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| Jeremy Corbyn: in the new politics only the now matters | |
| (about 14 hours later) | |
| What would Jeremy Corbyn call the new mission statement on public ownership that he proposed this weekend? Clause Before? In his interview with the Independent on Sunday, considering a range of options on public ownership, he mused explicitly about “restoring the clause IV as it was originally written” – thus tearing down one of the last surviving guy ropes of the Blairite “big tent”, hammered into place at a special conference in 1995. | What would Jeremy Corbyn call the new mission statement on public ownership that he proposed this weekend? Clause Before? In his interview with the Independent on Sunday, considering a range of options on public ownership, he mused explicitly about “restoring the clause IV as it was originally written” – thus tearing down one of the last surviving guy ropes of the Blairite “big tent”, hammered into place at a special conference in 1995. |
| Related: Jeremy Corbyn denies he would bring back Labour's nationalising clause IV | Related: Jeremy Corbyn denies he would bring back Labour's nationalising clause IV |
| On this basis, Corbyn’s fellow leadership contender, Liz Kendall, was entitled to label him a retro-politician, peddling “Bennism reheated, a throwback to the past … We are the party of the future not a preservation society.” Her point was well made. Yet such attacks slide off the Teflon Trot because they misconstrue the role of history in contemporary culture. | On this basis, Corbyn’s fellow leadership contender, Liz Kendall, was entitled to label him a retro-politician, peddling “Bennism reheated, a throwback to the past … We are the party of the future not a preservation society.” Her point was well made. Yet such attacks slide off the Teflon Trot because they misconstrue the role of history in contemporary culture. |
| When Tony Blair became Labour leader, in the wake of the cold war’s end, the centre-left was enjoying an unexpected global recovery. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the initial spread of democracy and globalisation, the contrast between left and right was replaced by a struggle between old and new. When Blair announced his intention to transform his party, he simply renamed it New Labour. When the freshly elected Tory leader, David Cameron, wanted to unsettle his veteran opponent at his first PMQs in December 2005, he said of Blair: “He was the future once.” Yet we seem to have moved on even from that division between nostalgia and modernity. Corbyn’s appeal to his party is not diminished by the association of his ideological position with almost every disaster that befell Labour in the 80s. | When Tony Blair became Labour leader, in the wake of the cold war’s end, the centre-left was enjoying an unexpected global recovery. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the initial spread of democracy and globalisation, the contrast between left and right was replaced by a struggle between old and new. When Blair announced his intention to transform his party, he simply renamed it New Labour. When the freshly elected Tory leader, David Cameron, wanted to unsettle his veteran opponent at his first PMQs in December 2005, he said of Blair: “He was the future once.” Yet we seem to have moved on even from that division between nostalgia and modernity. Corbyn’s appeal to his party is not diminished by the association of his ideological position with almost every disaster that befell Labour in the 80s. |
| According to the new rules, the candidate’s past is not only struck from the record but irrelevant. And if there is a shift, it is not confined to Labour, or the UK. In the US, the boorish Donald Trump is eclipsing his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination by a combination of insult and disdain. When Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, one of the moderators at last week’s GOP debate, asked the property tycoon how someone who had “called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” could claim to have “the temperament of a man we should elect as president”, Trump resorted to the weakest, most over-used counter-claim: “I think the big problem this country has – is being politically correct.” He then asserted that the US was being left behind in what David Cameron used to call the “global race” while it fretted daintily about giving offence. | According to the new rules, the candidate’s past is not only struck from the record but irrelevant. And if there is a shift, it is not confined to Labour, or the UK. In the US, the boorish Donald Trump is eclipsing his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination by a combination of insult and disdain. When Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, one of the moderators at last week’s GOP debate, asked the property tycoon how someone who had “called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” could claim to have “the temperament of a man we should elect as president”, Trump resorted to the weakest, most over-used counter-claim: “I think the big problem this country has – is being politically correct.” He then asserted that the US was being left behind in what David Cameron used to call the “global race” while it fretted daintily about giving offence. |
| Corbyn speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all | Corbyn speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all |
| Of course, Kelly was not asking about political correctness, its campus and workplace derivatives, but simple humanity and commonplace decency. But Trump hijacked the question to wake Joe Six-Pack – watching the highlights on the news, maybe – and to let him know that he, the Donald, understood what it’s like to have to watch what you say about women in your own store while some slacker across the road gets a bunch of Ivy League lawyers defending his “constitutional freedom” to burn the flag. They cheered in the debate venue in Cleveland, Ohio, when Trump said the words “politically correct”. His calculation was that they would be cheering elsewhere, too. | Of course, Kelly was not asking about political correctness, its campus and workplace derivatives, but simple humanity and commonplace decency. But Trump hijacked the question to wake Joe Six-Pack – watching the highlights on the news, maybe – and to let him know that he, the Donald, understood what it’s like to have to watch what you say about women in your own store while some slacker across the road gets a bunch of Ivy League lawyers defending his “constitutional freedom” to burn the flag. They cheered in the debate venue in Cleveland, Ohio, when Trump said the words “politically correct”. His calculation was that they would be cheering elsewhere, too. |
| The structure of western politics is in radical transition. In May, the British general election was won in the most conventional manner imaginable. As Blair had warned in an interview with the Economist in January, it proved to be an election “in which a traditional leftwing party competes with a traditional rightwing party, with the traditional result”. | The structure of western politics is in radical transition. In May, the British general election was won in the most conventional manner imaginable. As Blair had warned in an interview with the Economist in January, it proved to be an election “in which a traditional leftwing party competes with a traditional rightwing party, with the traditional result”. |
| Yet alongside this conventional system a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure. To borrow the jargon of semiotics, it is “synchronic” (cross-sectional) rather than “diachronic” (part of a serial narrative, with a before and after). It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called “the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today’s voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise. | Yet alongside this conventional system a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure. To borrow the jargon of semiotics, it is “synchronic” (cross-sectional) rather than “diachronic” (part of a serial narrative, with a before and after). It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called “the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today’s voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise. |
| They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream. The contents of that stream are not ideologically coherent but they are identifiable. Corbyn, for instance, speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all, no longer citizens but the puppets of planetary corporations that are accountable to none. | They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream. The contents of that stream are not ideologically coherent but they are identifiable. Corbyn, for instance, speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all, no longer citizens but the puppets of planetary corporations that are accountable to none. |
| According to Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality, first published in 1997 and now reissued, “the question of inequality and redistribution is central to political conflict”. Well, yes – but unevenly so. The return of this question to political debate as a primary concern of politicians across the spectrum – Michael Gove declares that “inequality remains the great social and political challenge of our time” – is a response to a very specific, vivid sense of alarm. In countenance and bearing alone, Corbyn soothes that pain. | According to Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality, first published in 1997 and now reissued, “the question of inequality and redistribution is central to political conflict”. Well, yes – but unevenly so. The return of this question to political debate as a primary concern of politicians across the spectrum – Michael Gove declares that “inequality remains the great social and political challenge of our time” – is a response to a very specific, vivid sense of alarm. In countenance and bearing alone, Corbyn soothes that pain. |
| Hard as it is to ascribe emotional intelligence to a figure as unlovely as Trump, he, too, is an empathetic genius – seeking out his growling tribe through the TV. Boris Johnson also seems to have this ability to persuade voters that he is their ambassador to the despised political class, rather than (an important distinction) an envoy of the political class, dispatched to win our favour. The London mayor and those like him are amphibious creatures, at home in the sea of social media, soundbites and selfies as well as the land of regular politics. | Hard as it is to ascribe emotional intelligence to a figure as unlovely as Trump, he, too, is an empathetic genius – seeking out his growling tribe through the TV. Boris Johnson also seems to have this ability to persuade voters that he is their ambassador to the despised political class, rather than (an important distinction) an envoy of the political class, dispatched to win our favour. The London mayor and those like him are amphibious creatures, at home in the sea of social media, soundbites and selfies as well as the land of regular politics. |
| History did end, but not the way that Francis Fukuyama meant. It was simply absorbed into an all-encompassing present. “Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid,” says Trump. The candidates who will succeed are those who intuit what is bothering the electorate at that particular moment, who seem to empathise and who promise to ease the worst aspects of modernity’s pressures while exploiting all of its tools to full effect. | History did end, but not the way that Francis Fukuyama meant. It was simply absorbed into an all-encompassing present. “Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid,” says Trump. The candidates who will succeed are those who intuit what is bothering the electorate at that particular moment, who seem to empathise and who promise to ease the worst aspects of modernity’s pressures while exploiting all of its tools to full effect. |
| In the Babel of the digital nanosecond, voters are driven less by pristine moral imperatives than by the crushing weight of the immediate and of proximate stimuli. Successful politicians of tomorrow will be those who stretch out a hand and offer an analgesic. That’s why Corbyn is winning. He understands that the axiom of our era is not “Lest we forget” but “Make it stop”. | In the Babel of the digital nanosecond, voters are driven less by pristine moral imperatives than by the crushing weight of the immediate and of proximate stimuli. Successful politicians of tomorrow will be those who stretch out a hand and offer an analgesic. That’s why Corbyn is winning. He understands that the axiom of our era is not “Lest we forget” but “Make it stop”. |
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