Portrait in Patchworked Idiocies


  It has certainly been a week for idiots – for what is an idiot but someone who drops a phrase from anywhere in particular into a set of affairs, and expects then that if they shout loud enough and long enough, that that phrase or bon mot or prejudice will start to make some kind of sense? The strange thing here is that it does. Meaning is generous like that – any nonsense makes some kind of sense if one stares at it long enough; and yet that is not the point. Political analysis really should not be about warping reality to create meaning, but rather finding fine grained meanings with which one only then paints reality. Perhaps though, the trouble is that the last few days in the political world of Britain has had an unreality implicit within it. Or perhaps it has been the cusp between differing paradigms. In the one paradigm, The Liberal Democrat Party tailored their identity to fit in with a progressive alliance with the Labour Party. It was what they had sort of thought would happen (given the political arithmetic of the country) for the last thirty years or more. Their beliefs and aspirations had then been poured into a mould where this alliance was always possible (if difficult); or even one where the fact that it did not happen was always the Labour Party’s fault (which is in part actually true). They had not forecast that the electoral maths would switch around and that they would have to go into alliance with the Tories while the Labour Party imploded for a while: and it took some readjustment of their ideals to do so!

  And yet here the first idiocy cuts in. The rest of us – those outside the Liberal Democrat Party, immediately yell hypocrite at them, and talk of squalid deals. And yet this accusation is surely daft in itself as it simply fails understand the nature of ideals and beliefs. Humans always tailor exactly the expression of our thoughts to our circumstances. This is simply what humans do, and all the more so if only some of those beliefs can be realised (which is of course normal in itself). It is only proper then to explore the sense of that realization and where it might lead one. More than that, this ability to transfigure worlds is in a sense the very stuff of ideals. I am a socialist; and yet I am not sure that my socialism is the same as Marx’s was one hundred and fifty years ago. Marx and I share ideals about what it is to be human and to aspire beyond humanity as capitalism conjures it, but what that then means and how one enacts in it a living world changes – of course it does, it ought to, it must do as the world and I live. A good powerful ideal then allows one to criss-cross the worlds – and re-orders reality in differing situations: Pacts with the Labour Party, pacts with the Tories and pacts with Satan, all require very different manifestations of the same ideals. To shout hypocrite or mutter about squalid pacts or shoddy deals is utterly misplaced. It is far more complicated than that. What is being negotiated is the sense within which ideals, which remain different, can be manifested or not in the same programme, although whether they can or not over the longer term, remains of course to be seen.

  And yet and yet, of course this truth immediate flips. Idiocies work by straddling many worlds in the same inflexible insult, and so there is a second dimension to this problem wrapped up in that ‘shoddy deal’ phrase. The British electoral system is a very complex affair. It always produces something kooky in its result. Parties without any real mandate as often as not govern (the 2005 General Election gave power to a party with less than 37% of the vote), while those who get nearly the same number of votes are discriminated against. More than that we are all rather used to the oddity, and vote accordingly. We therefore vote for positive and negative reasons (to keep this party in or out). The result is of course that in a sense every result lacks any clear meaning. We know who have been ‘rejected’ as often as not (that is whom one has not voted for) but not exactly why those who have won, have done so. For example there is at least a suspicion that under New Labour both Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs owed their positions to the fact that people were voting against the Tories. The problem then of course is for the Liberal Democrats, that to go into a pact with the Tories is to go against the spirit and the letter of these votes, votes that were not strictly ‘theirs’ in the first place. This is a real problem thrown up by the election cycle, and one that the Liberal Democrats have clearly wrestled with. They stand therefore on the very agonized cusp of electoral fate. On the one hand it might be the case that they go into government with the Tories, and prove themselves to be a popular and useful party in government, and so convince their voters (who vote for them for a galaxy of reasons) that they have done the right thing. And on the other hand if the coalition is a disaster, and the Liberal Democrats are caught in the ruin, they will return to their pre-1997 level of MPs (which is after all what happened after the 1979 election).

  Their problem is then the old one - they are on that fork of destiny (or at least feel that they are). To those of us removed from that fork, this merely appeared like dithering and weakness. Clegg gets accused of being a harlot selling his vote, and the Liberal Democrats of indulging in squalid deals and brinkmanship, and double-dealing. They become then in their agony a target of abuse, for other people’s agony is always open to our hilarity and irritation. This mud throwing is made all the more extreme because most of the media has spent the last three years or so investing (in the form of lunches and contacts) in the Tories. They have of course not made a similar set of investments in the Liberal Democrats. They now need that investment in the Tories to pay off, and are not sure what to do about the Liberal Democrats (that is how to fit them into their nice little world picture). The force of the lobby-lunch demands then a Tory victory. It follows then that anything that imperils that victory will be insulted and abused by journalists worried about their connections and investments. The Liberal Democrats are then faced with a media who will certainly claim that if they do not make a deal with the Tories (one way or other) then they will have somehow ratted on democracy. People, they are told, will be angry. It will even been akin to a declaration of civil war. The entire agony of the Liberal Democrat position is then reflected in the media, who need there to be no agony here, and for there to be a simple result (a Tory win).

  The result of course is that any delay at all is attacked viciously by the media – who seem not to have any stomach of their own for forks of fate. More than that, they know that if they put pressure of time on the Liberal Democrats, it makes a deal with the Tories more likely (stitching up an alliance with the Labour Party and others would have taken a long time). The result was that if the Liberal Democrats were not going to face a real lynch mob media storm, with endless appeals to democracy (and its abuses), they had to ally with the Tories. Here the trouble is the media who form themselves and their own prejudices as the court of public opinion. The Tory Party then ape what they know the media will report and report endlessly and in differing combinations. Here of course then new ‘social media’ have their own power to magnify these little simple idiotic slogans. For social media is the perfect platform for responsive prejudices. What else can one fit into a short message? Certainly there is no space for real reasoned argument. On the contrary most of the time one has to assume that the receivers understand the back story to the message and hence how one fleeting remark positions one within that wider story. What then can its users do but react, one hopes in a pithy way, to the current media storm (or attitudes)? Here then is the perfect platform for the idiocies which the media foist upon us. These idiocies can be reflected in this 'court’ of public opinions and so become all the more true.

  Social media allow the media obsessed by them to watch the result of the stories (or prejudices which they run as stories) blossom and spread, a fact that then becomes itself the story as  a multiplicity of patchwork follies spread. Behind this folly is of course another. Namely that there is a connection between the social networkers and that other rather amorphous group, ‘the British public’. The attitudes of the latter will be confused with the former. This then creates its own follies. For not only of course are the social networkers necessarily a highly self-selecting group, but also it is a group that by the very logic of the medium are there because they have ‘something’ to say, something they want to share with others. That is it is a group that feels that their thoughts, feelings and prejudices about politics actually matter to others. As such they are of course far from representative.

  And yet there is one sense is which, albeit in a figurative way, social media reflect something else about the recent election. Namely that there was something very agonizing about the entire affair. I mean we were faced with an apparent choice between a violent bank manager, an advertising executive, who cannot think beyond speaking in slogans, and a sixth form debating star. And had to make this choice on the back of a major recession, and in the face of cuts that will be deep and painful for the country as a whole (and yet which no one felt they could talk about and retain popularity). All while the same British public are locked into their own never neverland, where these cuts can be achieved by cutting down bureaucracy, and not by actually very painful and noticeable slashing of public expenditure (a fact known to the political classes and the journalists). The British public were then not only faced with an impossible choice between three very unattractive possibilities, but also made that choice from a position of pure fantasy. The result of any such an election was therefore likely to be problematic, as reflected the agony and confusion in the mind of each voter. This fact of course made the result very patchy, with no real trends or patterns.

  The folly and indecision of social networking reflects the idiocy of the public mood, that can neither decide nor yet face up to what the decision means. And yet of course the logic of an election is such that it is politician’s job to react to whatever shit the public throws at them, and to make it make sense - or even more moronically to treat it as if it does make sense. What is more they are expected to do so both very quickly, but also (and even more paradoxically) without compromising their own beliefs too much (and so betraying the voter in some unspecified way).  

  Perhaps one might say that one of the advantages of the first past the post system is that it hides with its own inadequacies, an injustice which one of the deep flaws in the nature of any democracy. That is that the people simply cannot make up their mind (or if they do, then they are not necessarily doing so on any reasoned basis; or do so even in the face of actual reality). Or perhaps it would be better to say that here it is not the people that are flawed, so much as the nature of the decision that they are forced to make That is individuals might (or might not make) perfectly justifiable decisions, and yet the problem is that the entire system is not designed to enact those decisions, or even understand them. We vote then for a variety of reasons, and in a galaxy of ways, and yet we still can only, when all is said and done produce one government. The multiplicity of reasons to vote is then collapsed into the idiocy of cabinet posts. Even then in a perfect world with an informed electorate and real choice, there would be this flaw here in the nature of democracy, a flaw we need to ignore in order to maintain our faith in it.

  This last fact then breeds yet another idiocy of its own. For the only way that we are distracted from this flaw in the nature of democracy is that the government changes and changes quickly. If there is an effortless flow of one government into another, the hope is that we will not notice that the system has a problem in it. Other systems will of course use other methods, - America dresses the whole folly up in patriotism, while other countries (for example Japan) simply loathe their politician even more deeply than we do. The point is though, that in this case the smooth transfer was not effected. This then leads to a real problem. The voter knows they voted against Brown, and yet he appeared to remain in office. Dark fantasies about flaws in the system and never getting what one wants started to flood in, as we started to fear that we had lost in some way the only power democracy gives us - namely the power to remove individuals. And yet the state, used as it is to its way of doing things, cannot hear this fear. On the contrary the establishment has a fear of a lack of government, and so demands the loser stay in office until some new government is formed. The fault line is then revealed for all to see. At which point of course the media make it worse by shooting their mouths off about traitors and dictatorships. Remarks that are incendiary treason, and yet reflect some truth – that there is a little piece of tyranny here - that piece that actually converts democracy into government.

  The patchwork of idiocy runs crisscross across difficult and even agonizing choices that have to be made. - They operate in a shadow world, where the complexity of what is happening, what is being worked through is simply ignored or distorted by those on the outside. Real problems are thereby transmuted into mere empty slogans and thoughtless folly. More than this, this folly then comes to have its own real power to prevent a careful and adequate thinking-through, and becomes a redolent political truth in its own right. The sixty four million dollar question then in all of this, is whether this idiocy is powerful enough to ruin all governments and all attempts at reform of the system. It was for New Labour (who could never rise above it), and is the Clegg-Cameron patch so very different? It would nice if the magic of a strange coalition was enough, but I doubt it….