aurelian2022 | There’s a pretty solid consensus that the western political class today is totally incapable, and that it presides over fragile state systems, that it has itself hollowed out and de-skilled progressively for the last forty years. Conversely, it is agreed that the West faces an array of existential problems never seen before, some already with us, others yet to arrive. Yet there’s been a surprising lack of reflection on the implications of these two truths together. Let’s peel away a few scabs, and try to see what’s likely to be hiding underneath.
Almost everyone who’s not a member of the western political class, or a parasite upon it, views it with a kind of numb despair. Increasingly professional in the blinkered and isolated sense, it is increasingly amateurish in every other. This would matter less if the class were supported by competent and properly staffed state structures, but that is seldom the case. Most state services in western countries have been reduced to shadows of what they once were.
That much is generally agreed, but there has been little attempt to think about what exactly the practical consequences are, and how they might complicate, or even prevent, an effective response to problems caused by climate change, disease, war, mass population movements, and all the rest. The conclusion of this essay will be a bit like an Aristotelian syllogism: western states are increasingly being confronted with massive, interlinked problems, requiring competent and far-sighted management. But there is no competent and far-sighted management. Therefore we are stuffed. I’m now going to try to put a little flesh on these unattractive-sounding bones.
Let’s start with the biggest weaknesses of the system. The first is the incestuous and exclusive nature the political class, Now of course this is not new. The House of Lords in eighteenth-century England, or the aristocracy at Versailles, were at least as ingrown and far removed from the concerns of ordinary people then, as their descendants are today. But in the eighteenth century there was no question of a notionally representative political class, theoretically owing a duty to the people: now there is. It’s a familiar story: the end of mass political parties, the dominance of politicians without experience of anything outside politics, the capture of the main western parties by a well-off, culturally homogeneous professional and managerial class, the triumph of image and discourse over reality, and the increasing contempt of the political class for the people who elect them. Beyond valid concerns about corruption and nepotism, there are two entirely technical consequences of all this, that bode ill for the political management of even relatively simple problems, and which will make facing up to the kind of complex crises that are starting to arise now difficult, if not impossible.
The first is that fundamental traditional political skills are no longer needed for career success. Once upon a time, politicians would try to get elected, and to develop personal and organisational skills that made that possible. They would rely on large numbers of volunteers for canvasing and to get the vote out, and on convincing as many people as possible to vote for them by personal contact and giving speeches. Few politicians are capable of that today. Rather, success comes from appealing to an in-group, to positioning yourself well with party militants, and to getting favourable coverage from certain media sources. “The electorate” is those who read your Twitter posts. Why does this matter? Well, it means that when a genuine crisis arrives, such politicians are incapable of understanding, let alone communicating with, and certainly not motivating, ordinary people. The epitome of this type of politician must be Emmanuel Macron, whose attempts to talk directly to the French people during height of the Covid crisis were so awful, and so embarrassing, that people hid under the table to get away from him. Here was a man clearly hopelessly out of his depth, in a situation where McKinsey was not the solution.
The second is that genuine ideas are no longer needed either. True, governments are still elected with notional programmes, but that’s a polite fiction. Politics is about winning the media battle, looking good on TV, massaging genuine political issues so that they go away, internal warfare within the party, and winning the next election. Government “initiatives” are generally sterile technocratic exercises which take money from those who have too little already, or give even more to those who already have too much. When a genuine political crisis arises (Covid, Brexit, Ukraine) the system finds that it cannot be managed or Twittered away, and has no idea what to do, other than to try to look good on TV. So it inevitably panics. With Covid, western governments have effectively surrendered, and allowed the disease to propagate freely, because they don’t have the moral or intellectual capability to fight it effectively. And Ukraine is being dealt with, so far as I can tell, on the basis that winter isn’t coming this year after all. The result is a kind of paralysis at the heart of government, where nothing is ever done except in haste and for immediate effect on one hand, or out of sheer panic on the other.
Even without forty years of the hollowing out of state capacity, this would still cause problems. Contrary to myth, public servants prefer to work for a government that knows what it wants, and sets objectives (and no, not those sort of objectives). Most senior figures in western public services have now spent their careers working in a political culture which is obsessed with image and with instant effects. There are no rewards any more for being prudent, for thinking long-term, or for telling the political class that they are storing up trouble for the future. All this produces a kind of corruption: the prizes go to those ready to tell the political class what it wants to hear, and to help them do whatever it takes to get good media coverage. Good people leave, or just never join.
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