Book Review: The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, by Upton Sinclair

While it is the last of the books I have reviewed for this blog, The Profits of Religion (1917) was actually the first of the books of what became the "Dead Hand" series that Upton Sinclair published.

As the play on words that is the title of Sinclair's book makes clear, he regarded organized religion as a racket--and has been pretty much the same racket all over the world, since the dawn of recorded history. This has, of course, all been said over the years many, many times, but in an era in which it is generally the right that gets to have it say before a wide audience on this subject as on virtually all others so that the "New Atheists" dominate what passes for "rationalist" criticism of religion within the mainstream, Sinclair's coming at the matter of religion from a very different standpoint can by itself distinguish him from those other writers on the subject one is likely to encounter today. Beginning with a surreal and symbolic vision of a field of people trying to, literally, lift themselves up by their bootstraps toward the sky under the tutelage of priests, as the Wholesale Pickpockets Association takes advantage of their distraction to do what its name indicates to be the main activity of its members, Sinclair tells us explicitly in Profits that his "thesis is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation"--an effect he traces from the prehistoric past to the present day. That is to say, if prehistoric peoples' incapacity to tell the difference between reality, dream and fancy as they strove to explain the often perplexing and frightening world in which they lived gave an emergent priestly caste the chance to build "a mighty fortress of Graft" upon the foundation of their fear ("Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite"), those particular grifters were through history partners, and at that junior partners, to other and increasingly bigger criminals--helping keep the slaves, serfs and commoners subdued and exploited by more "worldly" rulers, be they lords of war or lords of capital, by upholding the cruelest features of the social order by way of promises of prosperity and salvation, threats of damnation and hellfire, the hand-waving of ritual, the stultification of the mind with obscurantism, and of course, in the case of those who failed to respond to the standard operating procedures, persecution of the heretic unto death, as they made of human life a swamp of oppression and hypocrisy.

The New Atheists, for the most part, would not dare such criticism of course, more inclined to laugh at the poor when they get taken in by the grifters, and rather less prone to acknowledge a relationship like Billy and John's. Moreover, rather than promoting xenophobic and often blatantly racist intolerance, Sinclair concerns himself above all with religion in the mainstream of Western life, and above all American society--with, of the seven "books" comprising Profits, after he has got through laying out the essentials of the racket and their origins in the first book ("The Church of the Conquerors"), Sinclair devoting three to the more established Protestant churches (numbers two, four and five, "The Church of Good Society," "The Church of the Slavers," "The Church of the Merchants"), and still another to more novel American institutions (number six, "The Church of the Quacks"). It is in keeping with this spirit that if Sinclair has something to say of the Lutheran Church of America's then-wartime enemy, Germany, he has rather more to say of the established church of its ally and mother country (and root and cousin of Sinclair's own absolutely mainline Episcopalian Church), England's Anglican Church; that if he devotes a whole book (number three, "The Church of the Servant-Girls") to Catholicism abroad and at home in a time when anti-Catholicism was a significant prejudice in American life, he at least endeavors to be clear that, unlike the nativists of his own time to whom he is anxious to give no aid and comfort, he is criticizing the institution of the Church and the policies explicitly laid down by its undisputed authorities, rather than persecuting people of Catholic background; and that when referencing other religions from ancient Mesopotamia to the present-day South Seas, his concern all the way through is with showing the universality of the pattern he describes, rather than mocking, let alone demonizing, the "Other" or "exotic."

It is also the case that if Sinclair pulls no punches in attacking "actually existing" organized religion, Sinclair also tells us that he wrote his book "in the direct line of the Christian tradition" and "for the cause of Jesus" as "a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places," "thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth," and "has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men," with the contrast with the outlook of his friend H.G. Wells helpful in grasping his attitude. Where Wells, in that underappreciated book that drew the threads of his life's work together, The Shape of Things to Come, pictured the world's churches falling into neglect for irrelevance and eventually being "cleared away like dead leaves" save for a "few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals" preserved for their artistic and historical interest (and the same happening with the houses of worship of every other religion)--what good the religions had ever stood for advanced by other institutions, in other ways in the era of the "World State"--Sinclair anticipated in his seventh and last book ("The Church of the Social Revolution") the modernization of religion saving the churches, which he saw as still fulfilling real and enduring human needs. Social progress, Sinclair declared in the chapter "The Church Redeemed," "will abolish poverty and parasitism . . . make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier," but would "not remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue"--only raising the struggle to a higher level on which human beings would find "newer and higher types of virtue"--while humans would "more than ever" desire to gather "in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one another," and do so the better in "places swept clean of superstition and tyranny." Indeed, Sinclair held that just "[a]s the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses," so the Catholic Church, and every other such institution, would also be "compel[led] . . . to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation," and himself made so bold as to "record the prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed . . . true Socialism" the same way that those Authorities had already come to "deny that the Church ever . . . burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the sun," or "sold the right to commit crime."

Of course, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) lived to see that as of 1950 no such thing had come about, or even come close to happening--and had he also lived for the fifty-six years between his passing and our day he would have found himself still waiting for such denials (indeed, seen Popes celebrated for their role as Anti-Communist Cold Warriors). Just as was the case with the institutions he criticized for their corruption what he saw wrong with organized religion proved far more enduring than he expected in those hopeful times, which has translated to another unpleasant irony--just as was the case with his other works of nonfiction, the reader may find Sinclair's concerns and arguments all too contemporary precisely because the world simply did not move forward, the issues and conflicts of his time still the issues and conflicts of ours, so much so that some speak of the twentieth century as unfinished.

These days that lack of resolution, which ever more gives the lie to the smug claims that history as a whole was finished at the twentieth century's chronological end, seems ever more the story of our times--not least as we feel ourselves living through another edition of the interwar era, amid long depression, the resurgence of fascism, and renewed threats of world war.

Of the Term "Populism"

In recent years usage of the word "populist" has exploded--almost always in reference to figures, tendencies, ideas, movements, parties of the right whose politics a short time earlier would have put them outside the mainstream; to what can be called, descriptively rather than pejoratively, the far right. Almost unquestioned by the mainstream media, some analysts of contemporary politics have nevertheless taken issue with that choice of terminology as obscuring the facts in highly consequential ways, among them Aurelien Mondon.

In making his case Mondon begins with an indisputable definitional mistake on the part of analysts--their conflating "populist" with "far right." After all, the two terms are not synonyms. There are populists who are not of the far right; and there are far rightists who are not populists; but one would never know that from how the "punditry" uses the word "populist." However, at a deeper level there is also the reality that even those far right tendencies which advertise themselves as populist have not only been elite-tolerated or elite-backed (without which tolerance and backing a far right tendency would be no more successful than the left tendencies which have such a hard time for lack of such tolerance and backing), but elite-founded and elite-led as they promote elite agendas. At the very least such facts impose on any serious analyst the obligation to admit that such a tendency is more complex in nature than the opposition of "the people" to "the elite" denoted by the use of the term "populist." It also draws attention to the fact that in many an ostensibly populist movement the popular component is not only slight, or only marginally supportive of the tendency in a field offering few choices amid much discontent, but mere "astroturf."

Because of its centrist ideological bias the media is ill-equipped, and frankly disinclined, to cope with such complexity, or penetrate beneath the surfaces of political life to get at underlying realities. After all, the epistemologically pessimistic, consensus-minded, center is neither particularly interested in nor optimistic about the intellectual endeavor involved in uncovering the truth, while being much more interested in adhering to the rules of "civil" discourse. These rules hold it to be "uncivil" to do anything less than take at their word anyone it has not ruled out of the discourse as an "extremist" and thus deprived of the legitimacy obliging it to show respect--all as the center avoids calling out extremism at the right end of the political spectrum, keeping them from being so ruled out (in contrast with the left the center treats as as inherently illegitimate, and excludable as a matter of course). Adding to the difficulty for the media on this particular point it is especially squeamish about attending to realities of class and of power--making it even less likely to call out a "populist" movement as other than that, the more easily in as the centrist is so attached to the image of working people as hippie-punching "hardhats" (with the fact that the thought of a right-wing working class is much more comfortable for the centrist than a proletariat out of an Eisenstein film not irrelevant to their promulgation of that image).

Altogether this gives the centrist media ample reason to respect far rightists who claim to be "populists" as being what they say they are--with, ironically, even those in the center troubled by the far right's ascent the more inclined to believe them because the centrist is so ready to believe in the wisdom and responsibility of elites, and the backwardness and viciousness of "the lower orders." However, as with so much else produced by centrist news coverage the resulting view of the situation is not only intellectually muddling, but highly advantageous to the right as against its rivals. In discussion of such groups it switches the subject from their politics to their presumed popularity, with the same switch uncritically affirming their claim to being the true representative "voice of the people" which, presumably unrepresented before or by anyone else, must be given a respectful hearing, and accordingly afforded a platform for the presentation of its views such as that same media would not have accorded it earlier (and again, such as it would never give the left).

As Mondon has made clear all this has played its part in mainstreaming the far right, enabling its electoral victories again and again--even as that same media condemns "extremism" in its profoundly hypocritical fashion.

Rachel Reeves' Rancid Rhetoric: A Few More Thoughts

Recently taking up the issue of Rachel Reeves' first speech in Parliament about the new Labour government's fiscal "inheritance" my primary concern was establishing the hard specifics--just what it was that her government meant to do, and how it looked from the standpoint of the Labour party's promises and image. Quite predictably it affirmed the view of Starmer's government as promising to be the most right-wing in the century-long history of his party--and perhaps one of the more right-wing of any party.

Going over the rhetoric only reaffirms that, not only in such ways as the gratuitous reference to welfare cheats so dear to those who believe stupid lies about "welfare queens" living in luxury bankrupting the nation, or the none too subtle attacks on organized labor (with Ms. Reeves twice attacking public sector strikes as causes of the "inheritance"), but the way in which she broadly raised the matter of fiscal discipline, and situated what remain Britain's two principal political parties in relation to it. Making of "unfunded" the dirtiest word in the English language and throwing it about in the fashion of the pseudomature after they have just discovered swearing as she went down the list of "unfunded" Tory programs, she made it seem as if the Conservatives who presided over the country's brutal, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights-condemned austerity regimen of the 2010s were a pack of government program-mad lovers, upholders and extenders of Big Government and the welfare state who had to be reined in by stern Labour budget balancers in a profound reversal of the simple-minded stereotypes ceaselessly promulgated by Establishment media and expertise.

Much of this, of course, was the sort of cynical grandstanding that the politics-loving courtiers of the powerful, to their great and eternal discredit, absolutely admire and adore, and much prefer to cover as against the policy that is actually the end of all the nonsense, and really affects people's lives. Still, for a moment take it at face value and think--What if this really is, if only in some slight degree, how the world looks to Ms. Reeves, Keir Starmer and their colleagues? If by the standard of these persons Tory austerity really was spendthrift welfare statism, with all that implies for what the British people can expect under Starmer?

Really, really think about it.

Of Rachel Reeves' July 29, 2024 Speech in Parliament

While no sane person expects that politicians will keep their promises to the broad working public (their promises to the elite interests that own them are a different matter), and expects less and less of politicians the more and more as they have "Establishment approved" seals, centrist sensibilities, technocratic pretensions, and a penchant for whining "I want to be Prime Minister" when called out for every disappointment of their supporters, Sir Keir Starmer's brazenness is still something to behold, with his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves' speech a scarce month after the election that brought Starmer into 10 Downing Street living down to the lowest expectations those who voted for him with noses held, or did not vote for him at all, would have of a Starmer government. Pretending that the state of the country's finances had somehow been kept from them in spite of the fact that no observer of these matters of any intelligence would believe such a story, Starmer's Chancellor--mere weeks after her party's publishing a General Election Manifesto that, if still pathetically watered down from the pledges that Starmer made back when becoming party leader was the step he had to take in order to hope to someday "be Prime Minister," still promised that "There will be no return to austerity" in black and white (you may find this in the section "Economic Stability," specifically on page 19 of the document)--announced the "discovery" of a £22 billion hole in the budget and an assortment of "tough" and "difficult" decisions, including the following:

• The abandonment of plans to institute the "Advanced British Standard" in education (Reeves dispensing with funding efforts to improve teacher recruitment and retention, and student outcomes in math and English).

• The abandonment of £800 million of "unfunded transport projects," including work on the A303 and A27 motorways, and canceling those "Restoring Our Railways" (I assume she meant "Restoring Your Railways") projects to restore railway system lines and stations "which have not yet commenced."

• A "complete reset of the New Hospitals programme" supposed to deliver forty new hospitals to the country.

• The cancellation of plans "to introduce . . . charging reforms" in the adult social care aiding the aged, disabled and ill that would have "increased the generosity of means-tests."

• The cessation of "the Winter Fuel Payment" that helps older people with their heating bills to those who are "not in receipt of Pension Credit . . . from this year onwards."

• The extraction of "at least" another £3 billion in savings from government departments to compensate for public sector pay increases in a manner as yet undetermined.

Reeves announced other "tough" decisions, like the alteration of the planned terms of privatization for its holdings in NatWest bank, but simply sticking with those more obvious items--drawing back from previously promised funding in education, the country's physical infrastructure/transport system, hospital-building and adult social care, cutting off winter fuel payments, a government turning its departments upside down to shake change out of their pockets, and all that in the name of transparent bad faith assertions about unexpected budgetary shortfalls--quite suffices to justify Ms. Reeves as having presented a full-blown austerity program, with all this maybe just the beginning as governments these past many decades have had a habit of overdelivering when it comes to what has been euphemistically called "Reinventing Government," just as they underdeliver on their social promises.

Moreover, even setting aside Reeves' apparent inability to speak to the British public in any but the most insultingly patronizing tone--as seen in her her past references to the nonexistence of "magic money trees" and her making a refrain out of the phrase "If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it" in this speech--this did not augur well for those fearful of more to come, maybe much more.

Nor did her gratuitous reference to "the unacceptable levels of fraud . . . in our welfare system," with its evocation of right-wing rants that welfare cheats are somehow the ones bankrupting the country.

It also seems worth noting that within the brief statement she twice blamed industrial action for contributing to the non-magic money tree government possessing's problems (in the National Health Service, and in the rail services) to the tune of almost £5 billion. The result is that this Labour government is blaming not just the Tories but the workers as having compelled these "tough" and "difficult" decisions--which is something to remember when they consider just what this government will be like dealing with the country's unions as well as what it will be like dealing with the country's finances.

Stuart Hall and the Labour Right in 2024

Stuart Hall remarked in his 1988 book The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left that what he called "the right wing of the labor movement" (which I think can be identified with a Labour right that had not yet cast aside any pretense of being a labor movement at all) "has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival." Indeed, "[i]t would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark," while coming to the matter of struggle generally "[t]he only 'struggle' it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left."

The remark has become the sort of thing quoted again and again--recently appearing in Taj Ali's piece on Keir Starmer's long and rather dirty war on the left in The Nation back in June. This is because, as the nearly four decades that have elapsed since Hall wrote those words demonstrate, many of them have rung true again and again. Ideas of compelling quality? What the longtime face of the tendency he wrote of, Tony Blair, had to offer was the non-idea of the "Third Way," Keir Starmer his "securonomics"--whose unimportance is exemplified by how one need not refer to them at all in analyzing their statements and actions, and might indeed simply distract themselves from that object by attending to them. (Certainly reference to the "Third Way" seemed to me quite beside the point when I wrote about Blair's record, just as the one reference to "securonomics" in the 136 pages of Labour Party's 2024 General Election Manifesto that never rises above banality seemed far from essential to analyzing that document as a statement of Starmer's economic vision, or fulfillment or non-fulfillment of his past promises in that area.) And Starmer in particular has demonstrated that "[t]he only 'struggle'" that this tendency "engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left."

However, I am not in full agreement with the rest of the statement. The precise reason that the Labour right does fight so fiercely against the left is because it does know ideological struggle. It just happens to be firmly on the side of the right against the left in that struggle--as has generally been the case with "centrists" of this variety, who (like everyone else in politics) are most definitely ideologues themselves even as they lamely equate "ideology" with the intellectual and political sins of the left. Indeed, their ideological position can seem to me to take precedence over "the instinct for short-term political survival," focusing on which too much confuses the issue. If the courtiers of the powerful delight in inflicting on their readers the image of a right-wing Labour leader at election time as "a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor" the reality is that it was in each case the left of their party rather than the opposition of those who would look right that they most feared, with the right giving the centrist their excuse to demand left-leaning voters hold their noses and vote for them, in spite of the strategy commonly producing dismal results, as indeed it did in July 2024. Though the conventional understanding was that Starmer's ming vase-carrying Labour defeated the Conservatives by a landslide, the reality was that Labour won the election on the basis of very few votes indeed. Where Labour's comparable victories had typically seen it get the votes of 30 percent+ of the electorate, and even Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 managed to get 28 percent, Starmer got the King's invitation to form a government on the basis of a mere 20 percent, even amid a genuine (if perhaps temporary) collapse in support for the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak. The result is that the Labour right's "instinct for short-term political survival" has already proven less than impressive, and is going to be very severely tested in what promise to be the crisis-filled years ahead.

Thorstein Veblen and Today's Arguments About the Draft

In his important book The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) Thorstein Veblen's great theme was the increasing conflict between the motivations and prerogatives of business on the one hand, and the demands of modern industry on the other--with the latter of which he identified the needs of society in the age of the "machine process." Much of this was a matter of the clash between businessmen oriented to quick profits through financial operations--as with what we today call "financial engineering"--and the requirements of the "real" economy, and not least a technologically progressing manufacturing base, ever undermined and disrupted by the associated management and investment patterns in ways that seem all too familiar in our era of "financialization." However, there was also the matter of the broader culture associated with all this, with the rationalistic, matter-of-fact, cause-and-effect modern culture at odds with the comparatively old-fashioned outlook of business and professions key to it, like the law as it relates to property and contract.

Of course, the businessmen who increasingly defined conservatism naturally resisted that more rationalistic outlook, in part by supporting conservative institutions (the Jacobins of the eighteenth century learning to love throne and altar and the rest of the Old Regime package), with it seeming to Veblen that the most important of these was the militarization of society. Besides being instrumental to their business interests of "pecuniary mastery and . . . commercial solvency" in an "age of imperialism," he held its "incidental, disciplinary effects . . . no less important." As he put it, "a warlike business policy . . . makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace." The abeyance of civil rights inside armies, and under martial law, is of course always attractive to those who have power, and fear and hate dissent, and so are "the sensational appeals to patriotic pride and animosity made by victories, defeats, or comparisons of military and naval strength" which "direct the popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of creature comforts." Veblen also adds that the "[m]ilitary training" that becomes universal in a "nation in arms" implementing a policy of universal service "is a training in ceremonial precedence, arbitrary command . . . unquestioning obedience," and in "think[ing] in warlike terms of rank, authority, and subordination," with the habits formed in such a "servile" organization where "[i]nsubordination is the deadly sin" carried over into civilian life, training the population "into habits of subordination" and away from democratic attitudes.

Indeed, in a culture that, growing increasingly civilized, was becoming worrisomely so for an elite whose privileges owed to an "uncivilized"--barbarian--social condition and social outlook, war was a source of welcome rebarbarization ("the stress on subordination and mastery and the insistence on gradations of dignity and honor incident to a militant organization . . . an effective school in barbarian methods of thought").

Today, as talk of a draft resurges, almost all of it half-baked, with cynical cultural warfare absolutely pervading it (not least, appeals by politicians as artless as they are sleazy and the courtiers of the news media to old right-wingers who hate young folks)--to say nothing of a lot of begging some very serious questions about foreign policy and civil-military relations, and what the existing social model has meant for the plausibility or legitimacy of calls for "sacrifice" and "solidarity"--we hear much of the supposed virtues of a draft, and the supposedly salutary effects it would have on the young put through it. Indeed, even publications like the Guardian (if as close as one gets to a left perspective in a major newspaper of the English-speaking world, ever showing its essential centrism) in a recent piece which indulged in a bit of "both sidesism" as it treated the rightist position with considerable respect.

Perhaps the folks who run that paper never read Veblen. (I get the impression that they haven't read a lot of things.) Still, what Veblen had to say about the effects of a draft--that its really "salutary" effect is spreading authoritarian, hierarchical, inegalitarian, undemocratic attitudes through society, all as the broader militarization with which it is associated diverts attention from socioeconomic issues and restricts the civil rights that activists concerned with socioeconomic issues so sorely need when protesting those matters--should always be much on the minds of any who would presume to consider the effects of a draft in at all a critical fashion, and certainly those who would even presume to be on the side of democracy and freedom. So, too, should what conscription means for the conscripted in a more immediate way, very neatly summed up by Jonah Walters--the more in as a "crime against humanity" is precisely what so many haters of the young, and "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality" in general, are eager to inflict on their nation's youth.

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.