Politics

Over the years I’ve become bored with politics, especially with the critics, who seem never to comprehend that to talk about an idea is very different from implementing it; words and actions two languages forced to speak through a poor translator. I still intervene, from time to time, but you will notice that the majority of these pieces are years old. Today I am more interested in the abstract nature of the genre, about which I am writing a book. 

 
Pablo Picasso: Cat Devouring a Bird

There is hardly any Brexit here. Brexit a wonderful example of that mistaken belief - ubiquitous in our present century - that life can be fixed by political means. The key pieces are:

Hero Worship How revolutionaries think.
Inevitable A radical must believe life is determined (by their own ideas).
Careless George Monbiot has been a bad boy.
Cartoon Concepts A typical columnist in the newspapers.
Dear Mr Albert... The atmosphere of politics is what matters most.

Trust a Hippy?
I praised William Davies once, I praise him again. He is a pleasant soul, who wants to see more idealism in politics. He has his doubts, though. Will the guardians of 10 Downing Street let an idealist through the door?

Powerful People
The typical politician has been broken down, and like some sci-fi film now walks about as three separate people: the technocrat, the idealist and the opportunist.

It's The Ruskies
Social justice campaigners, council managers, young, pushy middle class adults, the haute bourgeoisie more generally; brief encounters with these characters could easily produce feelings of impotence and distaste; too often they felt patronised. The vote for Brexit was a vote against them. What revenge!

Cartoon Concepts
I pull out Black Unity. Inside there is a photograph of Pharaoh Saunders, majestic with his afro hair and mandarin profile. I look at this photograph and I try to see what Richard Seymour sees.  
The idea of a DIY radicalism that lives outside the existing political structure and seeks to replace it is a dangerous one for the organised British Left, and goes against its gut instincts, which is to complain about the system rather than to actively transform it (we must ignore all the utopian rhetoric).  
I am not opposed to caricatures.  They are an important means of eliciting fundamental truths about a subject, although to achieve such clarity requires leaving out many details; they are therefore necessarily unjust and not wholly accurate. 
Because it is such a powerful accusation charges of anti-Semitism must be used with extreme caution; and with precision – only those who are really anti-Semites should be described as such.

Much Too Nice (Creating the Future V)
Socialism’s biggest success was in the 1920s and 30s when it helped transform the culture and the economy.  A period when economic development was seen in national terms, and the state was expected to play a much greater role in its management.  With planning more pervasive politics became more important; with increasing pressure for social equity; culminating in the liberal reforms of the post war Labour government.
Contrary to your views it may be that the monarchy could be a way towards a progressive politics, by at the very least creating tensions in a not necessarily cohesive British elite; unlike in America where there seems to be more of a single business class; one of the dangers of the republican position.
I can’t stop thinking about the red deans! There is a curious symmetry to their lives.  To the lives of Hewlett Johnson and Tony Blair, I mean – not all of you will have read that last post.  There is the preacher who dived into politics.  And the politician who drowned himself in religion… 
We have been here before.  In the last post, in fact, where I had a look at Tony Blair, a man forever spreading the message of the free market, a new kind of hope by a new kind of evangelist; who offers redemption from a jet plane; by shattering the cities below. 
We watch fascinated as rocks tumble into the sea; when analysis falls into ideology: 
The less you know about someone the more certain you are…  that you understand them: 

Outside The Club (Creating the Future IV)
Power and control has become more amorphous and diffuse, and is often misunderstood; which helps create a general cynicism about authority, although little understanding of how it works in practice.  It is easy to attack an overpaid chief executive but hard to grasp the workings of the institution of which he is part, the real cause of front line strain and general inequality.  
Herman Cain appears to be a self-centred, and hard-hearted, though not unintelligent, fool - perfect CEO material.  He is the twin of Steve Jobs, as a recent biography shows us only too clearly. 
All those guys and gals we thought were our mates in the early days of the 1970s – remember how we felt about Amis, Hitchins, Melanie Phillips, and even Clive James back then – we now discover are old bigots.  Have they changed, become sclerotic with age; or were they always like that, just that we didn’t notice? 
To dissect David Held’s apologia is not put him in the stocks but to better understand our liberal establishment; their ideas and motivations; their blind spots and their naiveties.
The universities are part of a culture where business and national security interests are conflated, and where increasingly it is the market that determines priorities. Given such a society, and the imperialism on which it rests, it is inevitable that hard moral issues will arise; and people will make mistakes. Held put into a political situation without the requisite skills and experience.
Advertising.
It is well known in the universities that many professors never read further than the introduction and conclusion of a book. Our MPs never get past the opening sentences of a short article. Too tired after filling out their expense forms to read much else. 
Hooligans are everywhere.  Not even bookshops are safe.
I seem to upset people all the time.  Many’s the chief executive who has gone home crying to his wife.  Why won’t that Mr Schloss just listen!  Why indeed…
A couple of interesting replies to my piece on the Hackney riot on the Media Lens Message Board.  Inevitably I have responded.  It seems a shame to lose it into internet oblivion….
It was a very British riot.  Civilised, as I walked through its aftermath, and quiet.  It is the quietness, the general calmness, that I will remember the most.  Disturbed only by the police; with their occasional sirens and later, when I reached Mare Street, the helicopters’ thick pulsating whir, transforming the sky into a mechanised motor; a London shopping district into a battle zone.
At what age do people walk away from the left?  The early twenties, for the majority, a few months after their first full time job.  A minority crawl away many years later; when, their faith weakened by repeated failures, they are seduced by the comfortable life; the mood music and soft lights on the other side of the party wall too powerful at last to resist...

Palimpsest (Creating the Future III)
Where has all the power gone?
There is no surprise, I have answered the comments referred to in my previous post; which I have only recently read.  The one is extraordinary; and shows, I think, a major problem with the left – its intolerance of different ideas; exhibited here as an attack on the common man. 

When Conservatives Become Socialists (Creating the Future II)
The second in my series on the left for Ceasefire Magazine has now appeared.
Two men on their own blogs are talking to each other; they are arguing with one another about the same thing.  One is on the ground floor and the other is at the top, looking down.  The one appears to have just entered the building; the other has been there for a long time.  One seems fresh, the other somewhat stale; they appear to come from the same country; though their talk is in different dialects.  We listen carefully, or try to, trying to understand what it is all about.

Victory Begins with Defeat (Creating the Future I)
Ceasefire Magazine has published the first article in what I hope is a little series on that amorphous thing we call the left.
This is much better than the old theology.  Then the services provided by the clerisy were just a little too obvious; to the cynics their godly pronouncements looked more like common bribes.  This new one seems much better, for it offers everybody a chance to partake of the ineffable; incomprehension is guaranteed to cover us all. 
These harsh attitudes to the royals, like the attacks on popular culture,  are often a measure of the class differences between the Left intelligentsia and the ordinary person.
Russell was born in Trellech in Monmouthshire.  He is Welsh!
Then a human turned up.  He didn’t like what I had to say.
What happens when a salesman is let down by his product?  He so much wants to believe there is no rust under the freshly painted bonnet; and that the brakes were not broke long ago.
Paxman jumps in: why bother with stupid people!  This exposes the foundation stone of the liberal establishment: we are rational, tolerant and intelligent; those who aren’t don’t matter (and, one suspects, this is their view of most of the population). 
Moore’s speech suggests an alternative strategy: embrace the national sentiment, but give it different values.  Thus his vision of America is one of equity and justice; of a true democracy.  It’s a position his listeners appear to share.  There is, it seems, a place still for rewriting the national story, and to provide a social democrat narrative, which resonates with the ordinary voter.
"Churchill was unpopular in the Welsh valleys for decades to come, even as late as the general election of 1951…  Since Churchill’s reaction, when challenged in the House in 1910, was to congratulate police and troops for maintaining law and order, while a ‘savage war’ was going on in the Rhondda, and to refuse any further inquiry, he and his defenders could not complain."
It is a test for the Liberal establishment.  Will they support Julian Assange; or will they let him go; into America’s very own Gulag Archipelago.  The GuardianThe New York Timesand Der Spiegel published the documents; but was it for love or for money?  Was it to expose the duplicity of our governments; or was it for the advertising revenue of increased readerships?
I am always curious to read David Osler, our Socialist friend. He knows what to write, before he writes it; at least that’s how it reads to me.
In the 1960s it was natural to think of radical politics as belonging to the Left – history seemed to be on its side, with the gradual liberalisation of the cultural sphere; and the improvement in worker’s rights.  The radical Right, if not forgotten, were viewed often as freaks or strange fanatics, completely outside the political realities; merely the detritus left over from the Fascist and Reactionary movements of the 1920’s and 1930’s.  History was waving goodbye to them…. 
So the Tories are to remove child benefit for the rich; for they don’t need it, and it will save money…  Here is a great Tory, writing 18 years ago about the Thatcher government and their attitude to this kind of thing.
Politics is a messy business, often boring, and requiring little intellectual content.  Not particularly attractive for academics and professors of philosophy; or the fanatics who want their ideas alone to rule.  And this may provide another incentive for this kind of “revolutionary thinking”.   It is not about politics as it is actually practised - the distribution of interests, the little compromises, the hard slog of administrative drudgery - but about life and death struggles, where to win is to win all…
References to Obama’s intellect and those of his followers shows what’s involved in the idolisation of today’s leaders: smartness is seen as the virtue; as lineage or battlefield prowess in previous centuries. 
We mustn’t use strong words about a non-entity, an insignificant belle-lettriste injecting himself with pomp and self-importance, with intellectual gravitas, as an athlete their steroids.
Words are slippery things, like snakes they slide through our reasoning.  A statement can both be true and false, depending on the context, and the material it includes within its premises.  Those premises – how much they can conceal! 
It is not to say culture and historical myths do not play a significant role in politics; but we must be aware of getting the balance wrong, of putting too much weight on metaphysical ideas, when it is the current economic and political situation which tend to be the main drivers of policy. 
The voice of History. Can you hear it? Those portentous tones, the confidence that everyone will listen (‘not intended to play…’) and the confidence he knows and understands the world (‘my comments policy… one of the most libertarian…'). Yet who is this writer...
The affinity between the American establishment and Israel is such that the latter is viewed as almost part of the United States – ideologically and culturally they are almost one. This gives Israel’s government the same rights and impunities as the White House and the Pentagon...
At bottom ideas are abstractions; and because these doctrines are made of ideas, and are not supported by empirical evidence, the confusions and contradictions within them can be easily avoided – ideas are almost infinitely malleable if not tested with hard fact.
Did Heath see ideas as musical notes, fixed and discrete entities which could be arranged at will; that he could play the country as he played the piano? The beauty of machines! But people are far more intractable.
Should work carry a health warning?
Someone writes a piece. It’s powerful and full of insight; this person knows their subject. Because of its depth it grasps the core issues, elucidates the central concerns of the topic, and thus the analysis reaches far wider, touching our own lives and understanding; its ideas have universal application.

A while ago I expressed the view that we were turning into the Soviet Union, middle era Brezhnev. It elicited some wild comment – a Texan, no doubt, exercising his personal liberty with a colt 45. Nevertheless, was I so wrong? When other people start having the same idea…
As we become less democratic, with cartels and a fusion of the economic and political systems creating a culture more akin to oligarchy, it is possible that there will be a far greater retrenchment; to the point where the belief and practice of democracy will have weakened; thus allowing for far greater oppression. 
You read an article and you predict the decline and fall of a Prime Minster:
Class War…. We leave it nowadays to the Socialist Workers Party. But can it be resurrected into mainstream politics?
Why should this be so? Why so much stress on political rights, and the single individual, when social policies could save more people, and make them free?

How difficult is it not to know?  In a previous post I referred to the willed ignorance of our politicians. This was most obvious in the parliamentary debates leading up to the Iraq War. Never was I so angry!
Old Labour. Pensioned off, and sent to Florida. Hasn’t been heard of for years…
Balance. Even-handedness. Listening to both sides… How can we disagree? But what if the balance of forces is uneven? Would we expect the weaker to compete on equal terms with the stronger, the Marvi Marmara with an Israeli warship?
The model of society is no longer the family, but the modern corporation; with its need for growth, its tight hierarchical structure, the departmental battles; and over all: the ingrained rules and habits of a stable bureaucracy. We’re no longer human, we’re bureaucrats.
This important book highlights what is special about a great thinker – the quality of his insights. Many of the arguments are false; made so by later social changes. Nevertheless, even if the facts have changed the penetrating observations remain, raising new questions for our time.
J.P. Stern in his classic study of Hitler makes the point that the rise of the Nazis was within a culture that had no “stable liberal tradition”, and they were able to use extremist politics and imagery that was part of that culture.
Why is Israel behaving in this way? Why doesn’t it care about the international community?
In a fascinating article David Runciman writes of how the polls at the beginning of an election campaign are closer to the result than those at its end. 
One article answers another.
When Harold Macmillan visited the Soviet Union in 1959 the Soviet authorities arranged for Boris Pasternak to leave Moscow, and to go Georgia, to avoid any contact between the British Prime Minster and the country’s then most famous writer. It was scared of a poet.
At what point in the Middle Ages did it become impossible to think outside Christianity?
What is striking about the above quote is that it captures a striking feature of these ideas: their distance, and immunity, from the experiences of the mundane world of eating, sleeping and surviving. The world of facts and emotions, of needs and desires, are reduced to theories and ideas, of texts and images. The latter treated as if they were the reality.