There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

I've been expecting Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister ever since he was Mayor of London, and was only mildly surprised when Michael Gove's little Brutus-act delayed his progress by a couple of years. I don't possess any supernatural powers of prediction, it just seem blindingly obvious that he's the only politician with sufficient ruthlessness and charisma among the current professionalised political class. What was a bit surprising was just how inadequate they all proved at dealing with his Machiavellian skills during those grim months from October to December last year (when even the speaker of the Commons was trying to egg them on like a rowing cox).

This post is the text of a talk I gave in January to a panel discussion organised in Finsbury Park by Phil Cohen, under the name 'There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here'. The other speakers were Phil himself, Andrew Calcutt, Valerie Walkerdine, Tim (T.J.) Clark, Lynne Segal and Baroness Ruth Lister: 

Dick Pountain/There Must Be.../ 20th January 2020 08:52:01

I realised the election was lost on the Friday before, when Channel 4 News sent a team to do a vox pop in a northern labour seat. The man they interviewed, who’d only ever voted labour before, called Boris a "lovable buffoon" but said he would nevertheless vote for him. The following week’s defeat was particularly bitter because many people hoped that Labour was about to win a majority comparable to that of 1945 which founded the modern welfare state. Attlee's government came to power thanks to a social solidarity engendered by the collective experience of fighting and provisioning World War Two. British business - or “the capitalist class” if you prefer - was prepared to compromise with organised labour both for their common interest in reconstruction and to avoid the threat of more radical expropriation.

That degree of solidarity clearly can’t be relied upon nowadays, and to understand why, examine what lay behind that man’s description of the "lovable buffoon" who’s now our prime minister. He knew quite well that Boris Johnson isn't going to solve his personal economic problems, but he didn't believe Jeremy Corbyn would solve them either. That’s probably because he thinks no-one can, but he'd rather vote for the one that he thinks is more like himself -- the one who like a drink and a laugh, and who will get Brexit done -- a largely symbolic raising of the drawbridge that he thinks might preserve what he does have from marauding foreigners. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket but he'd rather go there with Boris, and with a giggle rather than a lecture.

The Left devotes a lot of thought to the question of why the working classes, both here and in the USA, choose to vote against their own "economic interests", often using abstractions like ‘false consciousness’, ‘ruling ideology’, ‘consumer capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’, all of which are merely descriptive. For the UK we can find a more concrete answer in party politics.The 1945 welfare state improved people’s lives over the next half century enormously, in housing, healthcare, education, and employment. It once looked as if this progress would continue smoothly toward some form of pan-European social democracy.

But as we all know this progress was interrupted in 1979 by the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, which set out to head off such an outcome. Within that government, a group on the Right of the party, who favoured an American-style unregulated economy, set out on a deliberate, tenacious and effective 40-year campaign to undo the solidarity that sustained the welfare state. During Margaret Thatcher’s three periods of office, they devised a policy of selling council houses to their occupants. In the 2nd January edition of the London Review of Books there's an excellent review by Susan Pedersen in which she identifies this policy of selling public housing as a turning point in post-war history.

The policy was part of a three-pronged attack, the other two being malicious neglect of heavy industry to weaken the grip of trade unions, and the fostering of anti-European and anti-immigrant sentiment. But the housing sales were the masterstroke. They gave many Labour voters a stake in the housing market, and this was followed up by restrictions on any further building of council houses, which eventually lead to the housing shortage and ferocious price inflation that’s still with us and is a major factor in the huge increase in inequality and homelessness of the last 40 years. It drove a wedge through the heart of Labour's support, between those who’d bought and those who hadn’t, another split that's still with us. Thatcher famously said she was creating a ‘property-owning democracy’, when in fact she only created half of one. 

The other half, now mostly at the mercy of private landlords lived more precariously, more liable to identify immigrants as competitors for jobs and homes, and less likely to vote Labour. But among the new home owners it reinforced a feeling of autonomy - having your own home to decorate as you like, perhaps a car rather than public transport to go where you like. It’s the attraction of such feelings of autonomy that’s missing from many Left analyses that ask why people vote against their ‘economic interests’ - in the last instance, they value autonomy over cash. Conflict between autonomy and collective good has been around as long as there’s been society, and it always plays better to the Right than to a Left that tends to undervalue autonomy. 

Following Thatcher’s fall, the Labour Party was forced to acquiesce in her counter reformation to get reelected in 1997 under Blair, and ever since the crash of 2007 it's been unable to regain the full confidence of ‘lovable buffoon’ man. Brexit was the Tory Atlanticist's final decisive weapon. Like all the most effective weapons it was two-edged in that it split both the main parties, but the Tory Right correctly guessed that the party’s historic will to power over principle would prevail against Labour’s historic tendency to factionalism and moral probity. And during those horrible three months of 2019 they deftly out-manoeuvered both their own “wet” wing and the Labour Party, to place Boris Johnson in power with a working majority.

Climate crisis hasn’t played a major role in the ‘Thatcherite plot’ until now, but now it’s set to widen the splits in our society that they’ve caused. And we’re not alone in this predicament, as the electorates of almost all Western democracies are splitting in a similar fashion. There’s growing generational split. The younger generations, whose futures are most threatened by climate change, are being politically galvanised by the threat, as well as by an inability to afford housing in the inflated market their parents generation profits from. There’s a growing gap between city dwellers who have decent, even greenish, public transport, and those outside cities won’t be willing to give up driving cars because alternative public transport is inadequate (and because they like driving - that autonomy thing again). Widest of all is the split between those who would close borders to keep out the mass migration of those displaced by war, flood, fire and famine, and those who support freedom of movement.

Under such conditions, promising to restore 1945-style social democracy will no longer win elections: accepting the reality of climate crisis means managing the winding down of fossil fuel usage which will be resisted, and the Right may continue to deny its reality. Australia is likely to be one of the earliest test cases, because when and if Scott Morrison’s government is thrown out over its attitude to the bush fire emergency, whichever successor that does accept the crisis will have to tackle a coal industry that provides a third of the country’s exports. In fact national solutions to the climate crisis aren’t feasible, since a degree of global governance that doesn’t exist is necessary to curb the fossil fuel industry. The UN is the only available institution, but its Millennium Goals, admirable as they are in principle, are unrealisable so long as climate-denying administrations like Trump’s have a power of veto.

Over the next decade preserving any sort of democracy will be a challenge, and we’ll need to invent wholly new rhetoric, institutions and practices to achieve it: the spectrum of Left, Centre and Right is no longer helpful, while electoral reform and green coalitions barely begin to touch the magnitude of the task.

The Dude Derides

To me, a very interesting aspect of Boris Johnson’s assumption of the premiership yesterday was the fact that both the Daily Telegraph and The Independent picked up instantly on the word ‘dude’ in his acceptance speech. Both papers understood this as a reference to The Dude, hairy anti-hero of the Coen Brothers comic film ‘The Big Lebowski’, played by Jeff Bridges. The Dude has become a cult hero: ex-60s radical, sunk into alcoholism of a rather sumptuous kind (White Russian cocktails), reluctantly forced to be a makeshift private detective. Unflappably cool, partly thanks to his vodka intake, his motto is ‘The Dude Abides’.

In invoking this Bridges character Boris is making a clever appeal to a largeish proportion of the voting population who find him amusing, entertaining and unlike the typical politician. His political allegiances may be fluidly variable but this doesn’t deter this particular audience, who despise most other politicians as humourless charlatans. Boris is a humorous charlatan, and that works for many people. In short, Boris was staking a claim to be Cool, with a capital C.

In 2000 I co-authored, with my late friend David Robins, a book called ‘Cool Rules’ (Reaktion Books, Sept 2000). An informal sociological analysis of popular culture, this book was widely misunderstood as promoting the virtues of coolness, which it was not, but nor was it either condemning it. Instead the claim we made in this book is that the phenomenon we christened Cool with a capital C (hoping to avoid such confusion) is a major shift in the social psychology of affluent Western consumer societies, a change in the ‘spirit of the age’ away from Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic to a quite different constellation of character traits – which we analysed as Narcissism, Hedonism and Ironic Detachment.

The book probed the history and the consequences of this change, drawing on a wide range of reference materials, from the Beat Movement, the 1960s Counterculture, Hip Hop culture, literature and movies, the anthropology of African religions to the psychoanalysis of New York neurotics. In a nutshell we recognised Cool as an extreme form of individualism, at odds with most forms of state-based collectivism, libertarian in tendency, attracted to extremes and contemptuous of compromise and moderation. The very antithesis of Social Democracy. The final chapter of the book was about Cool Politics, and I‘ll quote a few paragraphs for the benefit of those multitudes who haven’t read it:

CHAPTER NINE - COOL RULES

In a 1998 article for the New York Review of Books Mark Lilla of the Princeton University Institute of Advanced Studies pondered the two revolutions that have transformed post-war America - the 'cultural' revolution of the 1960's and Reagan's neo-liberal economic revolution of the 1980's - and was very critical of the inadequate political responses from both the right and the left of American politics to their aftermath. He characterises their responses as 'reactionary' in the proper usage of the term: that is, the Right can only react by lambasting the moral laxity bequeathed by the '60s, while the Left reacts by railing helplessly against the triumph of Reaganomics. The facts are, as Lilla puts it, that ‘the Sixties happened, Reagan happened and for the foreseeable future they will together define our political horizon’. According to Lilla, young Americans have no difficulty in reconciling the two in their daily lives, ‘holding down day jobs in the unfettered global economy while spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties’.

These thoughts then prompted Lilla to pose a dramatic question ‘for which neither Tocqueville, nor Marx, nor Weber has prepared us: What principle in the American creed has simultaneously made possible these seemingly contradictory revolutions? How have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society?’ At the risk of some immodesty toward the shades of Tocqueville, Marx and Weber we offer a single word answer to Lilla: Cool.
[...]
Some might argue that Cool is primarily a western phenomenon, and that elsewhere in the world there are other equally powerful forces, for example militant Islam, that will check its progress. Another possibility is that in non-Christian cultures the Cool pose does not offer the same attraction that it does in western societies - there is, for example, no equivalent expression in the Chinese language. Actually we don't believe in any of these counter arguments. Wherever the standard of living rises to a point where television, pop music and the Hollywood movie are available (and that leaves out very few areas of the globe now) then young people will both recognise and cultivate Cool. What Cool now represents is the influence of the free market in personal relationships and sexuality, and whether politicians like it or not, probably a majority of the younger generation throughout the world now aspire to this degree of freedom. What's more, they are unlikely to be gainsaid by mere moralising, and it takes dictatorship or the military triumph of religious fundamentalism to divert them from its pursuit.
[...]
So how bad could it be if Cool did rule the world? Certainly the traditional Left would experience it as absolute defeat - capitalism unleashed and unregulated, free to seek new markets where it will. Cool consumer capitalism has discovered, as Thomas Frank puts it, how to construct ‘cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.’
But the triumph of Cool would be no more comforting to those on the traditional Right since it represents the collapse of all their most cherished values. The USA, as Mark Lilla’s question makes clear, must be our model for what happens when a society embraces the free market both in labour and leisure, while losing interest in party politics: unprecedented prosperity for the many, misery for the few, Wall Street at an all-time high, jails overflowing, and a lack of any truly oppositional (as opposed to knee-jerk reactionary) politics. The maintenance of a healthy democracy requires a perceptible difference between the parties of left and right, and real confrontations over real issues, and in this light the emergence of an apolitical Cool generation is alarming.
[...]
Cool prefers the image of rebellion, as offered by glamorous terrorists, gangsters and wasted rock musicians, to the hard boring slog of real politics, and we would all do well to remember that Adolf Hitler was also a cultural rebel with artistic pretensions, a distinctive haircut, big trousers and kinky boots
[...]
Cool may once have been an expression of rebellion but it is surely not any longer. The real question is whether or not it can sustain the key elements, the rule of law and freedom of conscience, that make western democracy the least bad form of government ever invented. The picture is murky and contradictory: on the one hand Cool values personal freedom above all, it hates racism, it is egalitarian and hedonistic in temperament, on the other hand it is fascinated with violence, drugs and criminality, and mesmerised by the sight of naked power. But this book is not an effort to predict the future, rather to explain the past - to make visible the ambiguous influence of Cool in modern life precisely so that people might start to debate such matters, and more seriously weigh the pros and cons of boredom versus excitement, order versus turmoil, tolerance versus thuggery. In the end we shall, as ever, have to wait and see what happens, for deprived of Marxism’s Historic Inevitability the future’s not ours to see - Que Sera, Sera (Sly Stone’s version of course, not Doris Day’s).

If you are at all convinced by our characterisation of Cool as Narcissism+Hedonism+Ironic Detachment then it will be clear that with the ascension of Boris, the world is now largely under the sway of Cool rulers: Johnson, Putin and even Trump fit that template. I don’t ask you to believe that Xi Jinping is also Cool, but do keep an open mind - it was a bit of a shock when we learned that Mao Tse Tung was an enthusiastic orgiast after all. But my main point is please don’t confuse ‘Cool’ with good. When the spirit of an age changes, the words used to express value change with it. All young people, and quite a lot of older ones, now say ‘That’s cool!’ to mean that’s good, but that isn’t at all what we meant by Cool. Confusion arises because culture and its value system are the sea in which a people all swim and in which they can’t normally see the water: we were trying to get our snouts above the water to examine it from the outside.

So when I call Boris Cool that isn’t any sort of praise, but rather a dire warning. It makes him impervious to most of the arguments used by the Left, and perhaps even fatally attractive to young voters. Boris’s Dude-like insouciance is the perfect camouflage for the vile opinions and policies of the hard right-wingers he’s appointed to his cabinet. We know what Priti Patel thinks about the work-shyness of British workers, but Boris is a bit of a slacker himself you know, like The Dude. No-one in their right mind wants to work nowadays, rock stars and footballers are our role models, Boris is no prude, likes a larf. It’s really hard to picture Jeremy Corbyn besting Boris at PMQs.