An excellent essay by David Graeber, apologies if posted before
The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’
Wed 15 Jan 2020
The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’
by David Graeber, the New York Review of Books
Politics, in wealthy countries, is increasingly becoming a war between the generations. While the support for smaller parties in the UK (Liberal Democrats, Greens, the Scottish National Party, even Brexit) is constant across ages, the split between Labour and Conservative is almost entirely based on age cohort:
How Britons voted in the 2019 general election, by age; click to expand
The result, according to YouGov opinion polling data from 2018, is that if only Britons over the age of sixty-five were allowed to vote, the Labour Party would be all but wiped out, whereas if only Britons under twenty-five were allowed to vote, there would simply be no Tory MPs whatsoever.
Electoral maps of the UK based on projected results of opinion polling from 2018 if, respectively, only over sixty-five year-olds (left) or only eighteen-to-twenty-four year-olds (right) were allowed to vote; click to expand
This is particularly striking when one takes into consideration that the left Labour policies the young so overwhelmingly voted for in the 2017 and 2019 elections were ones that had been treated, even a year or two before, as so radical as to fall off the political spectrum entirely. Proclamations of the death of British socialism, then, seem decidedly premature. Meanwhile, the Tories’ core constituency is quite literally dying off. If conventional wisdom is correct, historically young people only begin to vote Conservative when they acquire a mortgage, or otherwise feel they have a secure position to defend within the system, which bodes ill indeed for the Tories’ future prospects.
Why, then, such an apparently devastating victory? Why did middle-aged swing voters—particularly in the former Labour heartlands of the North—break right instead of left? The most obvious explanation is buyer’s remorse over the European Union. For many working-class Northerners in their sixties, the first vote they ever cast was in the Common Market referendum of 1975, in which a majority of Britons declared in favor of the European project. Most experienced the next forty or so years largely as a sequence of disasters. In 2016 they turned against the “Eurocrats,” then watched in dismay as the entire political class proceeded to engage in endless and increasingly absurd procedural ballet that appeared designed to reverse their decision.
This explanation is true, but superficial. To understand why Brexit became such an issue in the first place, one must first ask why a populism of the right has so far proved more adept than the left at capitalizing on profound shifts in the nature of class relations that have affected not just the UK but almost all wealthy societies; second, one must understand the uniquely nihilistic, indeed self-destructive, role of centrism in the British political scene.
Let me take the two questions in reverse order.
The media treated the election largely as a referendum on the head of the opposition, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to some extent, it was. It is crucial here to understand that the political-journalist establishment in the UK had never, at any point, accepted the results of the 2015 leadership election that placed Corbyn at the head of the Labour party. To get a sense of what happened from an American perspective, imagine the Democratic Party eliminated its presidential primary system and replaced it with a summer of public debates followed by a single vote of all members, and that, as a result, Noam Chomsky became the Democratic candidate. For thirty years, Corbyn had been considered at best an entertaining gadfly. Under no conditions was he now going to be treated as a legitimate national leader, let alone, potential head of government. To do so would mean shifting the notorious Overton Window—the sense of what was acceptable political opinion, and therefore, where the center itself could be seen to lie, dramatically—from their perspective, violently—to the left.
At the time, there were essentially two significant factions in the Labour Party: the corporate-friendly Blairites, who controlled most of the mechanisms of power, and an ever-compromising social-democratic “soft left.” Together with the Liberal Democrats, who staked out a position between the two major parties, and “One Nation” pro-EU Conservatives, the Blairites were treated as defining the pragmatic center of British politics. This center was based on a series of broad agreements, serious departure from any of which marked one, in the eyes of the media, as lying along a continuum from merely wacky to insane. These were, first of all, that the nation’s economy would continue to be driven by finance, construction, and real estate. Second, that budgets should be balanced by gradually defunding or contracting out public services. Third, that public assets should be privatized, but not entirely, so that large institutions such as the NHS or higher education should operate as a kind of hybrid of top-down bureaucracy and “market forces.”
Such public-private hybridization was pursued by Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron alike. It is by now commonplace almost everywhere. Wherever it is pursued, it results in the same effect—almost everyone ends up spending more and more of their time filling out forms. But in the UK the process was taken further than perhaps anyplace on earth. The passion for paperwork now runs from the apex of the system, where City traders manipulate complex financial derivatives betting how long it will take a British family to default on their mortgages, to the increasingly arcane documentary evidence required to prove one’s children qualify for public housing. The UK is currently home to roughly 312,000 accountants—an extraordinarily high percentage of the working population. (Together with the nearly 150,000 British lawyers, they constitute a significant portion of the total workforce.)
This simultaneous embrace of markets, and of rules and regulations, represents the soul of what’s sometimes called “centrism.” It’s a decidedly unlovely combination. Nobody truly likes it. But the talking classes had reached an absolute consensus that no politicians who departed significantly from it could possibly win elections.
In 2015, the handful of “hard Left” MPs of the Socialist Campaign Group, who fell well outside this consensus, were largely considered mildly entertaining Seventies throwbacks. The election of one of them as party leader was therefore treated—both by the party establishment and their allies in the left-of-center media outlets like The Guardian—as an embarrassing accident that had to be immediately reversed. Corbyn was declared “unelectable.” In order to demonstrate this, dozens of Labour MPs initiated an immediate campaign to render him so, via an unceasing barrage of press briefings, leaked documents, attempts to create false scandals, and a campaign of sustained psychological warfare directed against Corbyn himself—essentially waging an active and aggressive campaign against their own party. Tony Blair even openly stated that he would rather see his own party defeated than come into power on Corbyn’s leftist platform.
The problem was that the party quickly began to change, as tens of thousands of older leftists who had quit the party under Blair and hundreds of thousands of young people began to swell the ranks of local chapters known as “Constituency Labour Party” (CLPs)—inspired by the call from Corbyn and his circle to turn the party back into a social movement. This meant making local CLPs forums of democratic debate, and imagining ways to coordinate between the “extra-parliamentary left”—the peace movement, the housing movement, the climate movement—and those working within the system. It was, in short, an attempt to move away from the politics of personality to one of bottom-up, grassroots democracy. As such, Corbyn’s own lack of conventional charisma was an asset. Suddenly the left was not only teeming with ideas and vision—four-day work weeks, new democratized forms of public ownership, green industrial revolutions—but there was also a feeling that at least some of these things might, for once, actually happen.
For most in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), these developments turned what was at first seen as a ridiculous accident into a genuine cause for alarm. It is important to emphasize that there is nothing like the American primary system in the UK; once selected as an MP by the party leadership, one is, effectively, a candidate for life. The only way to get rid of such a representative, short of an election loss, was through an elaborate process of “deselection.” Even the suggestion that those actively campaigning against their party’s leader in the face of protests from their CLPs might face deselection (and, as a result, the equivalent of a primary challenge) was treated, in the press, as tantamount to some kind of Stalinist purge. Corbyn’s partisans never actually attempted it. However, since so many Labour parliamentarians now found themselves so out of step with their CLPs, they had good reason to see any effort to democratize the internal workings of the party as a genuine threat to their political careers.
Still, I don’t think this quite explains the vehemence, even passion, that marked so much of the internal opposition to Corbynism. Centrists, after all, consider themselves pragmatists. For forty years the center had been drifting steadily to starboard. So what if it jumped a ways to port? It might have been abrupt, but it’s not as though anyone was proposing the abolition of the monarchy or the nationalization of heavy industry. They could adjust. A handful even did. The panicked reaction of the majority, however, only makes sense if the threat was on a far deeper level.
Most sitting Labour MPs had begun as Labour youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sell-outs.
Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts.
One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.
This, at least, would help explain the unrelenting nature of the hostility to Corbyn and the youth movement he represented. The new Labour leadership came in expecting a paroxysm of denunciation in the press, but they’d also calculated it would last six months to at most a year; they knew centrists would at first reject their legitimacy, but assumed that if they demonstrated that a left platform could play well with the electorate, and avoided all talk of deselection, those same politicians would, out of sheer self-interest, come around. This is precisely what did not happen.
Instead, the attempt to move politics away from a focus on leaders and personalities was met with four years of daily, sustained attack on the personal character of Corbyn himself. Headlines accused him of being everything from a shabby dresser to a terrorist sympathizer, Trotskyite, weakling, thug, cult leader, hamfisted incompetent, and Czechoslovakian spy. I am not aware of any other head of a major UK party who has been subjected to anything like it. Even in the “respectable” left press—The Guardian, The Independent, the New Statesman—traditional journalistic conventions such as the expectation to find balancing voices in critical news stories were thrown by the wayside, but only when it came to Labour. The message seemed to be, “Fine, reject the game. But then you have no business complaining if we act as if the rules no longer apply to you.”
The snap election of 2017 illustrated what might have happened had the media treated Corbyn as a legitimate political figure. For six weeks, the BBC and other mainstream outlets were legally obliged to give Labour and its platform equal time; Corbyn, who had been languishing fifteen points behind in the polls, almost immediately jumped back to near parity. Labour won thirty seats from the Tories and deprived Theresa May of her majority. Consistently dismissed as “unelectable,” Corbyn had in fact achieved the most dramatic swing to Labour since Clement Attlee ousted Winston Churchill in 1945. For a few weeks, it seemed as though the “pragmatists” were, indeed, going to be pragmatic.
Then, of course, the “anti-Semitism crisis” picked up again.
It is difficult to write objectively about this subject because so much of the background is both complex and has been buried under a cacophony of vitriol and sensationalization. To give just one example: Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for an East London constituency, really set off the summer’s conflagration in 2018 when she denounced Corbyn in Parliament as (in her words) “a fucking anti-Semite and a racist” over a purely technical quarrel over whether all the examples would be included when Labour adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism; but Corbyn supporters were quick to point out that the two had first tangled over Jewish issues in 1987, when Hodge was head of the Islington Council, and Corbyn, then a young local MP, had joined with Jewish activist groups to stop the council from selling the site of an Orthodox cemetery to property developers. Corbyn actually had a long history of supporting Jewish causes and had worked especially closely with the Haredim community.
Hodge is Jewish, but most of the MPs and professional journalists who were most ardent in condemning Corbyn and the Labour Party as institutionally anti-Semitic were not; they were, for the most part, the very same people who had been engaged in daily briefings against him from the start. To be clear: anti-Semitic attitudes were certainly there to be found among Labour supporters—as they are in pretty much all sections of British society. But in other parties, no one without media training is ever placed anywhere near a microphone. (To put the matter in perspective, when the Conservatives tried to create their own answer to Momentum, a youth group called “Activate,” it had to be almost immediately shut down because members were caught calling for the mass murder of the poor.)
There is no doubt, too, that the party could have handled matters better, but the fundamental principle of antiracist organizing that they adhered to—that is, that it is better to let such ideas come out in the open where they can be confronted—does seem to have been successful at first. During the first two years of Corbyn’s tenure, surveys showed anti-Semitic attitude actually declining among Labour members, rather than the other way around.
Accusing Corbyn of being personally indifferent, or even sympathetic, to what happened when the floor was opened to everyone was a textbook application of Karl Rove’s famous principle of swiftboating: if one really wishes to discredit a political opponent, one attacks not his weaknesses, but his strengths. Until then, even Corbyn’s enemies had admitted he was an honest man and a dedicated antiracist. Suddenly, he stood accused of being himself, personally, anti-Semitic, and of being a lying weasel for denying it.
The easiest way to gauge the political nature of the resulting campaign is to compare the number of references in the British press to “Labour anti-Semitism” with those to either “Tory” or “Conservative anti-Semitism.” Despite the facts that Theresa May’s recent former chief of staff was accused of peddling an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in 2017 and that Boris Johnson himself had written a novel that describes “Jewish oligarchs” as controlling the global media, a search of the media-monitoring service Meltwater reveals the following:
2015
Labour anti-Semitism: 1
Tory/Conservative anti-Semitism: 0
2016
Labour anti-Semitism: 2,520
Tory/Conservative anti-Semitism: 0
2017
Labour anti-Semitism: 93
Tory/Conservative anti-Semitism: 0
2018
Labour anti-Semitism: 6,790
Tory/Conservative anti-Semitism: 0
2019
Labour anti-Semitism: 3,820
Tory/Conservative anti-Semitism: 1
The anti-Semitism accusations weakened Labour immensely. But it was the—ultimately successful—campaign to force Corbyn to reverse his position on Brexit that really ensured their party’s electoral disaster. This, too, was essentially a centrist project.
Now, from the point of view of many on the Labour left, the entire Brexit issue was a distraction: a way to change the subject from the bread-and-butter issues of austerity, wages, health, education, and public services that had immediate effects on voters’ lives to scapegoating and symbolism. Some were convinced the entire project was a charade; the Tory leadership had no intention of breaking with the European Union in any meaningful sense at all—as some pointed out at the time, during the entirety of May’s tenure as prime minister, her government had not seen fit to hire or retrain a single new customs official.
What they did not at first understand, but became all too apparent as time went on, was that in Brexit the right had discovered an almost perfect political poison, not only dividing British society into two hostile camps, but bringing out the absolute worst in both of them. Each side ended up hurling bitter invective against each other, much of which was true. Remainers insisted that many Brexit campaigners were overt racists, and that the Leave campaign was—much like Trumpism—normalizing forms of racist expression that would have been considered outrageous only a few years before. They were right. Reports of racist hate crimes, for instance, increased dramatically after the vote. Leavers countered that many of the most vociferous Remainers were overt elitists, and were likewise normalizing expressions of contempt for small-town or working-class England that would have once been considered equally outrageous. They were right, too.
It might seem odd that the ultimate beneficiary of all this was Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an Eton-educated upper-cruster whose main occupation, before he turned his hand to politics, was as a columnist and occasional television personality notorious for his contempt for immigrants, single mothers, and the poor. But to understand what happened, I think, one must consider the broader situation of what has come to be known as “right-wing populism.” Ever since the economic crash of 2008, the left had tried to make villains of the bankers. Yet despite the fact that the City (London’s financial hub) was indeed largely responsible for the collapse of the economy and resulting austerity, this approach gained little traction. The right instead tried to make villains of the bureaucrats—of migrants, too, as they definitely did appeal to simple bigotry, but the immediate emphasis was on bureaucrats. And at least among middle-aged swing voters, this succeeded spectacularly. Why?
The answer, I think, lies in the emerging structure of class relations in societies like England, which seems to be reproduced, in one form or another, just about everywhere the radical right is on the rise. The decline of factory jobs, and of traditional working-class occupations like mining and shipbuilding, decimated the working class as a political force. What happened is usually framed as a shift from industrial, manufacturing, and farming to “service” work, but this formulation is actually rather deceptive, since service is typically defined so broadly as to obscure what’s really going on. In fact, the percentage of the population engaged in serving biscuits, driving cabs, or trimming hair has changed little since Victorian times.
cont at link…