Of Aspirationalism, Egalitarianism and the Confusion of the One with the Other

Recently revisiting the history that led from "Old" Labour to "New" in writing about the Labour Party's General Election Manifesto I found myself again dealing with the difference between aspirationalism and egalitarianism.

Aspirationalism is about improving one's individual place in an unequal society--endeavoring to climb to a higher rung on the social ladder.

Egalitarianism is about making society as a whole more equal.

This difference with all its implications--the individualistic focus of aspirationalism as against egalitarianism's societal concern, and what a conservative thing the former is against the latter--seems a very easy thing to understand. Yet in our time there is a tendency to flub the understanding, particularly because of the passing off of aspirationalism as egalitarianism, not least in the stress on "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome."

Thus did it go with the shift from Old Labour to New Labour.

As Clause IV in the Labour Party constitution of 1918 makes clear, the Labour Party was originally a party of working class "emancipation," whose goal was to bring the working class the "full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof."

That went by the wayside when the party revised the clause in 1995, which discarded the special concern for the working class, let alone its emancipation, for a vaguer conception of justice and democracy "in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few" (emphasis added). Then-party leader Tony Blair strengthened the accent on aspiration against egalitarianism in his 1997 General Election Manifesto, describing his goal as "a country in which people get on, do well, make a success of their lives," while pointedly adding "I have no time for the politics of envy. We need more successful entrepreneurs, not fewer of them." His qualification of this statement is limited to the view that "these life-chances should be for all the people."

Thus one had, rather than a more equal society, one where the chance to get ahead was widely available, as the standard of the "good society," with the current Labour Party leader taking the same view, more or less--the hard-working having "a fair chance to get on" as Keir Starmer puts it in his own Manifesto.

Just as no one should slight the difference between egalitarianism and aspirationalism no one should slight the difference between the old egalitarian vision, or the new aspirationalist one; what it says about the distance Labour moved in its politics; and how much continuity there is likely to be between the party of Blair and the party of Starmer.

The Centrist Outlook and the Propaganda Model of the News Media

Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's classic Manufacturing Consent was neither the first word on the way the very structure of the news media builds into it a political bias in favor of the status quo and the rich and powerful who prosper by it (Upton Sinclair covered this ground way back in the World War I period), nor the last (Matt Taibbi recently endeavoring to update Manufacturing Consent for the digital age, complete with an interview with Chomsky about the matter). Still, the book justly remains a touchstone for students of the media for its presentation of a "propaganda model" of the news--in which ownership (the fact that the news is a business, in the main a Big Business concentrated in few hands), advertising (the influence of other Big Business over the news media through its advertising dollars), "sourcing" (the media's unavoidable reliance on society's dominant institutions themselves to supply them with the information they retail), "flak" (the susceptibility of media outlets to potentially bank-breaking political counterattack that they are anxious to avoid) and Anti-Communism (providing an intellectual framework for dealing with events). Indeed, while not long ago I took up the matter of the bias of the news media on a very different basis I have since come back to it again and again. Indeed, if having argued for the mainstream media being strongly biased in a centrist direction at multiple levels (the ideological balance in the country more broadly, the backgrounds of the people who become journalists, the culture of the news profession, etc.), it seems worth considering how this interacts with a propaganda model that is above all driven by business factors--and in doing that, start with the character of political centrism.

The centrist package of "horseshoe theory" anti-extremism that on closer inspection is mainly Anti-Communism, the centrist's hostility to the mass and esteem of the elite and its experts, their pessimism in epistemology and much else, their orientation to resolving conflicts about social problems rather than dealing with the problems that are the causes, their standard of "pluralist" and "civil" discourse that delegitimizes what they recognize as "ideologues" in a way that is not politically neutral or equally enforced against all parties. All this makes centrists deferential to "Establishment" institutions and spokespersons and the privilege they represent, as respectful of the right as they are disrespectful of the left, disinclined to try explaining complex issues and instead simply pass on the pronouncements of "authority," obsessed with politics at the expense of policy, and more concerned for political consensus than finding out the facts and uncovering the truth (as seen in their propensity for both sidesism).

Those espousing such an ideology do not very easily recognize the advantages enjoyed by the well-resourced as against the less well-resourced, or regard their exercise of their power relative to other groups as at all problematic. Naturally they are not bothered by those key propaganda model factors, the concentration of the news media in a few hands, the influence advertisers exert through their dollars, and the way that those with the means can organize "flak" to intimidate media outlets taking a line they do not like. Altogether this means that the centrist would regard attentiveness to those advantages and problems as inconsistent with their conceptions of "pluralism" and "civility." Nor are they troubled by the reliance on "sourcing," because they are respectful of elites, and they are certainly approving of the fifth factor, the "national religion" status of Anti-Communism--while again having no truck with the opposite outlook. Indeed, they are critical not of those factors that turn the mainstream media into a machinery for propaganda, but of those who object to its being a machinery for propaganda in this fashion; entirely comfortable with a media working in a propaganda model way, and equally hostile to those who are not, a fact not just conducive but essential to that system's functioning as it has done down to the present.

Is the British Conservative Party Going the Way of the Liberal Party?

Britain's current party system is about a hundred years old now--born of the eclipse of the Liberal Party by the newly formed Labour Party in the early twentieth century. As related by George Dangerfield in his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, in a Britain beset by multiple crises in the years before World War I--the fiscal stress of increasing foreign and domestic pressures to spend more on both "guns and butter" and the political battles to which it led, rising labor and feminist militancy, the Irish struggle for independence that convulsed Britain as the Algerian struggle for independence convulsed France in the post-war period--the Liberals satisfied neither as the preference of elites, nor the party of progress, and after the General Election of 1924 they fell to a third-place position in the two party-dominated system prevailing ever since.

In that resulting system the Conservatives have tended to predominate. Of just under eighty-seven years in which one party or the other was in government, the Conservatives were the party of government for 54 years--62 percent of the time. During the nearly fourteen years of National and wartime governments in 1931-1945, the country had Conservative Prime Ministers, which works out to about 74 percent of the time. All of this worked out to Conservative Prime Ministers being in office for almost 64 years--about 63 percent of the time. One may add that the averages obscure periods of even greater conservative preponderance. Whereas in the exceptional 1945-1979 period there was a rough parity between the Conservatives and Labour where office-holding was concerned, when this period is removed from the picture there was a Conservative government for 69 percent of the non-National government periods when taking these as a whole, while a Conservative was Prime Minister 70 percent of the time. This is not least due to the Conservative predominance since the watershed election of 1979, which to date has seen Conservatives in office for 32 of 45 years--or 71 percent of the time.

Thus does the conventional commentary term the Conservatives, who as this reflects have been the preferred choice of the country's "elite," the "natural" party of government. However, a hundred years on Esther Webber suggests that the British party system may be headed for another such "shake-up"--with the Conservatives rather than their principal opposition the ones to fall as the Conservative Party not only flounders in its competition with Labour, but is challenged from the right by Nigel Farage's Reform UK.

The prospect can seem the easier to imagine amid the shake-up of party systems across the Western world since the financial crisis of 2007, and amid the disasters, and disastrous management of those disasters, seen across the globe, from the continued economic hardship of "the Great Recession," to the resurgence of great power war, to a global pandemic. (Most obviously the case in France and Italy, both countries are governed by parties that did not even exist before the Great Recession, in both countries the older parties have been marginalized, or even ceased to exist under their old names.) Still, at the moment I think any such a thing at the very least a ways off--more than one election off, frankly, in even the direst scenario for the Tories. A rather more likely outcome is Reform UK drawing the Conservative Party further rightward than they already are--and given the kind of leadership it now has, this in turn drawing the most right-wing leadership in the Labour Party's history rightward yet again.

Britain's 2024 General Election: Some Thoughts

I suspect even the essentially sympathetic will not look on the fourteen years of Conservative government that began in 2010 and (seem almost certain to end) in 2024 as a particularly proud period in that party's history. The Tories stepped in just a little after the 2007-2008 financial crisis as, struggling with a "Great Recession" that never ended, Britain (along with the rest of the world) went from one crisis to the next in a generally deteriorating world situation that saw the resurgence of great power war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In presiding over all this they delivered to the public austerity, a referendum on withdrawal from the European Union that began as a bluff and ended as a bungle, pandemic management consistent with what might be expected of a Prime Minister reported to have said "let the bodies pile high in their thousands," and even a good old-fashioned fiscal-monetary crisis as ill-thought-out tax cuts for the rich sent sterling crashing, while, as things fell apart, making grandiose pronouncements about a "Global Britain" a truly global power again.

It is telling of this chaos that the Conservative Party had five leaders, and in them Britain five Prime Ministers, within the slightly over six year span between July 13, 2016 and October 24, 2022 (a rate of turnover without precedent, certainly when circumstances are taken into account).* It is equally telling of this period that after the first of those Prime Ministers slunk away in shame after his bluff was called, and many might have hoped never to see his smug, sanctimonious face in the news again, the last of those Prime Ministers made him Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs--after the Monarchy and the Prime Minister, his face Britain's face to the world.

The polls only confirm how implausible it is that a party with such a recent history should stay in government. Indeed, perusing the numbers Esther Webber suggests that the "natural party of government" in Britain "is facing a defeat so dramatic it might not survive" (emphasis added)--with this all the more striking for the sheer tepidity of the opposition. The Keir Starmer not leading the Labour Party is, after all, no champion of those who have spent the last fourteen years--indeed, the whole era since Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street--anguished by the country's course. Rather he posed as just left enough to squeeze Jeremy Corbyn out of the leadership before kicking his "ten pledges" to the curb with a brazenness astonishing even for a career politician, as he set about pulling all the stops to reassure the country's elites that he was a safe alternative to the increasingly bankrupt Conservative Party--a neoliberal in economics, a neoconservative in foreign policy, a rightist dictator in his own party who will not only keep the party left in line but expel it (as he did Corbyn). Indeed, if Starmer can sound more leftish than a Blair who could scarcely bring himself to even use the word "worker" by throwing around the rhetoric of the "one percent" as if he were some Occupy Wall Streeter and putting in a good word for Old Labour here and there, that is because the swaggering neoliberalism of the hosannas-over-globalization-singing late '90s is totally unsalable today. However, Starmer's rhetoric has shifted rightward as of late, while when one looks beyond the "mere rhetoric" of even his most leftish statements to the substance of what he says, they may, like Thomas Scripps, feel themselves looking at a candidate who makes Blair "look like a left-wing stalwart of a bygone age."

The result is that, again, the most likely outcome of the coming election is a change of government--combined with a great continuity of policy, in a world where "business as usual" seems ever less plausible amid metastasizing polycrisis. Alas, what can be said of Britain seems sayable about a good many other places these days--while at least as far as anything emanating from political Establishments is concerned, "business as usual" is as good as things are likely to get.

* The Duke of Wellington's 23 days in office in 1834 before handing over to Robert Peel, for example, are a very different thing from the hijinks of the last decade.

Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer . . . Gets Nearer

As the date of release date of Raymond Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI (June 25 of this year) approaches we are seeing more reviews of the book, and commentary about its contents.

So far it seems that Kurzweil is not making any radical revisions to his earlier predictions, but endeavoring to show that we are continuing to advance toward the realization of what he predicted in his prior 2005 book, and indeed, what seems to me his more ground-breaking and foundational 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines.

This can seem less than surprising. While many assessing Kurzweil's forecasts, even when limiting themselves to just his forecasts regarding the area that is his focus rather than broader economic or political developments about which his knowledge has seemed fairly casual, have found him much more often wrong than right, Kurzweil has tended to regard himself as overwhelmingly getting it right rather than wrong. Defending his 147 predictions for 2009 in answer to Alex Knapp's critcisms of them as "mostly inaccurate" in Forbes, Kurzweil insisted that 78 percent of them were entirely correct, another 8 percent only off by a year or two, and only a mere 2 percent classifiable as wrong.

Still, when we consider what he had to say about matters like virtual reality and self-driving cars we are reminded that what he thought we would have in 2009 we still lack in 2024, all as the prospects of whole technological areas seem to have fallen sharply in the years since--as with nanotechnology, a bubble that can seem to have yielded next to nothing as compared with the promises then current, which were quite important to his vision. Yes, when someone points this those who refuse to brook any suggestion that this is anything other than an era of revolutionary technological changes insist that really nanotechnology is all around us, but when pressed admit that this is at best a matter of incremental improvements in a number of well-established fields rather than, for instance, the materials revolution promised by the use of exceedingly strong and lightweight carbon nanotubes in large-scale engineering, or even chip-making--never mind the wondrous nano-machinery an Eric Drexler described. In spite of that the buzz for Kurzweil's book has him continuing to project nanobots in our bloodstreams helping to keep us healthy in the 2030s. I admit myself skeptical about that one--but I do wonder what he has to say in support of his claim.

Cynically Exploiting a Generational Divide

In our age the grubby work of mainstream politics is far, far less a matter of building coalitions among different groups on the basis of their common interests than of playing them off against one another to push an agenda very few actually want. Thus has it been standard operating procedure to promote "culture war" for the sake of enabling a neoliberal economic program. Indeed, if for a period during the 1990s neoliberals, in a moment of utopian euphoria (or insanity, or idiocy), thought they could do without a culture war that had always been an imperfect tool for their purposes, turning to a more congenial "market populism" instead, but the way their utopian project came crashing down around them as they went from disaster to disaster in the twenty-first century had them doubling down on cultural warfare. Indeed, this seems inextricable from the way the Great Recession quickened the long rightward march of politics--with this, when one looks closely, not the end of neoliberalism but rather an attempt to save as much of it as possible.

Of course, in doing so they were already playing an old game, if more intricately. Traditionally culture war, which has been known by many names over the years (like status politics), has been a matter of ethnicity and religiosity. Today gender is a large and conspicuous part of the game in a way without precedent, while there is also an abundance of appeal to generational divides--and especially the fears and hates the old are supposed to feel for many of the young. Thus Rishi Sunak trots out his idea for National Service. The idea is bound to cost him points with the young--but to whatever extent he is actually trying to win this election, hoping that it will appeal enough to youth-hating oldsters to gain him enough points with them to more than make up for any such loss there.

Such maneuvers deserve to fail, and fail miserably. Perhaps they will do just that on Britain's own Fourth of July.

Drivel About the Draft

Some months ago there was an uptick in the chatter about the possible reinstitution of conscription in Britain in the wake of public remarks by retiring Chief of the General Staff Patrick Sanders. In the main it was light-minded, culture war-mongering nonsense from commentators knowing and caring nothing of the practicalities of the matter, and perhaps not even why there is so much talk of a draft in the first place, but sure that they find the thought of the millennials they despise being brutalized in basic training and coming home in body bags delightful.

This chatter waned, of course, but, as Rishi Sunak to all evidences does his best to lose an election that was already looking pretty hopeless for the Conservative Party after a long and disastrous time in government (think where they were in 1997, but much, much worse), and in line with this eager to guarantee the alienation of the younger voters who would actually be making the "sacrifice" of which those in power and those who duck-talkingly repeat their words so love to speak, raised the matter of mandatory national service, apparently in much the same spirit.

One would think those people had never heard of the fact that armies must not only have recruits, but equip them as well if they are to actually function as a serious fighting force. That one cannot mobilize a population without also mobilizing an economy, and that there may not be very much "economy" to mobilize, especially not the kind that counts in "finance" and "services"-oriented Britain a those aforementioned commentators cheerled for so many years. The likes of Nigel Lawson may believe, or profess to believe, that manufacturing is irrelevant, that an extremely import-dependent nation of sixty million can live on "services," but selling real estate and trading currency and even making London a "lifestyle" hub for the international super-rich does not outfit armored divisions. And as this process has been broadly evident across much of the world, not many others have much capacity these days, such that the few who still do can hardly meet the entire demand of a rearming Europe. (Certainly South Korea can't build enough tanks for everybody who wants them! Not for long anyway, the way things are going.)

When you see commentators talking about that you will know the discussion has gotten serious. Still, I would not rule out a draft happening without it getting serious. Those that lickspittle court historians hail as "statesmen" and encourage their countrymen to revere as such, when one judges by the facts and not the flattery, have generally not been an impressive lot--and as cynical as they are stupid quite capable of ordering lots of people to put on uniforms, and then only much later worrying about actually getting the uniforms.

Liz Spayd's Counterblast at the New York Times' Readers Over Bret Stephens' Column and What it Shows Us About Centrism

Liz Spayd answered the backlash from readers over the publication of Bret Stephens' climate denialist first column back in 2017 with an expression of support for a greater diversity of views on the opinion pages to be achieved by "busting up the mostly liberal echo chamber around here," and criticism of the Times' readers for not taking "at face value" Stephens' attack on climate science as honest skepticism.

Looking back at Spayd's piece her position strikes me as an object lesson in the centrism that is all too often confused with "liberal" or "left" views (when it is, in fact, classical conservatism adapted for twentieth century America).

It is very telling of this centrism that the Times' editorship's desire for a greater diversity of views led to the inclusion of a Stephens on its pages--the conservative center more easily looking right than left for its opinion and its insight; far more likely to extend a conciliatory hand toward the right than to the left; and when those to its left question its doing that, the center defending not just its conduct but the right to them, as it attacks the left for saying anything about the matter. Indeed, in answering the "liberals" who stood in for the left in this discussion, Ms. Spayd accused them of intolerance for other views--all very much in line with who is and who is not part of the "legitimate" conversation in the centrist's eyes. Put into the terminology of centrist political theory, the Times' left-leaning readers were a pack of "ideologues" and "extremists" behaving in an "uncivil" fashion--as a result of their doing what the "civil," "pluralistic," "pragmatic" politics by which centrists set such great store disallows by their remembering that in politics people are not always forthright about their meanings, intentions and goals, their actually paying attention to context, their thinking that actual physical reality is of any importance, and caring more about addressing a pressing real-world problem than "getting along." For in the view of centrists like those for whom Ms. Spayd spoke anyone legitimately part of the conversation ought to take a presumably legitimate Stephens "at his word," accepting his claim "that he has no intention of manufacturing facts and that he will be transparent with his audience about his ideas and intentions"--even though bad faith and outright lying have for decades been foundational to climate denialism, and Stephens' personal history generally and writing in that very column particularly raised alarms on that point, the more in as centrist media such as the Times have enabled denialist propaganda such as they suspected Stephens of at every turn, not least through the "both sidesism" into which Spayd's remarks at the very least played in a way all too familiar.

One may imagine from this that it is easier to stay within the bounds of "legitimate" discourse when one is getting their way (as the climate denialists have generally succeeded in doing), rather than those criticizing, let alone trying to change, the "status quo" (as those concerned about climate change are)--and they would indeed be right, centrist theorists drawing the boundaries of legitimacy in such a fashion as to make it impossible for any leftist to meet the standard (as it regards any structural criticism of society raising such matters as capitalism, class and power, the reliance of explicit social theory, among much, much else central to the leftist tradition all absolutely off-limits). By contrast the same rules have been far more accommodating to the right, and in practice the centrist less ardent about enforcing the rules against it, permitting it to assume the right to be "legitimate" unless proven otherwise (with this almost impossible to do to the satisfaction of a conservative, anti-leftist centrist, as Spayd's piece reminds one).

All of this is underlined by how situations in which the center defends the left to the right do not seem to come up the same way--though admittedly such a situation could hardly have done so when the Times, while having a veritable army of avowedly right-wing columnists (this was, after all, the place where Ross Douthat coined the term "woke capitalism," while the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell writes for them too, etc., etc.), and its supposed "liberals" are often anything but (as with a certain "free-market Savonarola" who cheerled for war after war with famously vulgar, brutal and racist rhetoric), has no one writing for it on such a regular basis who is anywhere near as far to the left as its avowedly right-wing columnists (or even those who are not avowedly so, like the aforementioned free-market Savonarola) are far to the right.* And it would be a surprise were it otherwise given the recent quantitative assessment of the paper's front-page stories demonstrating its consistently favoring the concerns of the right--just as the conservative, and ever rightward-inclining, centrist can be counted upon to do when it really matters.

Conscription in a Neoliberal (and Neoconservative) Age

"There is no such thing as society," snarls the neoliberal--meaning exactly what they sound like they mean, even if they deny it afterward, or others deny it on their behalf.

However, those who talk in such terms are not unknown to suddenly decide that there is such a thing as society after all--when it lets them make demands on the less powerful members of that entity whose very existence they just denied. So does it go with figures like Rishi Sunak proposing bringing back mandatory "National Service" for the young in a fashion that, however much Sunak insists that the proposed program offers "choice," is undeniably intended to press at least a portion of the relevant age cohort toward the armed forces (while, with General Patrick Sanders floating visions of British mass armies for fighting on the continent, the pressing of a few that way is plausibly interpreted as a first step toward much more).

The reaction of the most relevant part of the public--the young from whom the government is intent on exacting this service--is not merely unimpressed with Sunak's talk of "choice" (and "opportunity"!) but hostile to the idea, enough so that it is a reminder that it is one thing for politicians conducting an electoral campaign with such extreme incompetence that they seem determined to lose to shoot their mouths off about such plans, another to actually make such a scheme work. However, national-level political figures these days, in any country, rarely show any understanding of the concept of making things work, or even seem to care to pretend to do so for simple appearance's sake—and get away with it the more easily as their courtiers, and the courtiers of those to whom they really answer, are, as always, highly accommodating of their most brazen stupidity, ever assuring them that they are brilliant even as they consistently prove themselves the extreme opposite of that word in all its senses.

Looking Back: The New Republic's list of Overrated Policy Intellectuals From 2011

Recently I stumbled across The New Republic's 2011 list of "overrated" policy intellectuals.

I admit to not recognizing every name on the list (I did not remember previously hearing of Drew Westen), and to not being in a position to judge some of those I did recognize because of my knowing something of their work only secondhand--and especially the particular charges the list's makers laid against them (as with Rachel Maddow).

Where those I could judge are concerned I did not think that Ayn Rand belonged on the list at all, not because of any strengths or weaknesses of her work, but because she died almost thirty years before the list was made, in contrast with everyone on the list who was, at least at the time, among the living and actively part of the scene.

Of the others many seemed entirely appropriate. Fareed Zakaria? Definitely, and for exactly the reasons the list's makers say: "a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle," and frankly, an off-putting "mix of elitism and banality."

Parag Khanna? Likewise a fair choice. I reviewed his book The Second World. He got enough right that, a more generous reviewer then than now, I was on the whole favorable to the work--the more in as I was inclined to emphasize the positives over the negatives. Still, it was not one for the ages, and Khanna's next, How to Run the World, left me deeply unimpressed--"a self-congratulatory anthology of clichés and platitudes—the life of the mind, Davos-style" in the Republic's words. And nothing I have heard or read of him since has suggested I needed to bother with his work.

Still, I would say that this portion of the list was at best right fifty percent of the time--which also made it wrong fifty percent of the time, with Frank Rich one such case. The Republic's charge was simply that he is "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety." Even were that true it seems to me that his being an "old school salon liberal" would still leave him several cuts above the competition given the degeneration of the quality of political commentary across the spectrum of mainstream opinion, such that he has injected into that mainstream much that needs saying and is ever less likely to be said within its bounds these days--not least at his paper, the New York Times. Indeed, remarking the Republic's list Salon, in its worthwhile contemporary comment, characterizes the inclusion of Rich as a cheap piece of hippie-punching, which seems to me a very plausible reading of that item.