The Political Center and the Double Election of July 2024

Centrism is a conservative, elitist, ideology, one in respects abstruse, with a view of democracy as a thing best carefully delimited and intensively managed so as not to upset the status quo. Where the centrists' own policymaking is concerned they are pessimistic about and not really interested in getting to the roots of issues and solving problems--that is the dangerous behavior of "ideologues" and "extremists" in their view--but rather keeping problems from threatening the "consensus" in favor of the aforementioned status quo (if only by sustaining the hope among those desirous of action that they might yet get it, rather than actually doing anything for them).

Centrists, who are squeamish about ideology generally and in denial about being ideologues themselves are disinclined to spell all this out, the more in as it is just not very attractive intellectually or emotionally, to such a degree that it has a very limited popular base, how limited is evident in comparison of the center with the more avowedly conservative right with its nationalistic appeals and culture war-mongering, and the left with its demand for a freer, more just, society. What enabled centrists to win elections was, especially in a context where the center (in collaboration with the right) succeeded in blocking the left, delivering a certain amount of actual reform. However, the centrist embrace of neoliberalism ruled that out (and made the hope on which centrists expect the politically frustrated to live look increasingly empty).

The result, of course, has been a tough time for the center, underlined by the elections in Britain and France this past month. If Anne Applebaum crowed about the Keir Starmer-led Labour as a triumph of the center over populists and extremists to his left and right, the reality was not a Labour triumph but a Conservative collapse substantially due to challenge from further right as the third party vote generally surged--enabling Labour to win the election with the support of just three-quarters the proportion of the electorate that Jeremy Corbyn commanded in 2017 (when he lost). Meanwhile in France, to the evident shock and dismay of a news media not so secretly looking forward to reporting a far right victory (they do so love to "troll the libs" and "punch the hippies" with large, splashy, images of rightists exulting in a triumph at the polls), the left-leaning New Popular Front came in first in an election that had, in contrast with the record-low turnout seen in Britain, a very high turnout bespeaking the force of opposition to the far right coalition led by the National Rally--and leaving France in a situation of unprecedented crisis since Macron did not get the majority for the center that he was counting on (Macron's Ensemble coalition getting less than 25 percent of the vote, and a mere 161 of the 577 seats in parliament).

No reasonable person can look at those two elections and think that either was an affirmation of the center by the broad public, testimony to the wisdom of its leaders, or source of "lessons" for how to enable the center to hold in these times.

Thomas Piketty on the French Election

In the wake of France's recent election (which, frankly, was what got me thinking about that phrase "method to his madness," and how usually there's neither method nor madness in what is being described, just stupidity) I have had an eye open for comment by those French public intellectuals whose work I have become acquainted over the years. To my surprise I found Thomas Piketty's remarks in a piece running over at CNBC (far from being an outlet friendly to views such as Dr. Piketty's!).

According to Piketty (who made his comment between the two rounds of voting), Emmanuel Macron made the "mistake" of "demonizing" the left, without the support of which he would not have won the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022.

Alas, that is just what centrists do--the center ever preaching a "horseshoe theory" anti-extremism, but always seeing the left as the principal enemy (with, certainly as centrism took shape in America, opposition to the left the foundation of centrist political theory), and indeed, inclining to treating it with open contempt. The result is that when in contest with the right, taking it for granted that the left-leaning can be brought around to "holding their noses" and voting for them for fear of worse from the avowed right-wingers (that the centrists will be more moderate or at least more competent conservatives their sales pitch). It is not much of a card to play, and it often fails, but in the wake of its embrace of neoliberalism that took away the center's old function of arranging social compromises, the center has had little else to offer--while to the extent that individuals really do matter in politics, the famously high-handed, "ordinary people"-hating and neoliberal Macron was especially unlikely to offer anything else.

Of course, all this has only continued in the wake of that election, with, in spite of the left New Popular Front's coming in first with the voters (an outcome Macron shows no sign of having anticipated), Macron instead apparently looking to create a coalition between elements of the center and the same right that had aligned itself with the National Rally to govern instead--and some have reported, is even negotiating with the RN itself). What will come of the effort remains to be seen, but the effort itself is all too consistent with the dynamics of the center.

"Is the British Conservative Party Going the Way of the Liberal Party?" Revisiting the Question After the Election

The July 2024 General Election in Britain (covered here) saw, in a historic degree, abysmal voter turnout, and an abysmal showing by the two major parties, with the Conservative Party's vote collapsing outright. The Conservatives' 24 percent share of the vote this time around compares unfavorably with the 31 percent that was their prior low in 1997, the 31-32 percent that was their lot in the three elections in which they ran against Blair-led Labour (1997, 2001, 2005), the 35 percent+ (and often much higher) that they managed in every prior election of the post-World War I era outside the Blair period, and the 42-44 percent they got in the elections of 2017-2019, when they got nearly double the share of the vote they received last week, and that from a rather larger share of the electorate. (Some 29 percent of the eligible voters may be said to have voted for the Conservatives in 2019, as against just the 14 percent who voted for them in 2024, only one in seven of the country's eligible voters casting their ballot in favor of a fifth straight Conservative ministry.)

This was in part because of the extremity of disgust with the Conservative Party after these last fourteen years, which went so far as to enable a challenger from the right, Reform UK, to draw off much of its vote--14 percent of the votes cast, which is rather more than any third party has had since 2010, and more than any third party other than the Liberal Democrats has had since Labor supplanted the Liberals as the country's "number two" party a century ago. Of course, that still leaves the Conservatives a long way ahead of this particular rival, but were the trend to continue--were there to be a transfer of a 6 percent share of the vote from one party to the other in the next election--then it would be the Conservatives in the number three position, in the kind of restructuring of the British party system the country last saw in 1924.

How likely is that? I suspect not very. Due to Britain's system for translating votes into seats, Reform will end up with a mere four seats in parliament--against the Liberal Democrats' seventy-one, and the nine the Scottish National Party won with a mere 2 percent of the vote, the four seats Sinn Fein won with one-twentieth of the share of the vote Reform got (0.7 percent), all as with their lower votes the Green Party (7 percent) and Plaid Cymru (0.7 percent) each get four seats. It will make for a very small parliamentary presence for Reform (less than 1 percent of the seats), and the influence that goes with it (even if Nigel Farage is now in the House, and a media whose default tone is "shrieking rightwing hysteria" is bound to give his party and him disproportionate coverage). Moreover, one can see the way the vote for Reform is spread about the country as placing significant obstacles in the way of its expanding its parliamentary position.

Meanwhile the Conservatives would seem down, but not out. In opposition they will, with the help of a media which is naturally forgetful--above all, of the failures of the right--encourage the public to forget the chaos they presided over during 2010-2024. Keir Starmer's Labour will make it the easier, given how brutal the press is likely to be even with one who may prove the most right-wing leader Labour has had in the whole of its history, all as Starmer commands little enthusiasm among his own base (ultimately, voted in by just one-fifth of the country's eligible voters, many of whom would seem to have "held their noses" as they did so). At the same time the Conservatives will respond to Reform's gains by inclining further rightward, stealing some of Reform's thunder, with some new faces helping the process given the discredit fallen on old-timers like David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and the always multiply unlikely Rishi Sunak.

The result is that 2024 could in the long run prove to be the high water mark of Reform UK--just as the Liberal Democrats, amid surging dislike of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's New Labour earlier in the century, saw its share of the vote surge to 22 percent in 2005 and 23 percent in 2010 (far more than Reform just got) before collapsing in subsequent elections (scoring just 7-8 percent of the vote in the next two elections). However, it seems unlikely to be the last heard from that end of the political spectrum, going as it is from victory to victory in these years amid centrists proving more loyal to an increasingly despised neoliberalism than to the mission of "consensus" sustenance they talk about so self-importantly, and effective opposition, or even alternatives for the discontented, proving scant. Indeed, with another General Election all but guaranteed by mid-2029 barring world war-caliber catastrophe (alas, a less unlikely-looking thing these days than a few years ago), it may not even be the last surprise Britain's third parties will produce before the decade of the 2020s is out.

Crunching the Numbers Behind Keir Starmer's "Landslide" Victory

Those even minimally attentive to the news are likely to be aware that on the Fourth of July Britain had its General Election. They are also likely to have heard that the Keir Starmer-led Labour Party won the election by "a landslide." "Landslide," "landslide," "landslide," they say, the din of the word's repetition ceaseless (landslidelandslidelandslide)--and a reminder that to go by the available evidence the generality of those who work in news rooms have no more regard for the implications of the words they use in their headlines than they do for fact, logic, truth and the intelligence of that audience which reads past those headlines in the hopes of gaining an understanding of the events lying behind the factoids with which that news media so cynically barrages the public through every minute of the 24-hour cycle.

After all, one would come away from the talk of a "landslide" thinking that Labour enjoyed some crushing victory over its rivals, when this is not even close to being the case. Granted, Labour did manage to get almost 3 million more votes than the Conservatives, who have not received such a low number of votes (6.8 million) since 1923--which is to say, never in British history since Labour displaced the Liberals as the country's "second" party (1924). However, these were not the only two parties locked in serious contention for votes and seats in that election, and one has to take the others into account in any proper appraisal of the situation, at which point Labour's share starts looking less impressive, and frankly rather paltry--Labour getting just 34 percent of the votes cast in the entire election, two out of three of the votes cast going to its rivals.

This reflects the fact that Britons voted for third parties in record numbers.* In all the elections the Labour Party's historic displacement of the Liberals and 2019 Britain's "third parties" never mustered more than 35 percent of the vote between the lot of them (in 2010), while the typical figure has tended to be far lower (a mere 24 percent of the vote in 2019, in 2017 not quite 18 percent.) By contrast third parties picked up some 42 percent of the vote this time around. Of these one-third went to the Conservatives' challenger from the right, the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK. Had the Conservatives got even three-quarters of the 4 million votes that went to Reform UK they could ordinarily have expected they would have beat the vote for Starmer, the Tories would have remained in power, and Rishi Sunak would have followed the election by celebrating rather than shamefacedly resigning.

One may argue that Britons voted for third parties as much as they did because this seemed a "boring" election whose conclusion was so foregone that rather than letting themselves be dragooned into voting for one of the two principal parties in spite of their real preferences because of the need to "beat the other guy" (and the disincentives to third-party voting presented by the "first-past-the-post" system), they went ahead and voted their real choice, or as close to it as the options on the ballot offer, maybe with an eye to the next round in which they hoped that those alternatives will be yet more viable choices (as many on the right hope will be the case with Reform UK). However, there is yet another exceptional feature of this election, namely its extremely low turnout. A mere 60 percent of the electorate voted in last week's election--as against 65-69 percent in the last four elections (2010, 2015, 2017, 2019)--with the one point of comparison in the past hundred years the election of 2001. The combination of low turnout with the extraordinary share of the vote claimed by the third parties is strongly suggestive of the more anecdotally reported extreme disgust of much of the electorate with the two major parties, an impression affirmed by a comparison of the vote for Labour against what the party got in past elections.

Those elections in which Labour unseated a longstanding Conservative-led government seem particularly relevant, and the comparison with them at once makes the difference clear. Back in 1997 the Tony Blair-led Labour Party picked up 43 percent of the vote with 71 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, while Labour did better still in the two really comparable prior elections, sometimes considerably better. In 1964 Labour, led by Harold Wilson, got 44 percent of the votes of the 77 percent who turned out. And in that election Starmer so loves to reference, that of 1945, Clement Attlee's Labour got 48 percent of the votes of the 73 percent who turned out.

The party's performance in 2024 even compares unfavorably with Labour's performance in many an election it lost. Setting aside such relatively distant elections as that of 1951 (which saw Labour win an even bigger share of the vote than they did in 1945 but still lose the election to the Conservatives in spite of their having fewer votes), and focusing on more recent elections, one sees that the Corbyn-led Labour Party that Starmer and his supporters have treated with such complete disdain, and entirely expelled from the Party, got a considerably higher proportion of the vote in the 2017 election (40 percent of a 69 percent turnout), and a higher number of absolute votes in both the 2017 and 2019 elections (12.9 million and 10.3 million, respectively, as against the 9.7 million votes which have just seen Starmer into office). Indeed, even the Michael Foot-led Labour Party of 1983, whose Manifesto Labour left-bashers so gleefully deride at every opportunity as "the longest suicide note in history," did only a little less well than Starmer in that year's election, getting the votes of 28 percent of the 73 percent of the eligible voters who cast a ballot (which worked out to 8.5 million votes from a rather smaller electorate than Britain now has).

The result is that where Clement Attlee was elected by 35 percent of the British electorate, Wilson by 34 percent, Blair by 31 percent--and even the defeated Corbyn got 28 percent of the vote of that electorate in 2017, and 22 percent in 2019--Starmer received a mere 20 percent. Looked at another way, it was just 75 percent of the popular vote with which Corbyn lost in 2017, and even less than he lost with again in the less fortuitous election of 2019.

If one insists on using the word "landslide" one would be sounder in using it to refer to the Conservatives losing by a landslide rather than Labour winning by one, because this election was lost by the Conservatives rather than won by Labour, in large part because of the splitting of the right's vote was split between its traditional favored party and the newcomer Reform UK. One should also acknowledge that this demonstrates the extreme unpopularity of Labour as well as of the Conservatives, a function of dislike of Starmer, the direction in which he has led the party, and the way in which he has gone about taking it in that direction. Posing as a socialist with a social democratic platform to win the leadership contest, afterward he cast all that aside with brazenness exceptional even by the standards of politics to assume the centrist-neoliberal-neoconservative "Blairite" posture Labour's base has long despised, rather treacherously turned on the more popular Corbyn he displaced through these maneuvers, and ever since, if sprinkling his remarks with superficial hints of Old Labour-respecting leftishness, otherwise consistently treated his party's left with contempt as, even while speaking of "change," he promised business as usual (all quite evident in the fundamental vision and more specific details of the Manifesto he released to the public three weeks before the election).

Thus did so few vote Starmer--while it seems plausible that many of those who did cast their ballot for him did so "while holding their noses," with all that implies for any rhetoric Starmer offers about having a "mandate" for his program (such as it is). Indeed, if commentators like centrist-neoconservative Anne Applebaum are exulting in Starmer's victory as some crushing "triumph of anti-populism," I would say that Starmer's troubles are just beginning. Indeed, it may well be that for all of Starmer's promises of "stability" in the Manifesto in government the Labour Party will prove no more stable than the Conservatives they have just defeated.

* For my figures regarding all British elections prior to the one just held I relied on the comprehensive compilation of the relevant statistics in the handy House of Commons Library's Research Briefing UK Election Statistics: 1918-2023: A Century of Elections.

The Mirage of Cyber-Utopianism

These past many years we have heard a great deal about "cyber-utopianism." The conventional narrative is that the left hoped that the Internet would be a powerful tool for giving voice to the disenfranchised, and that they have since seen the dashing of those hopes.

It certainly seems that the left has been less than triumphant online, that indeed the right has prevailed here--and that this reflects how online life simply "works." (In propagating a message online it is easier for the established, well-funded actor with a substantial legacy media platform to promote a message which is already quickly apprehensible by the broader public, and to which an audience with the affluence, leisure and comfort in expressing themselves normally required for them to be very active online will be receptive--and that all of this has greatly favored the right.)

What is more open to question is that the left ever bought into the cyber-utopian conception--a claim that can seem implausible given that cyber-utopianism was a matter of "Big Tech" corporate PR, techno-libertarianism, "market populism" and the information age hucksterism in which they are all invested, and about all of which one would expect any self-respecting leftist to be skeptical, if not cynical.

For his part, Cory Doctorow makes clear that the generally progressive-tending activists with whom he has associated in organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Reflecting upon "Twenty Years of the Copyright Wars" he called what I have described here Facebook propaganda, all as he and his associates "were . . . terrified about how" badly the Internet "could go wrong," with the "revisionist history" of cyber-utopianism erasing their concerns and their efforts from the record.

The "Juridification" of Politics and the Centrist Outlook

Reading Jamie M. Johnson, Owen D. Thomas & Victoria M. Basham's argument about Keir Starmer's "juridification" of politics I did not find the word "centrism" or its derivatives (e.g. "centrist") anywhere in the piece. Still, the image of this kind of juridification can bespeak Starmer's centrism as much as the neoliberalism to which they point--in particular the centrist's centrist view of "the system" as not up for discussion, and its management a mere technocratic matter of minor adjustments, with democracy carefully bounded and not allowed to get in the way of what the elites think matters, such that a centrist party competing with the right mainly offers a promise of more competent conservative government rather than an alternative to conservative government.

So does it go with the real meaning of the "post-ideological" assumption of juridification that Johnson et. al. so ably unpack--the claim that ideological conflict has been settled forever in the end just a conservative flush with victory giving the brush-off to their challengers, a thing they have done again and again over the centuries, only to find themselves challenged again and again in ways they cannot brush off, then as soon as they feel confident that they have fended off the challenge, repeat the same argument to begin the cycle all over again. Indeed, while Johnson et. al.'s article discusses Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis at some length, considering that argument--which as of 2024 looks ever more like a relic of end-of-Cold War triumphalism than a really insightful statement about the post-Cold War era--one does well to remember that almost three decades before Fukuyama published his argument in its initial form Daniel Bell (a thinker who has been claimed for the centrists as well as for the neoconservatives) published The End of Ideology.

Keir Starmer's "Juridificated" Politics

Jamie M. Johnson, Owen D. Thomas & Victoria M. Basham recently published an interesting article in the journal British Politics discussing Keir Starmer's politics as representing a "juridification" of politics. By that term they mean that it reduces government to mere administration. That is to say that it treats questions of more fundamental policy, their premises, their social bases as either nonexistent or meaningless--an approach the authors identify with a neoliberalism whose proponents have always argued "There Is No Alternative," and with the claims for this being a post-historical, post-ideological era in which all the big questions have been settled, the apparatus for running the world essentially in place, and all that remains its operation in a sound manner. In line with this Labour in opposition under Starmer criticized the government on grounds of "probity" and "competence"--its failing to adhere to "the rules"--and promised that under a Labour government Britain would get not a radical alternative, but "the continuation of Conservative policy, albeit implemented in a more honest and efficient manner." All of this, of course, is further affirmed by Starmer's ceaseless display of contempt for those who desire anything else from a Labour government--from his "I don't care" response to the objection that his policy is conservative, to his expression of disdain of "ideological purity."

In the process of Johnson et. al.'s argument for their position they give the impression that if Starmer can seem to have pragmatically acknowledged that 2024 is not 1997 in his rhetoric and even his policy promises down to his party's current General Election Manifesto, on a deeper level for Starmer the 1990s never ended. He is certainly not alone in this delusion, which can seem to be astonishingly persistent among centrist neoliberals of Starmer's type--but the thought is still not a happy one for anyone who understands just how much the world's path has diverged from what was expected by neoliberal utopians back in what George Friedman and Meredith LeBard called "the giddy springtime of the bourgeoisie."

My SSRN Working Papers: Some Thoughts

I have been posting at the Social Science Research Network for some years now, and recently decided to "take stock." Looking back it seems to me that my SSRN working papers had three principal themes.

1. Political Language and its Application.
I wrote about how we use terms like "neoliberal," "centrist," "neoconservative," "fascism," etc.--the meanings we assign them, and their relevance to our public life. Thus did I not only deal with what neoliberalism is, but finding it indeed a useful term whose conventional understanding is in fact descriptive of an importantly interconnected political-economic theory, political tendency, practical policy, economic model, and cultural condition, considered whether particular governments (such as that of Tony Blair) have adhered to neoliberalism in policy (and usually finding that they did so), and the way in which neoliberal practice has often diverged from neoliberal theory (and the results still more so). The ways in which centrist political thinking has colored the news media's biases (evident in such things as its uses of "expert opinion" and its penchant for "both sidesism") similarly emerged as a recurring theme. I also spent a lot of time looking at some older terms which may not be heard much these days but whose relevance may not have necessarily passed, as with "status politics," "pseudo-conservative," and "market populism," as well as still others which are less obviously "political," but have undeniably had political significances, like "middle class."

2. The Performance of the World Economy Since the End of the Post-World War II Boom.
Alongside the examination of so much terminology and its relation to the facts of the record I did a lot of number-crunching, comparing differing estimates of growth with an eye to the downward trend in the rate of economic growth evident in the world economy since the 1970s. In the process I wrote a lot about different ways of measuring growth, paying special attention to the differing results we get when we use the Consumer Price Index rather than chained-dollar deflators to adjust for prices over time (and arguing for the value of the results we get from the latter approach, which can seem to indicate that, China apart, per capita Product has just not grown since the 1970s). This carried over to a particular interest in the deindustrialization observable in many advanced industrial countries, particularly the U.S. but also Britain, among others; and the combination of deindustrialization with financialization that seemed to me characteristic of the neoliberal model, quantitatively demonstrating the reality of important changes in an economy like that of the U.S. as it shifted from "Keynesian Fordism" toward "Neoliberal Financialization." (Thus did I examine changes in the makeup of Gross Domestic Product, value added, asset accumulation, international trade and profits by sector amid the U.S. economy's "restructuring" in the neoliberal era.) I also spent quite a bit of time on what seemed to me possible explanations for this state of affairs, focusing on the limitations of the Keynesian growth model and its possibilities at mid-century, what neoliberalism has really meant for our economic life, and how different countries got different results (with, for example, its stronger defense-industrial boom and the shale boom making an important difference in how deindustrialization proceeded in the U.S. as against a harder-hit Britain). All of this, of course, factored into my aforementioned writing about neoliberalism and the middle class--and I should add, my writing on social withdrawal in such forms as the "hikikomori" phenomenon.

3. The Contrast Between the Expectations of the 1990s and the Realities of the Twenty-First Century.
The third theme, which can seem derivative of the first two (particularly the neoliberalism about which I wrote so much, and the downward trend of growth in the past half century), has been how a particular image of the post-Cold War era that in the 1990s had prevailed in America--of a permanent tech boom interacting with unstoppable globalization within a unipolar, American-led world order that would only become more so--and how that image has differed greatly from the reality. In this vein I discussed the odd combination of declinism and triumphalism so prominent in the period, the "information age" of which we heard so much then and so much less since, and just what "unipolarity" was supposed to mean, as well as whether or not it has eroded in this era of increasing great power conflict (extending to examinations of the military balance between the U.S. and its allies and other powers such as Russia and China). I also ended up discussing the broader outlook prevailing in American culture in the 1990s and its aftermath, extending to the famous '90s penchant for the ironic, and for the "extreme!"--as well as such notions as "market populism" that would seem to have suffered badly in the years since, and such related issues as why we give "Silicon Valley" so much attention, and the larger matter of whether neoliberalism's day is passing.

I did write about a good many other things over those years--like why argument over popular culture is so prominent in our political life--but even to the extent that this can seem removed from those other themes (and this is arguably imperfect) it was the Big Three to which I kept coming back.

So does it generally go with most writers, I suppose, coming back to the same themes over and over again.

The trick, I suppose, is to keep it all from getting stale.