When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
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Syria and Libya too have seen incipient democratic revolutions run into the sand. Viewed in the right light, the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 was a series of popular uprisings of oppressed people desirous of the same liberties they witnessed in the developed world. That was certainly the hope and the initial interpretation. Yet it was naive to suppose that democracy was there ready to take wing, like the butterfly in the chrysalis. By the same token, to pretend that no impulse for popular sovereignty was part of the uprising in the first place is simply untrue. The demand for recognition was there; it has just not been met.
Quite remarkably, given their manifold advantage over other forms of government, the established democracies are losing confidence in their own goodness. Astonishingly, the 2011 World Values Survey found that 34 per cent of Americans approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’. They might have been more careful what they wished for. A third of voters are at least prepared to say they would like to drop the inconvenient panoply of democracy. The young have been steeped in complacency. When Americans born before the Second World War were asked to say how essential it was to live in a democracy, on a decimal scale, 72 per cent rated it as maximally important. Only 30 per cent of the millennial generation did the same.
The same spectre stalks Britain. Sixty-four per cent of British people recently told YouGov they thought conventional politics was failing and 38 per cent had at least some sympathy with the statement that ‘Democracy isn’t always the best way to run a country’. Against this sentiment, we need to retort, without hesitation, that it most certainly is. The noble arguments of Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are not just random fancies. They are making the case for a system of government that is emphatically superior to other forms. If we are ever hapless enough to be cursed with any of the alternatives we will learn to regret our complacency.
The Populist Utopia
When people cease to believe in democratic politics they will not find it replaced with better politics. They will find it replaced by populism which, rather than representing the power of the people, arrogates power in their name. Populism is utopia’s dark shadow.
The term populist derives from the 1890s, when the Populist movement in America set the rural Democrats against the more urban Republicans. The already elastic term then stretched further, across political movements of the fascist Right and the communist Left in Europe, the hearings of Senator McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the Peronistas in Argentina. Contemporary movements that include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the less scrupulous advocates of departure from the European Union and those backing the election of President Trump in late 2016 have a range of natures. They are connected by their claim to be the envoys of the people in adopting the use of the term populist. This is the fraud that utopia can smuggle in along with its promise. It is crucial to comprehend the populist utopia the better to counteract it.
The populist utopia has no place for politics. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the House of Commons has been transformed into a storehouse for manure. The literary utopia erases all conflicts, which means that politics, the arbitration system, is redundant. In utopia, all desires have been satisfied and all the virtues miraculously consort in infinite combination in a land of no scarcity and abundant happiness. Individual rights can be revoked as unnecessary. The utopian takes all the complex questions of politics and promises, as if by magic, that they can be solved.
The idea that all good things can be had at once is a fantasy. The pursuit of a society that can satisfy everyone is a fool’s errand. Robert Nozick put this point colourfully in Anarchy, State, and Utopia when he suggested that no single society can be imagined in which Hugh Hefner, the Buddha and Ludwig Wittgenstein would all be equally happy. The clever statesman is always trying to build a coalition across ideological lines. Cicero is seeking to win the approval of the Senate. Jefferson needs to heal the nation after a bruising election. Lincoln wants the country to unite after civil strife. Kennedy summons the citizen spirit of the American people. Obama makes a direct appeal to people who did not support him. All of them are speaking to the best in the circumstances, not to some absolute best.
The populist pretends that politics is easy. The only reason that the obvious solutions have not been arrived at is that the prevailing elite is venally self-regarding. This is why the defining trait of the populist is an anti-political division of the nation into rival tribes; the elite cast against the people. The only factor that unites populist movements of the nativist right and the socialist left is hostility to the governing elite. The 2016 campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was populated by advocates, some of them, bizarrely, government ministers, who agreed on nothing except hostility to views they caricatured as those of the establishment. The American historian Richard Hofstadter called populism ‘the paranoid style of politics’ because it is always based on a supposed betrayal. If only the elite weren’t in it for themselves, the people would have been served.
In a notable speech in October 2016 Donald Trump hit all the discordant populist notes. ‘This’, he said portentously, ‘is a crossroads in the history of our civilisation that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.’ There has rarely been a clearer exposition of the paranoid style than this. All those warnings about the fragility of democracy that were aired at Gettysburg sounded prophetic, and so did the alarms about the demagogue when Trump said: ‘this election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system. This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it.’
The agents of this treachery, in the mind of the paranoid populist, are usually the media, and so it was in this case. ‘The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media’ – which, he went on to say, is now part of the conspiracy. The suspicion of the free press that is common to all populists is exactly the paranoia that Plato exhibits when he banishes the poets from his utopia in The Republic. We hear this argument in the social media echo-chamber today. According to this critique, the ideological prejudice of the media lackeys, who are themselves puppets of unscrupulous proprietors, enters unfiltered into the empty heads of the people. The minds of the people are so many tabula rasa on which the fiendish thoughts of the elite speaker will be imprinted. Conspiracy theories are always based on a credulous people and the populist is a full-bore conspiracist. ‘This is a conspiracy against you, the American people,’ said Trump. Utopia has always been just around the corner if only the corrupt elite had cared to venture there. ‘We will rise above’ said the candidate Trump, ‘the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters.’
This is why the utopian’s account is so fatuously inadequate about how change will come about. In More’s Utopia a traveller, a speaker of nonsense, finds the perfect society in full working order in the ocean. The title of H. G. Wells’s utopia accurately captures the lack of seriousness of the genre: When the Sleeper Wakes. These books are nothing more than grown-up fairytales. In the place where an account of change should be, the utopian populist substitutes the supreme leader. The paradox of populism is that it has a rhetoric of a movement but the practice of a cult. Camus once said that democracy is the system for people who know that they don’t know everything. The populist utopian has all the answers. The omniscient figures are, variously, the priests, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the scientists, the process of history or the party. Plato believed in the rule of the sages, the Stoics in the power of reason, the seventeenth-century rationalists