In a Election Year In Expressionism In Surrealism 4 Functions In 2-Tone
In Superpower In History In Counterpoint Of Regency Of Victorious
By Messotint BY SUETONIUS In Political Superpower as Brain
of Conspiracy in Pornography by Numbers in Pointillism Via Postmodernity
As Traditions By Salmongundy By Mandate Of Perspective As Carving
As Portrait of Charisma As Fracture Of Champions 2 Campaigns
Through Scandal Of Capitulations In Wanting in Idiocy of Concorde
In Governance Through Fiction in an Elegy across Icongraphy As a Grimoire By Cassius Through Nightmare In Novellas of the Great Divide Of The Ceasura
Portrait of the Capitulation
It is one of the sadnesses that those on the left feel – that whoever wins this election, the slow trickle towards the right will no doubt continue. On so many issues, from the management of schools, through to the importance of the market, to the rights and wrongs of immigration, the rightwing appears in the ascendancy. No matter that deregulation led to one of the greatest financial crises, or that the setting schools free of LEA control at best has little or no effect on education or that the PFI has been a costly way to borrow money. Nor does it appear to matter when all is said and done that the bankers, and their regulators have been able to ruin economies twice over. The first time, the two combined to ruin us by simply not regulating themselves, by dissolving all external control, and sacrificing us all to the corrosion of a market where greed alone is king: The second time the two pulled apart, and yet sang still in harmony. Banks then ruined individuals by inflicting upon them the caution they learnt from that excess of greed and treat us all as if we are them (and therefore a bad credit risk!). Whilst in contrast the regulators, having missed the fact that the bankers were behaving irresponsibly, are now being allowed to ruin countries (such as Greece), wreck currencies, and generally whoop up misery and lay blame left, right and centre.
Right-wing policies, in spite of their clear role in creating the crisis in the first place, appear to be happily re-establishing themselves, or at any event thriving in the ruins that they have made. - And to be able to do so in a way that the left never could or has. Take the parallel crisis of the 1970’s: There the crisis ended up being blamed upon the left (and the greed of unions). The result was the widescale rejection of a whole galaxy of left-wing policies (from adequate pay, through to the ethic of national ownership). These were the policies that got us into the mess, we were told, and all we needed to do was to ditch them and we would forge ahead once more. But where now is the movement to ditch the right-wing policies that far more certainly got us into this current mess? Perhaps it will come, but paradoxically at the moment the effect of the crisis appears just the opposite. The right is again on the march.
This of course raises that age-old question – why oh why is right-wing ideology quite so resilient to everything which fate throws against it? The clue to its power must surely be both in where it proceeds to unwind its doctrine from, and in the emotions and sentiments that inspire that doctrine. The first of these is relatively easy to deal with. Unlike the left-wing that traditionally requires one to always think of another as its starting point or appeals to a nebulous concern such as society, the right allows one to start with what one has got. One already has the key to one’s own happiness in one’s hands it suggests, and all that needs to be done by government is to set one free from that which holds one back. Every individual is then invited to imagine a world where what they are currently doing suddenly starts to succeed, where they become wealthy and powerful, where what they feel to be their hard work is rewarded justly. And this promise is made to everybody, and all over the world.
The initial dream therefore of being able to succeed better at what one is already doing, has enormous sentimental appeal. We can so easily imagine ourselves, but only better, newer, improved or at least more successful. Likewise almost every individual can list a reasons or a set of forces that are holding them down – a set or series of others (immigrants, governments or regulations) that stop them doing what they ought to do. The right’s appeal to eliminate these forces, to set us free from our own bogey men – those that keep us back – has then an immediate and easily grasped appeal. How could we not all dream the same dream? How could we not be part of the big society?
From this immediate appeal the right traditionally makes two further moves, both of which proceed from this foundation. On the one hand individual desires and greed are lauded: Capitalism is the alchemy to make ‘Greed good’, and the desire to personally succeed come what may, a quasi-altruistic power. On the other hand, the initial social bond of most individuals, the family is transfigured. That series of relations is held to be the prime unit in society and its main bulwark. Societies and the wider concerns of individuals are then sacrificed to the everyday morality of the simple family set up where Families were King. It is from these two rather incompatible sentiments that the right traditionally unwound itself. Its power lay not in the purity of these two starting points, so much as in the endless power of right-wing politicians to blend them one within the other, into new explosive combinations.
Traditionally then this blend produces on the one hand an ethic of a powerful state: The state – Queen and Country, patriotic duty and the rest, is treated as if it were a parent for whom one must have respect or love. The merely being a British citizen ought to be enough to inspire one with loyalty or love; in the same way that the mere fact that one is a child ought to inspire love for one’s parents. The existence of the country was then held to be a simple absolute. This then allowed the country to operate according to the rules of greed and power play. Britain could then operate endlessly in its own interest, and shit on whatever countries it wanted to, or connive with whatever states it desired to. The collective will of the people was then reason enough for one hunk of humanity, all caught by the one landmass and in the one crystal of history, to misbehave as they saw fit.
It well be argued that this crystal has become rather cracked and flawed of late; and yet its passing in the face of globalization has clearly spawned a successor sentiment, in the current fear which we have of immigration. The founding principles of a state was that this little patch of land, and the little lives that occurred within it were special and different, worth defending and believing in. This sentiment, which links the loves we have for the life we lead (and its ease) with being British (and so having a national and cultural signature) has come under profound threat. For in a global world where one is rewarded for what one is doing (and less and less for what one’s ancestor did), there is less and less reason why we should have a privileged existence and excess of comfort (in comparison to ‘less fortunate’ neighbours). That is that effortless assumption we had for many years that it is our birthright to have an easy life, and behave as we like in the world to ensure that right, has come under serious threat. More than that, the entire ideology of the West as a whole that it was alright to behave in this manner because in doing so we were some how ‘Westernizing’ the people (our ideology was then said to be their true freedom) and bringing freedom to them, has also become somewhat questioned. Other peoples are very likely to say - we want your technology but not all the cod morality that goes with it - and so take our wealth, and reject our ‘friendly’ (if patronising) ‘advice’. This set of rights is under very severe threat, and with it our special place in the world. The deep worry about immigration clearly takes up then this battle and works it out on the streets of our communities. Others are supposed to be coming in, and in great numbers: others who impose a threat to our ease and to our culture. Our special place in the world has then passed away and not to be found even on our own streets: and so a paranoia is born as patriotism falters.
The second main synthesis of greed and family which the right-wing created revolved around home life. One was not meant to be greedy for oneself alone, but rather for one’s nearest and dearest. It did not then matter too much how one behaved in general as long as (in the best Wackford Squeers manner) one held dear one’s immediate family. More than that, the ethic of good housekeeping was meant to provide the foundingstone from which greed radiated. If one looks back at the rhetoric of the 1980’s it was full of the worthy housewives, saving their pennies, and not spending what they did not have (and hence not going into debt). The ethic of family life, and the well-run economy were then meant to somehow balance the greed. Greed should not be unbounded, and must at all times be caught in this wider ethic. It did not matter then that the mechanics for running a society might not be the same as those that drive a family. Or even that the thrifty housewives of legend were often on the never never of hire purchase and credit. The moral might have been flawed, and yet it was vital as it allowed one to claim that there was a natural limit to what greed would or should to. It would never, the claim went, fire one out of the orbit of the thrifty housewife. It would never create a galaxy of shifting greeds and pyramid schemes that characterized capitalism before the Great Depression. All internal regulators could then be scaled down or removed, as the thrifty housewife was now the queen (the meta-Maggie?). It was a pity that bankers did not share this faith.
But one should be very careful before one pronounces the death rites for this little bit of romanticism. The idea that somehow the country ought to indulge in good housekeeping, runs very deep within capitalism. Take the current example of Greece. What has Greece done so badly that we feel that it ought to decimate its own national wealth and strip out a large part of the fabric of its civil society? The answer of course is that they have behaved like the ‘sluttish housewife’ of legend. They had paid themselves what they were not due, and have not practised that legendary thrifty economy. For this bit of cod morality the markets will destroy them. Or to put it another way they are really merely guilty of having enjoyed the good times, and not then thinking that they would ever pass away: But was not that the promise of the capitalism at the time?
In effect then the right wins both ways around. At times of economic growth it holds out the endless opportunities that greed opens out to its acolytes. The future is rosy, and can then be gambled upon, and wealth (or credit) is as endless as that future dream. The ideology of money and desire is then the great force into which a future is allowed to incarnate (and before the merits or otherwise of that future have actually come to pass). But if then, Heaven forefend, this punt on the future turns out to be a disaster and the entire system is pitched headlong, the right-wing has an immediate answer. - The trouble is, it says, that we have not behaved like that legendary thrifty housewife. Her morality of earning what one spends and living within one’s means suddenly becomes the order of the day, and countries are destroyed in the process. At no point though, in this switch-around is the far deeper question asked. Namely - is boundless greed contrasted with the thrifty housewife a very good model for understanding the expansion of, or controlling, Western industrial technology? Do we not have any better concepts than these two pieces of kitsch stone age politics? The problem is that there might be, and yet these easy models above are the ones that have immediate impact and appeal, and so in a world where ease of communication matters, are the only ones we appear to accept. This is of course in a sense a paradox, as neither really impose the regulations whose abolition got us in the problem in the first place, and which clearly ought to be re-imposed once more.
The final great synthesis of the modern right, involves the community. In the community themes of greed, and themes of the family are extended and blended one to the other. Charities represent this interest group or that; families come together for a common purpose (be that from organizing the school run to organizing better schools). Self-interest and the wider society meet then in endless little places. This last point breeds a very real romanticism (and its accompanying blindness) as this blending of greed and family life is taken to be a model for a new and ‘bigger’ society. No matter then that there is not a shred of evidence that this policy could work (where it has been tried it has actually always been a failure); nor that even if it did work, it would reward unfairly a very self-selecting group - namely those with the time and money to organize in this manner. - Or yet that the spectre of greed that haunts this model, and motivates the actions of those involved (they all want something better than the norm, better than the rest), might be rather problematic if unleashed on the wider society. Communities who have been promised so much are likely not to give a damn for the price others must pay for their wealth. All these concerns then fall by the wayside of the romanticism of the communal world which this big idea creates within the (public school) elites that formed it.
The right’s power always lies in the same place. That is, it allows individuals to generalize and abstract from their own colloquial and individual experience and passions. These passions are held to be the foundingstone not merely of the individual but also of society itself. In their name then one can govern, and do so in a way that has a mass appeal if no great competency. The power then of this appeal is such that the right can cock it up very badly and survive not merely unscathed but with increased power: its very failure become strength as long as it finds another to blame. The left then cannot move beyond this impasse, unless it finds a convincing answer to this endless power for transfiguring the commonplace. A move which it appears incapable of ever doing effectively. And hence the current deep and worrying capitulation to the very forces that got us in this mess in the first place!
