere – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those who could come from Anywhere: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated. He cites polling evidence to show that Somewheres make up roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20% to 25% and the rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.

A key litmus test to determine which one of these “values tribes” you belong to is your response to the question of whether Britain now feels like a foreign country. Goodhart cites a YouGov poll from 2011 that found 62% agreed with the proposition: “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.” Only 30% disagreed.

The book may focus initially on immigration but its analysis soon widens to cover key aspects of economic and social development in the last 25 years and the best part of the book for me is his critique of the new meritocracy; the inexplicable push for mass enrolment at universities; and the collapse of the commercial training system – with employers preferring to take the option of enthusiastic young central and eastern European graduates.

His initial presentation of the book here is particularly strong on sketching just how dramatic the changes in our economic, social and cultural world have been since 1992 - the year of Maastricht and the European citizen; the year the Democrats arrived on the scene with “Robert Reich’s “The Work of Nations” reflecting the prevailing view that globalisation would allow agricultural workers to be transformed into IT workers – as did New Labour a few years later. Well it didn’t happen….the only country where it did was Germany…In 2001 China joined the WTO…the Euro came into existence….. in 2004 the first wave of central European countries joined the EU. In 2008 the global financial crisis hit us and 2015 the immigrant crisis…..” 

The author is clearly well-versed in social surveys and his sense of how the world has so quickly changed very much gives me a sense of the 8 change factors which Matt Flinders identifies in his recent “Defending Democracy”

An excellent, extended review in Spiked Online goes so far as to suggest that “ a new form of social solidarity lies at the heart of the book”

And here, I think, we approach the core of Goodhart’s recent work: the search for a new form of social solidarity. He is concerned with the rift between the Somewheres and Anywheres not in order to take sides with one against the other, but to bridge it, or, as “The Road to Somewhere” puts it, to ‘reconcile the two halves of humanity’s political soul’.
To this extent, Goodhart really is neither on the left nor the right – and you can understand why “The Road to Somewhere” was originally planned as a book on ‘post-liberalism’. He is concerned with establishing the basis for what he variously calls a new social contract, or settlement, one grounded on a political recognition of the ‘decent populism’ he regards as the attitude of the vast majority. ‘[It] refers to those who broadly go along with changing attitudes on race and sexuality’, he says.

 ‘They aren’t in the avant garde of liberalisation, but they have accepted most of those changes – perhaps in some cases with reservations, but they’ve broadly accepted them. They are not liberals in the Anywhere sense. They have views about the world rooted in place, and very strong national attachments; they place a strong value on security; they focus on national rights over universal, human rights; they worry about the lack of opportunities for those not going to universities.’ …………

Yet in Goodhart there is sometimes a patrician-like air to his calls for a ‘new centre, common norms, things that will pull us together’, especially when he seems to want the establishment to provide it. And because of this, is there not a problem, too? How can a political class composed entirely from the Anywhere liberal section of society, incorporate the values and views of the majority of Somewheres, a majority on whom they have waged cultural war for decades? Any move certainly won’t come from the Labour Party, at the heart of whose resurgence lies little more than an Anywhere restoration, complete with a determination to overturn the Brexit vote. As Goodhart himself writes,

‘the Corbyn movement could be described as populist in economics but extreme Anywhere in most other respects. What it has not done is change the social composition of the party – about three quarters of Labour Party members are middle class, about 60 per cent are graduates, and almost 40 per cent live in London and the south-east’. 

And although he sees the Tories as closer to the Somewhere majority, ‘because they often are Somewheres, albeit more affluent than most’, there’s little evidence that they can break out of their political-class office of mirrors. He seems to admit as much: ‘Yes, I think [the political class] is almost entirely Anywhere – political activists, MPs, ministers, shadow ministers – all mostly university graduates, all liberal-minded Anywheres.’ 

At points his argument can sound like wishful thinking. ‘The political class has been divided down the middle between the militant Anywheres and the admonished Anywheres’, he tells me. 

‘And I think Theresa May is the most obvious admonished Anywhere. The admonished admit that they’ve got some things wrong, that there’s a chasm between the smart liberal people running society, and the rest, and it’s time we listened – and that’s what democracy requires. And then there are those, the militant Anywheres, saying we’ve given these idiots too much power, why did we call a referendum – the AC Grayling worldview. Those arguing thus seem almost to want to go back to property qualification for the vote, or that you must have at least a 2:1 before you get to cast a ballot. In other words, you’ve got to be of us before you vote.’……

‘Perhaps it’s as banal as doing things that matter to people, doing something about social care, housing, the post-school education landscape, which is hopelessly over-invested in universities, rather than vocational training and apprenticeships.’

The Road to Unfreedom?

Do(es) 25 years of researching the “Eastern bloodlands” unhinge your mind? This is the question I’m left pondering - in all honesty - after almost completing Timothy Snyder’s latest book The Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America (2018). I appreciate it's not exactly a delicate question in view of Snyder's reputation . The reviews in the Eurozine journal set the context - 

over the past decade Timothy Snyder has sought to convince western European and English-speaking audiences of the importance of east-central Europe for the history of the twentieth-century. Although the Holocaust is usually thought of as a western phenomenon, in “Bloodlands” (2010) and “Black Earth” (2015) he shows that by almost any measure (death rates, physical devastation, population displacement, societal breakdown or institutional destruction) it was primarily an eastern atrocity.

If we wish to draw the lessons of the 1930s and 40s, we must first understand what happened there.As a scholar of totalitarianism Snyder is understandably concerned by the return of fascist ideas clothed in the guise of right-wing populism. The striking similarities between the interwar crisis that followed the Great Depression (1929-39) and the aftermath of the Great Recession (from 2007) lead him to worry that the beginning of this century might end up looking much like the early decades of the last.

His previous work, “On Tyranny” (2017), started off as a warning posted on Facebook that went viral after Donald Trump’s election and details ‘20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today’. His “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) brings his longstanding interest in combating the western-centrism of European history and his more recent attempts to apply his knowledge of the past to the present together in a single volume. The book traces the current crisis of democracy back to Russia, showing how Vladimir Putin used fake news and the hacking of personal data – as well as support for neo-fascist parties in Europe and America – to rebuild Russian power and influence in the world.

As someone who lived in Central Asia from 1999-2007, I remember following the development of Russia’s “managed democracy” with particular interest. I never imagined that the crude but apparently successful efforts in building fake political parties there in the late 90s – an updated version of a Potemkin village – would be a test-bed for developments in the West.

Snyder’s narrative is organized chronologically, with each of the six chapters devoted to developments in a single year from 2011 to 2016. In particular, it focuses on how Russia rapidly shifted from rapprochement with the West to overt antagonism in 2012. Snyder links this transformation to the fact that Putin had to fake the presidential election that year in order to retain his grip on power.

He argues that after defeating the uprising in Chechnya, Putin needed a new enemy to rally the people behind him. He settled on the West, concocting a ‘fictional problem’ that focused on the alleged ‘designs of the European Union and the United States to destroy Russia’ (p.51).

Snyder highlights how Putin adopted the ideas of the fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), who argued that the Russian spirit must be mobilized against all external threats ‘by the caprice of a single ruler’ (p.24). Ilyin’s Manichaean worldview, combined with his obsession with sexual purity, helps explain both the vehemence of Russia’s recent rhetoric, as well as its erotic focus on the ‘homosexual’ attempts of the EU and America to ‘sodomize’ Russian virtue. Snyder notes, ‘The dramatic change in Russia’s orientation bore no relation to any new unfriendly action from the outside. Western enmity was not a matter of what a Western actor was doing, but what the West was portrayed as being’ (p.91).

Given my proximity for the past decade (in Romania) to the Ukraine, I started the book in the hope that it would help me better understand the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Phrases like “the politics of eternity”, however, soon put me off and I increasingly found myself shaking my head. Fellow historian Richard Evans captures my own thoughts in his Guardian review when he writes that

The effectiveness of Snyder’s thoughts on the “road to unfreedom” isn’t helped by the strangely declamatory, often obscure style in which they are expressed. One dubious generalisation follows another, as the author never troubles to support any of them with serious evidence. For instance: “Britain and France had no modern history as nation-states. The European powers had never been nation-states.” Does Snyder really think that the possession of an overseas empire negated the claim of the imperial power to be a nation-state?

Or: “The meaning of each election is the promise of the next one.” Most people think the meaning of an election is defined by the policies of the parties that contest it. And so on. Obsessed with the theory of Russian manipulation behind all the political surprises of recent history, from the Brexit vote to the election of Trump, he has little to say about the driving forces behind them, forces that are vital to understand if democracy is to be saved. And by packaging all of this in the endlessly repeated concepts of “the politics of eternity” and “the politics of inevitability”, he virtually guarantees that he will lose the attention of his readers. The current threats to democracy cry out for reasoned and powerfully expressed analysis, but regrettably, this is not such a book

And The Nation went so far as to suggest that Snyder’s latest book

marks the next phase in his transformation from academic historian to political commentator; it is also the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake. The book’s cover comes complete with helpful directional indicators: “Russia > Europe > America”—the road to unfreedom is a one-way street.

For Snyder, Russia is to blame for the growth of the “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, stoking the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, the rise of the far right in various European countries, and the Syrian refugee crisis. Russia is also in cahoots with the National Rifle Association and has been sowing dissension in the United States by encouraging hostility between the police and African Americans. Putin’s “grandest campaign” of all, though, was his “cyberwar to destroy the United States of America” by “escorting” Trump to the American presidency.

“And sentences that consist entirely of rhythmic abstractions”, The Nation caustically remarks, “convey very little” eg

“As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair”. One of his favorite images in the book is the abyss: so empty and so frightening. This gives us “Having transformed the future into an abyss, Putin had to make flailing at its edge look like judo,” but also “Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.” Truly the abyss swallows up all meaning.

But most of the media are delighted with the book.....as you will see from this "resource" which includes a 15 part series of a Snyder Youtube exposition.....I've included three more substantial texts to help the reader set the Snyder book in context.....

A Resource

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-great-russian-disinformation-campaign/564032/

https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/timothy-snyder-road-to-unfreedom-book-review-politics-us-russia-news-16211/

Timothy Snyder Speaks series – started Nov 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=153&v=Eghl19elKk8

Building an authoritarian polity; G Gill (2015)

The failure of democratisation in Russia – a comparative perspective; AB Evans (2011)

Russia’s Managed Democracy; Perry Anderson (2007)