Ill Fares the Land (15 page)

But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along—and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers. We need to sort out to our own satisfaction what aspects of the past we wish to keep and what made them possible. Which circumstances were unique? And which circumstances could we, with sufficient will and effort, reproduce?

If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most ‘freedomloving’ societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations—and we always do—why not others? Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for investment banks ‘too big to fail’, tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?

There may be good answers to these questions; but how can we know unless we pose them? We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of ‘revolution’. We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means. At the very least, we should accommodate Keynes’s warning on this matter: “[i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.”
²⁵

But having acknowledged and digested all of these considerations, we need to look ahead: what do we want and why do we want it? As the present dilapidated condition of the Left suggests, the answers are not self-evident. But what alternative do we have? We can hardly put the past behind us and merely keep our fingers crossed: we know from experience that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. After twenty wasted years it is time to start again. What is to be done?

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

 

 

 

 

T
hose who assert that ‘the system’ is at fault, or who see mysterious maneuverings behind every political misstep, have little to teach us. But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent—however irritating it may be when taken to extremes—is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

 

 

 

 

I
t is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise. Societies and communities where these are absent or have broken down do not fare well. But there is a price to be paid for conformity. A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed—or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits—loses its capacity to respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges.

The United States is a country founded upon small communities. As anyone who has lived for any length of time in such places can attest, the natural instinct is always to impose a regulative uniformity upon members’ public behavior. In the US, this disposition is partly countered by the individualistic propensities of the early settlers and the constitutional protections they prescribed for minority and individual dissent. But the balance, noted by Alexis de Tocqueville among many others, has long since swung towards conformity. Individuals remain free to say what they wish; but if their opinions cut athwart those of the majority they will find themselves outcast. At the very least the impact of their words will be muted.

Britian used to be different: a traditional monarchy governed by a hereditary elite which preserved its hold on power by permitting and even incorporating dissent and advertising its tolerance as a virtue. But the country has become less elitist and more populist; the non-conformist streak in public life has been steadily disqualified—as Tocqueville might have predicted. Today, full-blooded dissent from received opinion on everything from political correctness to tax rates is almost as uncommon in the UK as in the United States.

There are many sources of non-conformity. In religious societies, particularly those with an established faith—Catholicism, Anglicanism, Islam, Judaism—the most effective and enduring dissident traditions are rooted in theological differences: it is not by chance that the British Labour Party was born in 1906 from a coalition of organizations and movements which drew heavily on non-conformist congregations. Class distinctions too are a fertile breeding ground for dissident sentiments. In class-divided societies (or, occasionally, in communities organized by caste) those at the bottom are strongly motivated to protest their condition and, by extension, the social arrangements that perpetuate it.

In more recent decades, dissidence has been closely associated with intellectuals: a class of person first identified with late-19th century protests against the abuse of state power but in our own time better known for speaking and writing against the grain of public opinion. Sadly, contemporary intellectuals have shown remarkably little informed interest in the nittygritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically-defined topics where the choices seem clearer. This has left debates on the way we ought to govern ourselves to policy specialists and ‘think tanks’, where unconventional opinion rarely finds a place and the public are largely excluded.

The problem is not whether we agree or disagree on any given piece of legislation. The problem is the way we debate our shared interests. To take an obvious (because familiar) instance: any conversation here in the United States on the subject of public expenditure and the benefits or otherwise of an active role for government will very quickly fall foul of two exclusion clauses. The first mandates that we are all in favor of holding taxes to the minimum and ‘keeping government out of our affairs’ wherever possible. The second, in effect a demagogic variation on the first, asserts that none of us would wish to see ‘socialism’ replace our well-oiled and long-established way of government and life.

Europeans fondly suppose themselves less conformist than Americans. They smile at the religious corrals into which so many US citizens retreat, abandoning independence of mind to group-speak. They point to the perverse consequences of local referenda in California, where well-financed ballot initiatives have destroyed the tax base of the world’s seventh largest economy.

But it was a recent referendum in Switzerland that banned the construction of minarets in a country that boasts just four and where almost every resident Muslim is a secular Bosnian refugee. And it is the British who have meekly accepted everything from closed circuit television cameras to enhanced and intrusive policing in what is now the world’s most ‘overinformed’ and authoritarian democracy. There are many respects in which Europe today is a better place than the contemporary US; but it is far from being perfect.

Even intellectuals have bent the knee. The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line. Criticism of the military and those in political authority—always harder in times of war—was pushed to the margins and treated as something akin to treason. Continental European intellectuals were freer to oppose the gadarene rush, but only because their own leaders were ambivalent and their societies divided. The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply.

But at least war, like racism, offers clear moral choices. Even today, most people know what they think about military action or racial prejudice. But in the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today’s democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy implications are far beyond the understanding of the common man or woman—a point of view enforced by the increasingly arcane and mathematical language of the discipline.

Not many ‘lay people’ are likely to challenge the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of the Treasury or their expert advisors in such matters. Were they to do so, they would be told—much as a medieval priest might have advised his flock—that these are questions with which they need not concern themselves. The liturgy must be chanted in an obscure tongue, accessible only to the initiated. For everyone else, faith will suffice.

But faith has
not
sufficed. The emperors of economic policy in Britain and the US, not to mention their acolytes and admirers everywhere from Tallinn to Tbilisi, are naked. However, since most observers have long shared their sartorial preferences, they are ill-placed to object. We need to re-learn how to criticize those who govern us. But in order to do so with credibility we have to liberate ourselves from the circle of conformity into which we, like they, are trapped.

Liberation is an act of the will. We cannot hope to reconstruct our dilapidated public conversation—no less than our crumbling physical infrastructure—unless we become sufficiently angry at our present condition. No democratic state should be able to make illegal war on the basis of a deliberate lie and get away with it. The silence surrounding the contemptibly inadequate response of the Bush Administration to Hurricane Katrina bespeaks a depressing cynicism towards the responsibilities and capacities of the state: we expect Washington to under-perform. The recent US Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited corporate expenditure on election candidates—and the ‘expenses’ scandal in the UK Parliament—illustrate the uncontrolled role of money in politics today.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, responding to a January 2010 report on economic inequality in the UK which confirmed the scandalous gap separating rich and poor that his party had done so much to exacerbate, pronounced it “sobering” and conceded that there was “much further to go”. One is reminded of Captain Renault in
Casablanca:
“I’m shocked, shocked”.

Meanwhile, the precipitous fall from grace of President Obama, in large measure thanks to his bumbling stewardship of health care reform, has further contributed to the disaffection of a new generation. It would be easy to retreat in skeptical disgust at the incompetence (and worse) of those currently charged with governing us. But if we leave the challenge of radical political renewal to the existing political class—to the Blairs and Browns and Sarkozys, the Clintons and Bushes and (I fear) the Obamas—we shall only be further disappointed.

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.

But they are also more likely than their elders to be tempted by apoliticism: the idea that since politics is so degraded in our time, we should give up on it. There have indeed been occasions where ‘giving up on politics’ was the right
political
choice. In the last decades of the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, ‘anti-politics’, the politics of ‘as if’ and mobilizing ‘the power of the powerless’ all had their place. That is because official politics in authoritarian regimes are a front for the legitimization of naked power: to bypass them is a radically disruptive political act in its own right. It forces the regime to confront its limits—or else expose its violent core.

However, we must not generalize from the special case of heroic dissenters in authoritarian regimes. Indeed, the example of the ‘anti-politics’ of the ’70s, together with the emphasis on human rights, has perhaps misled a generation of young activists into believing that, conventional avenues of change being hopelessly clogged, they should forsake political organization for single-issue, non-governmental groups unsullied by compromise. Consequently, the first thought that occurs to a young person seeking a way to ‘get involved’ is to sign up with Amnesty International or Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch or Doctors Without Borders.

The moral impulse is unimpeachable. But republics and democracies exist
only
by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants. The British House of Commons today is a sad sight: a parlor of placemen, yes-men and professional camp followers—at least as bad as it was in 1832, the last time it was forcibly overhauled and its ‘representatives’ expelled from their sinecure. The US Senate, once a bulwark of republican constitutionalism, has declined to a pretentious, dysfunctional parody of its original self. The French National Assembly does not even aspire to the status of an approval stamp for the country’s president, who bypasses it at will.