Two-party democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic, is looking somewhat polarised. In the US, voters are refusing to back the anointed leaders of either party. Hillary Clinton is being trounced by the cartoon villain of the American dream — a socialist. The Republicans don’t even have a credible anointed leader to offer as an alternative to the literally incredible Donald Trump.
People are falling over themselves to point out the obvious — that Democrat frontrunner Bernie Sanders is America’s Jeremy Corbyn. Both men are longstanding leftwing demagogues, the pristine idealism of their rhetoric untainted by the low politics that high office demands, which is precisely what these populist uprisings are really saying.
For a lot of people, the grubby compromises of government are looking very grubby indeed. Clinton’s long, hard experience has become her millstone, not her advantage. Trump’s blustering political virginity, conversely, is his strange and dangerous asset.
In truth though, compromise really is difficult. Even the most devoted of Corbynistas can see that a fleet of nuclear-free nuclear submarines gliding doggedly through the ocean would be Keynesianism taken to an absurd degree.
This week, shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry appeared to suggest that submarines could be loaded up with some splendid, not-yet-invented, non-nuclear defensive stuff instead. No one seemed that grateful for her efforts.
The trouble with uncompromising views is that they make a mockery of highly political processes such as negotiation.
Labour’s attempts to grapple with the Trident issue, rather than “show leadership” on it, are a gift not only to the Conservatives, but also to satirists.
If only it was so easy to poke fun at the unedifying idea that “comfort with the prospect of pressing the nuclear button” is the one box that any prospective leader of the UK absolutely must be able to tick, because only that ensures that they’ll never have to. But the logic is so perfectly absurd and paradoxical that it’s basically satire-Teflon.
I’m neither a successful politician, nor a successful satirist. In fact, given that all I ever want to do is take the two main parties and knock their heads together, I’m not even a successful voter. But I do wish that, instead of sighing and blaming the naivete of voters, which insiders in Washington and Westminster are wont to do, they could all start asking why people are losing faith in adversarial democracy.
The idea is that left and right battle it out, within the two parties and against each other, achieving a social-democratic balance that can be described as reasonable, if not happy.
The reality is that reasonable, if not happy, social-democratic balance is exactly what has been eluding us. (It’s why who-are-we? referendums are coming along like buses.)
Just a machine
The reality, also, is that polarising further and slugging things out more aggressively isn’t going to get us there either. Instead it’s just making the debate more and more toxic, more and more destructive. I’m not afraid to declare that I think capitalism is a good thing. But I fervently believe that you can have too much of a good thing, and that capitalism is a case in point. The degree of inequality it is creating, the concentration of wealth in a small number of hands — these don’t necessarily mean that capitalism is unworkable. They are more likely to mean that capitalists are refusing to respect and honour the needs of social democracy. Like, say, paying your taxes.
And yet, for many political activists in the UK and the US, from the right and from the left, it is anathema to suggest that capitalism is just a machine whose morality lies entirely in the hands of those pulling the levers.
Rightwing fundamentalists will declare that capitalism has no imperfections as a generator of fair societal outcomes. Any dysfunctions — stratospherically improbable London property prices, gigantic financial crashes, regional unemployment patterns — are due, by some dark magic, to the machinations of the meddling state.
Leftwing fundamentalists will merely insist that I must therefore join the Tories, somehow believing that no greater, more wounding insult exists on the planet, caught up as they are in their black-and-white world. The important thing is not to thrash matters out, but to shut discussion down.
Obsessed with immigration
The tragedy is that both Britain and the US have so much to cherish. But even the fact that people all over the world dream of making their lives in these prosperous, fortunate democracies is seen not as a compliment, an acknowledgement that we often get things right, but as an evil, wicked, nasty threat. Why are both countries still obsessed with immigration, when it has already been cracked down on so hard?
How can the Tories admire Blair — which they really do — yet undo so much of the work his government did towards making teaching seem like an attractive career? How can Labour hate him — which they seem to — when one thing he got right was prioritising good education for all children as fundamental? State education is now good enough to close down bad private schools. Who doesn’t benefit from that? Capitalists do.
How can the Conservatives do the same with the NHS, driving junior doctors out by imposing unwanted contracts on them, when it is recognised as one of the most efficient health systems in the world? Will they feel like winners, grand political reformers, when people are dying in their own vomit, on gurneys in corridors, like they did in the early 1990s? Who benefits from that? Capitalists don’t.
Why, above all, does politics have to be so destructive? It can’t even build consensus any more, let alone anything else. It doesn’t even seem to want to.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Deborah Orr is one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators. She has a weekly column in the Guardian.
