There is something hauntingly familiar in Sunny’s efforts to ‘re-think Obama’ and his comments on the lessons of the US ‘netroots’ movement…

In the UK, we frequently mention the US ‘netroots’ and how they forced politicians to take notice of blogs. But one aspect of that revolution almost always goes unremarked here. In their seminal book, Crashing the Gate, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD made one point very clear: tired of the factional infighting and endless pontification about where Democrats should be going, they were going to focus simply on making sure the party was going to win the election. They wanted to discuss what the Democratic Party needed to do to win and retain power – simple as that.

Mmm… been there, done that, bought the t-shirt back in 1994.

Its the same old argument that the architects of New Labour advanced back in the mid 90’s and look where that’s taken us over the last decade or so.

Sorry, does that sound a little dismissive, because that’s not my intention?

Sunny’s right, of course. If you’re serious about winning elections then there’s a point at which you have to put the infighting and endless navel-gazing to one side and get down to the business of making sure that you do win the election and either take, or retain, power but – and here’s the rub – that’s only half the story.

As Neil Kinnock rightly observed in his speech to the Labour Party conference in 1985:

“We know that power without principles is ruthless, sour, empty, vicious. We also know that principle without power is idle sterility.”

In the last ten years we’ve seen much that has been ruthless, sour, empty and vicious – and I’m not just referring to Alistair Campbell (although now you mention it) – and we’ve seen our fair share of sterility as well. The current downturn in the economy and the credit crunch may well have [finally] exposed New Labour’s lack of imagination to the full glare of public scrutiny but for those who take an interest in such things, the intellectual vacuum at the heart of the New Labour has been apparent for years. New Labour ran out of ideas somewhere around the beginning of Blair’s second term and has been bumping along on fumes and whatever it could scrape from the gutter outside the offices of the Daily Mail ever since, even if it was only at the point at which Blair cited Thomas Hobbes as authority for his ‘Respect Agenda’ that the scale of the mess that New Labour would leave behind became fully apparent.

And before anyone gets to feeling a bit too smug about that kind of criticism coming from my direction, its worth pointing out that neither of the other two main parties are in any better shape on the ideas front.

Cameron might have temporarily put a shiny new veneer on the Conservative Party but scratch the surface and is ‘same old, same old’; tax cuts for the rich, social policies written by Christian ideologues and a bit of old fashioned Tory paternalism dressed up for the 21st century in modern-day psychobabble. ‘Nudge’, my arse, if you look at the policy detail most of what you’ll find is the same old social authoritarianism with a winning smile and a big dose of ‘How Very Dare You!’ whenever anyone point that out.

Oh, and don’t get my started on the Lib Dems. They’ve had 20 years to figure out whether or not they’re liberals or social democrats and they’e no closer to reaching a conclusion and they’ve got one viable electoral policy which amounts to hanging around in the vain hope that the day will come whem both the other parties succeed in seriously pissing off the electorate at the same time, allowing them to sneak through the middle on the ‘lesser evil ticket’.

Don’t get too offended here. I’m talking about the political classes, the politicians and the party hierarchies and all their attendant hangers-on, not bloggers. Once you’ve managed to filter out the noise and give the moron tendency the slip you can still find real politics and real ideas out here on the Electronic Frontier.

The political classes have become sterile, although only intellectually and not biologically – damn, you can’t have everything – especially when it comes to economics. I mean, seriously, when was the last time that the left generated anything new in terms of economic thinking?

Marx? – 19th Century.

What about Keynes? – Pre-World War II.

How about Seldon’s ‘Third Way? – Neoliberal economics in a cheap suit.

And, again, the right are not much better off – Neoliberalism might not have hit its stride until the 80s but the thinking behind dates back to the 50s and its starting to show its age.

Broadening things out just a little, what is there that’s even remotely new on the political scene?

Managerialism? – Nope, that kicked off in the 1940’s and its key tract, James Burnham’s ‘The Managerial Revolution’ provided some of the inspiration for Orwell’s 1984.

What about Neoconservatism? – 1970s, although it been argued that its has its roots in Trotskyism, but that’s another story and, in any case, one of it leading lights, Francis Fukayama, has already cut and run (in 2002) and has since equated it with Leninism in an essay in the New York Times in 2006.

How’s that for a paradox. We got a political class that’s obsessed with novelty, newness and modernity and not a single one amongst them has any ideas of a more recent vintage that the 1970s.

And that’s irritating enough, but its not the whole story and what you’ve also got to factor into the equation are the dolts and dullards who fervently believe all this crap to the exclusion of all sense and reason.

Do we need to spell it out or will a general characterisation do? We’re talking here about the kind of people who think that whatever is they happen to believe in, whether its a particular religion, a political ideology or even an economic theory, amount to a universal grand theory of everything and the world would inevitably be much better place if only there even more of whatever it is they believe in and everybody in the world believed the same thing they do.

But even that’s not the full story because every so often some of these people get into positions of power and authority or their ideas spread and come to permeate and then dominate a particular sphere and suddenly their grand theory of everything gets put to the test and, eventually, found wanting because there isn’t a single grand theory of everything or, to be more accurate, if there is such a theory then it’ll consistent of several blackboards worth of shit-kicking mathematical equations that serve to unify Einsteinian relativity and Quantum mechanics and, in practical terms, it’ll mean next to bugger all to virtually everyone. It ain’t going to give you the date of the second coming or tell you whether its worth cutting interest rates to stimulate the economy or how many tractor factories you should be buliding in the next five years.

Political, economic and religious ideas are born within a particular context, they reflect a particular reality and a set of conditions, one that existed in a particular location and at particular time. The more successful ideas tend to be those that are expressed in terms that are general enough to allow for a bit of wiggle room, a bit of adaptation here, a bit of reinterpretation there to try to fit in with the world around them but they can never fully escape their origins, they have limitations, there are things that could be predicted at the time the idea was formed and these couldn’t be allowed for with sufficient flexibility to allow those limitations to be overcome. So we shouldn’t be surprised at all when someone gets into a position to give Marxism a go and it doesn’t result in a stateless utopian dreamworld any more than we should be surprised that Jesus hasn’t popped back for his (by some) long anticipated second visit or that that the deregulation of markets doesn’t automatically create free and fair competion, sometimes it just turns them into a playground for the venal and corrupt.

None of this means that any of these ideas are utterly wrong or complete without any foundation (except the second coming thing, of course) it just means that they’ve run into to something they hadn’t counted and need to be rethought even if it means chucking out a few preconceptions along the way.

But that’s not how things work in practice, not when it comes to the ‘true believers’ and one of the best illustrations of that is to be found in what became known as ‘The Great Disappointment‘.

The story itself is straightforward enough. In the mid 19th Century, a Baptist preacher named William Miller made a prediction of the approximate date of the second coming (sometime between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844) and a lot of people swallowed it wholesale. Naturally enough, the 21st March 1844 passed and the ‘Big J’ hadn’t turned up which rather confused a lot of the people who’d swallowed Miller’s story. A few months later (August) Samuel S Snow announced that after a bit of ferreting about in Biblical texts everything was going to fine after all and the ‘Big J’ would be appearing live on the 22nd October – and, again, he pulled an Amy Winehouse and no-showed the gig.

Now, to a sceptic the answer here is obvious, Miller and Snow were off with the sky-fairy and there was nothing at all special or significant in any of these date – they just got it plain wrong – and that’s how some of Miller’s followers took it but not others. In their eyes Miller had to right even if the event he predicted didn’t happen and out of this emerged a number of interesting if extremely specious rationalisations and attempts to salvage the ‘prophecy. There was at least one more attempt at resetting the date of the second coming, which failed (obviously); some settled on the ‘shut door’ belief, which held that humanity ‘probabtion’ had ended on that date and that only those who lived a pure and entirely blameless life would, henceforward, get into heaven. That one died out pretty quickly as people cottoned on to the fact that if that we true then repentence was no longer a cosmic cop out for the sinner and they went off to form the Advent Church and cook up the idea of ‘soul sleep‘ and others went off to found the Seventh Day Adventist Church and came up with the doctrine of ‘investigative judgement‘, a rather curious exercise in cosmic bureaucracy, to cover their embarrassment. Oh, and there were some who decided that Jesus was going to come back on that date but changed his mind when he realised just how people there were who still weren’t Christian, which made his no show everybody else’s fault.

Today we call this kind of thing ‘cognitive dissonance‘ – people get uncomfortable and stressed in situations where they have to try and hold on to two seemingly contradictory ideas at once so they reject one of them even though both may be true. A good example of this in a modern context can be found in the reaction you get amongst hardcore Thatcherite Tories when you start to point out that most of negative social outcomes they traditionally blame on the liberal culture of the 1960’s don’t actually start showing up in earnest in the socio-political and socio-economic data until the 1980s.

To some the admission that Thatcherism had negative as well as positive consequences, that it created problems as well as solved them is tantamount to heresy. That can’t accept that idea in the same way that many of Miller’s followers could not accept that he’d just got the date of the second coming completely wrong because to accept that as true would be to fatally undermine their belief in the fundamental ‘rightness’ of Thatcherism. It has to be either all good or all bad, it can’t just have limitations, things it couldn’t deal with and didn’t have all the answers for. It;s these same people who firmly believe that we’d all be sitting here today approaching in the 30th year on unbroken Tory rule if only the party had stuck with her in 1990, that the Tory’s gradual slide into opposition under Major was a sign that the party had deviated from the ‘true path’, that Hague, IDS and Howard failed to retake power because their eiher failed to get the Thatcherite message across or were undermined in their efforts by the ‘wets’ and the Europhiles and if and when Cameron takes them back to the ‘promised land’ he’ll either have to accept the fundamental rightness of their beliefs or be pushed aside.

One can see much the same psychology in Labour ranks, in the hard left refusal to take the hint after the 1983 election debacle and today amongst the ‘uber-Blairites’ some of whom firmly believe that if only the Maximum Tone were still in charge and hadn’t been hamstrung in the pursuit of his ‘vision for Britain’ by the Brownites, the Unions and other fully paid-up members of the awkward squad then Labour would be well on the way to a fourth term and smashing the upstart Cameron and the entire Tory Party into political oblivion, after which the glorious leader would hoover the Lib-Dems, annoint a successor of his personal choosing and establish a Blairite hegemony that would last for a thousand years, and still get home in time to give Cherie a good seeing to and defeat Mohammed Ahmadinejad in hand to hand combat.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating for effect – well, some of its an exaggeration – but the serious point is that there are people in positions of power and authority who have just such a rigid view of the world and who use their position to promote those who see the world in much the same way into other positions of power and authority around them. They may well talk endlessly about change and reform and modernisation but they lack the most basic and fundamental prerequisites necessary to bring about that change, the ability to realise that the world is changing around them, that they don’t have all the answers and that some of the things that used solve problems for them no longer work, not because they’ve never worked but because they’re outdated and no longer relevant.

These people and their ideas are the arterial plaque of the political system and every once in a while they, and their ideas, do need to be flushed out but to do that you need not only someone to do the flushing but some fresh ideas to flush the old ones out with.

We’ve come a long way from ‘re-thinking’ Obama but the fact of the matter is that I don’t expect that he’ll be a disappointment because I don’t have that much in the way of expectations to begin with. If he wins the election, the presentational style of politics in Washington will change and with a bit of luck we may see the US taking a more nuanced and subtle approach in its foreign policy but as to whether we’ll see an significant changes in content and substance, I doubt that very much. There are too many variables and too much that lies outside of Obama’s control both globally, where the idea that national governments can control or direct the markets has been an illusion since at least the 1960s, and domestically where the devolved nature of the US political system with its Federal and State governments and its municipal authorities streching right down to the level of elected sheriffs, judges and school boards, make the system too diffuse to effect real change.

As for Britain, that’s a bit of different matter. The system doesn’t work against us to anything like the same extent. In fact, the drive towards the centralisation of power on Westminster should, theoretically, work in our favour. It is still possible to drive change from the top, even devolutionary and democratising change if only those at the top are genuinely committed to that kind of far-reaching change which they’re not – and you only have to look at the utterly self-serving approach taken by both Labour and the Tories on the reform of party-funding for proof of that.

There are things to be learned from the netroots movement, certainly, but also things to be done before those lessons are put into practice. What we can’t afford to do is what Labour members did back in the mid-1990s when they close ranked behind Blair to win an election without having any clear idea of what he really stood for – which turned out to be not much more than whatever’s necessary to win the next election and principles be damned. Just look at the speed with which he sold out to the Daily Mail on immigration after the 2005 election – do we really want to risk that happening again.

There’ll be a time and place for liberal and left-wing bloggers to close ranks and put everything behind a push for victory but that time isn’t now – we need the ideas first and, fortunately enough, that may just turn out to be playing to our strengths and into the right-wing blogosphere’s key weaknesses.

For all its been right-wing bloggers who’ve emerged to become the ‘big boys’ of the blogosphere to date, in terms of traffic, if you look at whose sprinted clear of the pack and the kind of politics and political thinking they represent then, for the most part, you’ll find that they add very little to the political process by way of ideas or original thinking. Most of the top echelon of the right-wing blogosphere operate from with what are markedly orthodox conservative positions – its only really when you get out into the ‘fringes’, amongst the smarter Libertarians and the Witans, that’s you’ll find that much original thinking. Amongst the rest, give or take the fact that Guido prefers to play court jester rather than fully exercise his libertarian sensibilities most of the time, what you’ll find in mostly loyalty to the cause or the kind of semi-Thatcherite orthodoxy that’s been apty dubbed ‘Continuity IDS’ plus the occasional bonehead who knows how to repeat all the libertarian rhetoric, parrot-fashion, having picked it up from the trolls over at Guido but, in reality, wouldn’t know the difference between Freidrich Hayek and Salma Hayek unless one of them tried shag them.

On the liberal-left, centre-left or independent left – whichever term you prefer – things look a lot different. We don’t, at this stage, generate the kind of traffic of a Guido, Iain Dale or Con Home but then no one over here, except maybe Recess Monkey, has been trying to play then at their game. There’s very little overt courting of Westminster elites and the political lobby and a lot more debate around issues of policy, philosophy and ideas – it might not be the stuff of the ‘netroots’ movement but it is generating ideas and fresh perspectives on left-wing politics and although much of it is not formally attached to any one political party, as yet, it is closer to the mainstream of liberal and left-wing politics than the Liberatarians and Witans are to the Conservative mainstream under Cameron.

The real difference between the Liberal-Left and Right-wing blogosphere isn’t a matter of popularity, audience share, or the amount of traffic that some bloggers and it isn’t about personalities, style, or pandering to the denizons of the Westminster Village, its about being in a very different place to the right in terms of ideas and about exerting a very different kind of political influence to that which the current ‘big dogs’ of right-wing blogging have been aiming for. They want a change of government, we’re looking to create a change in philosophy, to re-engineer liberal-left politics for the 21st century.

It’ll be interesting to see which turns out to be the better route in the long run.

About the author
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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